And she, the child that was to have borne the burden of his genius and his passion, poor little blameless victim of the imagination that glorifies desire, how would it be with her in this empty house, empty of the love she had looked for and would never find? How would it be with him? Had he pledged himself to a life of falsehood, and had he yet to know what torment awaited him at the hands of the avenging truth? Truth, as he had once defined it, was the soul of the fact. It was the fact that he was going to marry Flossie; but it was not the truth. Only love could have given it a soul and made it true. If he was bound to maintain that it had a soul when it hadn't, that was where the falseness would come in.
Yet no. He might go mad by thinking about it, but life after all was simpler than thought. Things righted themselves when you left off thinking about them. He would be unhappy; but that could only make Flossie unhappy if she cared for him. And in a year's time, when he had left off thinking, she would have left off caring. He had shrewdly divined that what Flossie chiefly wanted was to have children; or if she did not want it, Nature wanted it for her, which came to the same thing. As for mating her to a man of genius, that was just Nature's wanton extravagance. Maddox had once said that any man would have done as well, perhaps better; Flossie wouldn't care. Well, he would give her children, and she would care for them. Indeed, he sincerely hoped that for him she would not care. It would make things simpler. Maddox, he remembered, had also said that she was the sort of woman who would immolate her husband for her children; whereas Poppy—but then, Maddox was a beast.
It never occurred for a moment to him to throw Flossie over. That, he had settled once for all, could not now be done. Circumstances conspired to make the thing irrevocable. Her utter dependence on him, the fact that she had no home but the one he offered her, no choice between marriage and earning her own living in a way she hated, the flagrant half-domestic intimacy in which they had been living, more than all, the baseness of his past love, and the inadequacy of his present feeling for her, both calling on him to atone, all these things made a promise of marriage as binding as the actual tie. Their engagement might possibly have been broken off at any of its earlier stages without profound dishonour. It was one thing to jilt a girl within a decent interval of the first congratulations; another thing altogether to abandon her with her trousseau on her hands. It had gone so far that his failure at the last moment would be the grossest insult he could offer her.
Gross indeed; yet not so gross but that he could think of one still grosser—to let her marry him when he had no feeling to offer her but such indifference as marriage deepens to disgust, or such disgust as it tones down into indifference. Would he go on shuddering and wincing as he had shuddered and winced to-day? Passion that might have condoned her failings was out of the question; but would it be possible to keep up the decent appearance of respect?
And yet he was going to marry her.
That was impressed on him by Flossie's voice saying that if he wouldn't decide which of those two rooms was to be their room, she must. Because the men wanted to put up the bedstead.
It was an intimation that he was bound to her, not by any fine ties of feeling or of honour, but by a stout unbreakable chain of material facts. He looked out of the window. The vans were unloading in the street. It seemed to him that there was something almost grossly compromising in the wash-stand, dumped down there in the garden; and as the bedstead was being borne into the house in portions, reverentially, processionally, he surrendered before that supreme symbol of finality. As he had made his bed, he must lie; even if it was a brass bed with mother-o'-pearl ornaments; and he refused to listen to the inner voice which suggested that the bed was not made yet, it was not even paid for, and that he would be a fool to lie on it. He turned sad eyes on the little woman so flushed and eager over her packages. He had committed himself more deeply with every purchase they had made that day. How carefully he had laboured at his own destruction.
He had gone so far with these absurd reflections, that when Flossie exclaimed, "There, after all I've forgotten the kitchen hammer," his nerves relaxed their tension, and he experienced a sense of momentary but divine release. And when she insisted on repairing her oversight as they went back, he felt that the kitchen hammer had clinched the matter; and that if only they had not bought it he might yet be free.
There was something in the Beaver's building, after all.