“Well, you can’t expect me to be glad to lose your company, can you? I shall never make a golfer now.”
She laughed at that and recommended a course at St. Andrew’s under a professional, which proposal 220 he treated with scorn, but after a short silence he said in a different voice:
“Don’t think I’m not glad at anything that makes you happy, Patricia. Geoffry’s a real good sort and—here’s a town—you must not speak to the man at the wheel.”
Patricia was obedient. She sank into a reverie in which, despite her own determination, Geoffry played a long part. It was characteristic of her exact attitude towards her accepted lover that it was the immediate future in which he figured most clearly. Her thoughts hovered round the pleasant summer to come with the distant excitement of a wedding to crown it. She never considered, or only in the most cursory way, the long years ahead, the daily companionship with the man she had chosen. She was honestly attached to Geoffry. She believed she was in love with him, whereas, as is far more often the case than the young suppose, she was in love with the love that had come to her in the glory of the spring, offered by familiar hands that were dear because of what they held for her.
So they drove through the glowing afternoon, and the line of white road before them appeared to Christopher as a track dividing past and future, the thin edge of the passing minutes. They spoke no more, however, on the forbidden subject. Christopher presently explained to her the visible mechanism of the car and on a stretch of clear road let her put her hands on the wheel beneath his own and feel the joy of fictitious control. Before the sun quenched itself in the sea they stood on the Cliff Edge and looked out across the shining waters into the great space, where a thought-laden air renews itself, reforming, cancelling and creating in the crucible of Life. They clambered down from the lip of the cliff on to a jutting-out shelf of rock, screened with gorse, where the few 221 feet of gravel bank behind them shut out all signs of habitation.
Patricia sat with her hands clasped round her knees drawing slow, deep draughts of the cool air, her eyes on the immense free space, and she spoke not at all with her lips, yet Christopher, lying at her feet, caught her thoughts as they came and went with strange certainty and stranger heartache. He picked a handful of golden gorse petals and pressed the sweet blossoms to his face: ever after their scent was to mean for him that place and rapture of that hour, in which was borne to him the certainty of his right to her, and the knowledge of the surrender he was making in each silent minute. For she was his now, if he told her, if he broke faith, if he claimed the right that was his.
Now in this golden hour he would win if he spoke, sweeping aside the shadowy intervening form of the other with the relentless persistent truth of the faith that was in him, a faith that had no ground in personal vanity or individual pride, but was only the recognition of a great Fact that lay outside and beyond them both, that named Patricia forever his in a world where the Real is disentangled from the Appearance.
Was life to consist, for him, in a relinquishing of his own rights in conformity to the Law of Appearance? Was it but a cowardly fear of convention that held him back from claiming her now on the verge of the world? Or was it a deeper, half-understood trust of the Great Realities of Life, a knowledge that faith, integrity, and honour are no conventions, but belong to Real World of Truth, and that he could snatch no joy of life over their trampled forms? He tried dimly to understand these things, to gauge the nature of the forces that controlled him, but he never doubted what force would claim his obedience. It was already habitual to him by reason of training and instinct to set such Laws of Life as he recognised before his own 222 will. But that will was very clamorous this evening as he pressed the hot yellow whin-flowers to his face drinking their fragrance into his thirsty soul.
When he raised his eyes he looked out at sea and sky and avoided the dear sweet face above him. She still sat smiling out into the serene space, watching as it were the random thoughts of her subconscious self floating in those ethereal realms. It was almost too great a happiness for peace, the fair world, the comprehending companion, who understood without the clumsy medium of words, and the love awaiting her on the morrow. She did not wish for Geoffry’s presence now, she was perfectly content that he stood in the beautiful morrow, that he was bringing her a good and precious crown to the golden days of her youth.
She sighed out of pure joy and so broke the spell of the golden and blue-cloaked silence which had reigned. Without moving she gathered a handful of whin blooms and scattered them over the brown head at her feet, a baptism of golden fire. He shook them off and looked up at her, laughing.