REACTION visited her. Walking along the sun-white pavements the next morning the self-revelation of the night before seemed incredibly absurd. It had rained during the night, and the cool scent of the gravel roadways seemed somehow to radiate the suggestion that life was cool and clear and fresh, to be taken light-heartedly and never to be feared. As she walked with springing step along the High Road, there seemed such an infinitude of interests in her life that she could afford to say: If I never saw him again it would not matter much. Every shop-window seemed bulging with reasons why, if she were never to see him again, it would not matter much. And when she stood by the counter in Burlington’s music emporium and leisurely scanned through piles of pianoforte music, she decided sincerely and clinchingly: It is impossible that I am in love with him.
In the few novels she had read, being in love had been symptomized by dreamy abstraction, random melancholy, a tendency to neglect worldly duties, a replacement of clear-cut ambitions by a nebulous ideal. This was not true of her. Three hours of Chopin practising awaited her when she returned, and she was looking forward to it eagerly, enthusiastically. Never were her ambitions so clear and business-like, never had she less time and inclination for dreamy abstraction and random melancholy.
The air was clean and clear as after a storm. She saw nothing but sheer absurdity in herself. She went back to Gifford Road and threw her whole soul into Chopin. That she was able to do so seemed to be convincing proof of what she desired to prove. She wrote half a dozen letters, and as she methodically stamped the envelopes one after another she thought: This is life! Not emotional fireworks, but the sheer methodical doing of one thing after another. And I am not in love.... From the businesslike stamping of her envelopes she extracted that subtle consolation. Somehow there existed in her the weird idea that being in love would militate against the successful stamping of envelopes. She was immensely, incalculably pleased at the decision she had come to. Thereafter, every action of hers confirmed it. When she went for a motor drive into the Forest and enjoyed it thoroughly, she thought: This shows that I cannot be in love. And when she played Chopin she felt vaguely: A person in love would not play Chopin like this.... She discovered that platonic friendship meant the friendship of men and women devoid of ulterior motives.... Henceforth she was a passionate disciple of platonism, ignorant of the fact that a disciple of platonism must never be passionate. She applied platonism thus: I can be friendly with him without being in love with him. I can be and shall be. He is capable of platonic friendship: so am I....
§ 2
A time came when she told herself: I am changing.... She was becoming more serious, less impressionable. Or so, at any rate, it seemed. Conversations with him had given her intellect a stimulus. She read Shaw and Ibsen, not so much to give herself ideas (though that result was inevitable) as to provide fascinating topics of discussion with him. For in those days Shaw was a rising and Ibsen a waning star in the intellectual firmament. Platonism was ever in her mind. She and Verreker met with moderate frequency, for his position as her concert organizer involved much business intercourse. They talked music and politics and economics and literature, and always she was afraid of two things, lest the conversation might flag, and lest she might make some absurd remark which would betray the poverty of her knowledge. And yet when she managed to discuss with him intelligently she never imagined that she was deceiving him. She knew that he knew that all her knowledge was recently acquired, that her brain was only slightly above average, that she only imperfectly comprehended most of the topics she ventured remarks upon. An occasional remark of rank stupidity was almost inevitable under such conditions, and she knew it would not surprise him. He had no illusions about her which she could break. And yet the fear always hung over her when she was with him that some day she might say something irrevocably, catastrophically absurd. It was almost a relief to her when their meetings were over. The sensation was of having piloted a ship through a channel infested with rocks and succeeded somehow or other. Yet there was pleasure in the exercise. And she treasured up certain things he said, not for their intrinsic value, but because she had made him say them....
She was quite sincere and enthusiastic about the platonic basis of their friendship. She almost sentimentalized about it. She deified it till it shone with a flame infinitely more dazzling than that of love. She despised love. Love was elemental. Basically, it was animal: she watched the couples strolling at twilight beneath the trees of the Ridgeway, and saw nothing in them but the primitive male seeking the primitive female. The poetry, the idyllic quality fell from the amorousness of men and women and revealed it to her as something of sheer brute passion. (A cold douche from one of Shaw’s plays had assisted this transformation.) She felt herself consciously superior to these couples. She speculated on their thoughts, their conversations, their sympathies, and she almost despised them because their thoughts were not high, nor their conversations intellectual, nor their sympathies complex. She felt: the further and higher mankind develops the less prominence will be given to the merely brutish and physical aspect of passion. Until there shall at last be evolved the Higher Love, which is the union of twin affinities, indissolubly one by community of thought and sympathy and ideal. (This, by the way, she had read somewhere, and her mind seized hold of it greedily.) She could not conceive of Verreker and herself as man and wife. But as twin-souls their future seemed promising; and the strictly platonic nature of their association was consecrated by the application of the twin-soul theory. She diligently read abstruse, religious-cum-psychological works on the subject. She became possessed with a fierce enthusiasm for masculine camaraderie. Men, she thought, are easily able to enjoy delightful and perfectly platonic friendships with both men and women. Men have a greater capacity for friendship than women. They are less intensely sexual. They have a glorious sense of camaraderie which is as the breath of a gale over uplands. Whereas women are narrower, more passionate, maybe, in what attachments they do make, but incapable of realizing the male ideal of comradeship. She admired men for their wider and more spacious outlook on life. She became fond of the novels of Michael Fairless and Jack London. And, as a sort of reaction, she was profoundly affected by reading The Hill, Vachell’s Harrow school story of a great friendship. Then she got hold of Wells’ Passionate Friends, and it thrilled her by its seeming applicability to her own life. She felt, with some superiority: Most people would not understand this book. They would condemn it as unreal, exotic, untrue to life. But I understand it and know that it is very real and very true.... There were sentences in Wuthering Heights which she treasured as enshrining her ideal in words of passionate epigram. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” was one of them. “I am Heathcliff!” she could scarcely read without poignant emotion. The enigma of Emily Brontë’s life made her construct many theories to account for the peculiar passion of Wuthering Heights....
Sometimes she would think proudly: This is an amazing friendship. We are people in a million. We are immeasurably higher in the human scale than those to whom such a relation as exists between us would be incomprehensible and incredible. It is not love that binds us—that reckless fuser of incompatibilities—it is an affinity of soul, rare, intense, exquisitely subtle....
And also there were moments of terrible lucidity, when the subtleties and complexities resolved themselves into a single pattern of tragic simplicity. She loved him and he did not love her. The relation between them was compounded of nothing but that. Everything else was artificial and a sham....
§ 3
Yet platonism was her acknowledged ideal. She was curiously anxious in discussions with him to emphasize it, even to rhapsodize upon it, to pour scorn on the sentimentality that finds it unworkable. She strove to re-create herself on the lines of what she strangely imagined would be his ideal of womanhood. And somehow this re-creation of herself was inextricably bound up with the paramount necessity that their relations must be strictly platonic. She would show him (and herself) that she was capable of maintaining such a relationship. She found a savage pride in the restraints she was called upon to exercise. She took fierce delight in saying things which were not only not true, but which were like knife-thrusts directed against her own heart. Her life became interwoven with intrigue against herself. As time passed, the complexity of what she was attempting began to demand ruthless self-suppression and a constant cumulative duplicity. Some of the traits of her newly manufactured character she identified so thoroughly with herself that she almost forgot whether they were real or not. Some of the lies that she told and acted became as real to her as the truth. Moments came when her brain as well as her soul went reeling under the burden of the tangle she had herself created.