XXXIX
Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, it couldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to be halting. But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:
“I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar—I mean the ability of completely making you out of my heart—that when you are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are never away. I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But you know about it—from years back. Time has only managed a greater power. Lately, and I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeing you again as a girl; as young as at Markue's party; younger. Not more than ten. I don't mean that there is anything—isn't the present fashionable word subliminal?—esoteric. God forbid. You'll remember my hatred of that brutal deception.
“No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling, of Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exact statement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a child—who knows why?” he relinquished the answer with an opened palm. “And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. It isn't necessary to understand.
“You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world I absolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do you suppose, to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insist on my sanity.”
The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his hurried voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull reddish patch, she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told herself that the fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:
“Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I see Hallet failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabs of soft flesh, grow up and pass through college and marry. I hear myself in the studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip under the mall and I can't move the clay about without help—all fading, decaying, but you. Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while your whiteness, your flame—
“Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word we have no business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose. Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to nature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You can understand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothing more.” He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against the curtained light. “I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creative artist—Simon Downige at Cottarsport—I have you. If it's God so much the better.”