There had been a time when she thought: All I want is his friendship, his sympathy, his understanding, the consciousness that our souls are affinite. Intellectual and spiritual sympathy with him, she had argued, is the summit of my ambition. To talk with him on terms of candid intimacy, to be the sharer of his deepest confidences, to realize in their relationship something of the glorious male ideal of camaraderie, that had been her grand aim. She had deceived herself. That was not so. In the moment that he stood on the foot-board of the departing train at Cambridge every vestige of the platonic camouflage was torn from her. There was one thought that was infinitely more rapturous, infinitely more seductive and alluring, than even the thought that he and she were on terms of deep intellectual and spiritual intimacy. And that was the thought that whilst he was standing there on the foot-board he was wondering whether to kiss her. If now her platonic dreams were to be fulfilled, she would be strangely and subtly disappointed. Deep communion with a god-like personality was fine. But she preferred the impulse that changed the deity into a man, that dragged him from the stars into the streets, that caused all his dreams and ideals to be obscured by that single momentous triviality, the desire to kiss her.
She was cruel, merciless in her hour of seeming triumph. She loved him more passionately than ever now that he was a being dethroned from heaven. She had thought formerly: I cannot understand him: we are on a different plane. But now she thought: He has come down to my plane. One thing at least I can understand: I can understand why he wanted to kiss me. And that crude fragment of understanding was more precious to her than all the subtleties and spiritual nuances which had made his soul a hitherto uncharted sea.
If she could break his ideals, if she could shatter everything in him that had nothing to do with her, she would be glad. Already, not content with the footing she had gained on what had seemed an unscalable cliff, she wanted to dominate the heights and destroy everything that was independent of her. Never had the essential selfishness of her nature so revealed itself. She grudged him every acre of his soul that was not sown with seeds of her own planting. She wanted him, all of him, passionately, selfishly: his soul and intellect would be for ever beyond her, so she was jealous of their freedom. That he should fall from the lofty heights of his idealism was epic, a thing of high tragedy, yet thrilling with passion: that she should be the means of it was something that convulsed her with rapture. Her passion was terrible and destructive. She wanted it to scorch his soul until he desired nothing save what she could give. She wanted entire possession of him: she grudged him everything that was beyond her comprehension.
§ 10
All this was somewhat premature.
As yet he had not spoken a word save what was easily compatible with disinterested friendship. He had treated her many times with such curtness and incivility that it seemed absurd on the face of it to imagine that he could love her. And yet there was in her that strange instinct which told her that he did.
After her return from Cambridge she began to wonder when she should see him again. Since she had left Mrs. Carbass and had taken the cottage at High Wood, he had been a moderately frequent visitor. He liked the situation of “Elm Cottage,” he liked to sit in a deck-chair on the lawn and watch the sun dipping down over the roofs of Upton Rising. The æsthetic pleasure made him talkative and companionable. In the summer time she would open the windows and play Debussy on the baby grand piano she had bought. She had furnished the interior in masculine taste. There were great brown leather armchairs of the kind common enough in clubs, and innumerable facilities for smoking (she was not a great smoker herself), and a general atmosphere of freedom and geniality. She had bought an expensive club-fender with leather seats at either end and a leather rail, because she had noticed that at his own house he liked to sit with his back to the flames. The front room was really very comfortable and cosy, though she was lost when she sat in either of the two great armchairs.
There was no particular business reason why he should see her, yet for several nights after his return to Upton Rising she expected him to come. She laid in a stock of his favourite cigarettes: she diligently learned a little known and mathematical work of Bach because she knew he would appreciate it. But he did not come. Then she had a spell of concerts which kept her in town until nearly midnight: he did not come to see her after the performance, as he sometimes did, so that she did not know if he had been among the audience or not. She knew that he had returned from Cambridge, and she knew that an abstruse work on sociology was occupying a good deal of his time and attention. Yet it seemed strange that he did not visit her. Their farewell on Cambridge platform was already past history, and she sometimes found it hard to believe it had taken place at all. She wanted further proof that it was no delusion. She felt that every day made that incident more isolated, more inconsistent, more meaningless. And in another sense every day was adding to its tremendous significance.
A fortnight passed and still he did not come. She did not want to go and see him. She wanted him to come and see her. She made a vow: I am not going to see him; I am going to wait till he comes to see me: if he doesn’t want to, he needn’t. And she was glad when a concert or other engagement kept her busy in the evenings, for the temptation to break her vow was strong if she were alone at “Elm Cottage.”
On Christmas Day the temptation was overmastering. An offer from a Scotch concert agency had come by post that morning, and she found it easy to persuade herself that she had to visit him to talk it over.