XXXIX
What she had the power to do was to awake in him sensations, sensations of mystery and of charm, sensations of the rare moods of nature and of the night, sensations that brought the youth of the artist thronging back to him. Of this he spoke to her frankly, trying to make her understand. It was one evening, when a sudden squall was whistling under the doors, and the rain pellets, wind-driven, were rattling against the windows. They were before the fire-place, the dishes cleaned for the night, watching the glow of charring logs, Inga stretched full-length on the rug, her elbows on the floor, chin in her hands, Dangerfield rocking back, drawing long clouds of fragrant smoke from his pipe. He watched her (he never tired of studying her instinctive poses) with a sense of eye-delight. There was something feline and pliant in her contemplation of the fire, the wonder one sees in a graceful animal fascinated by a burning flame which lies beyond the world of its comprehension. Inga, to him, was a constant source of pleasant sensations and unfathomed surprises. He rose and laid a stick on the red ruins, cities and palaces in miniature, and returned to his seat, as the stick caught fire and sent its fluttering shadows into the room.
“Feels good to be here, wind and rain outside, fire and shelter, inside—that’s home,” he said. She nodded without turning, divining that he felt like talking to himself. Presently he said, as though appreciative of her intuition:
“Good work to-day. I’ll make something big out of that sketch, that inlet seen through the mist—bully skyline, and taken just from the right spot. There’s something going on in me, the power to feel effects, not simply to transcribe them—thanks to you. You’ve done a bigger thing than just getting hold of me, Inga; you’ve given me back the power of sensations—that’s youth, that’s the artist. Well, to be an artist is to retain youth, I suppose, the ability to receive sensations. You’ve got that instinct yourself, primitive, savage, but it’s there in everything you do. And I get it from you, from watching you, from feeling through your eyes. That’s the big thing—to feed me with sensations. You see that’s what civilization has taken from us, the power of sensations, passion, love, hate, fear—all great sensations of the artist. Civilization steps in and fences us about; passion exists only when it is a destructive force; love even—blind, romantic love—civilization has turned into an economical partnership; hatred, the fierce, cleansing passion to destroy, is taken from us, even fear, the greatest of all, the fear of great unknown nature and hidden voices in the sky, the sea and the woods, the terror of the night when the other world may return—civilization has deprived us of that, too, by explaining it. Civilization is constantly at war with our elemental nature. But to the artist, the elemental, the world of the instincts and sensations is the world of creation. That’s why we break through conventions, why we seem constantly in revolt against society—the need of sensation. To convey, one must be keen to receive—Too abstruse? Well, that’s what I am living in, reveling in now—yes, for the first time in my life.”
She listened, her large eyes intent on him, her brows a little drawn, nodding when he came to an end. Yet he wondered. He had a queer, half-humorous feeling that she had understood nothing, and yet that she was industriously storing away his words, as a squirrel buries food against the winter, for some further use—for some other queer turn of her existence.
At the bottom, he was content that she should acquiesce and not discuss, that she lay before him in a languid, graceful picture looking out at him from eyes that were like the uttermost sea. With her, he felt absolutely, pleasantly alone with himself, in a stimulating self-communion, his imagination rekindled, his mind taking flame with new ideas. And this mental fertilization was due, as he himself acknowledged, to the charm of his existence with her, to the curiosity she had awakened in him with the abrupt releasing of riotous, youthful nature, even as a wild grace and glory had come into her eyes with the liberty of her released hair, which came tumbling and turning about her slender, dark face. Sometimes, when she stood on the edge of a cliff, she flung her hair completely free, her head thrown back, her throat bared, lying back on the arms of the wind.
“What a trick civilization has played on her!” he thought, at such times. “She should be a bride of a Viking rover, not of me.”
One night, in mid-August, when every leaf lay flat upon the torpid air, he awoke with a restless sense of loss. The room rose luminous in the flood of moonlight. He turned to the couch at his side. It was empty.
“Inga?” he said softly.
Then he repeated his call, and there was no answering sound. He did not feel alarm, knowing well her moods, but, being wakeful, he felt a curiosity to know where her impulse had taken her. He rose and stood a moment at the threshold in the warm night. From where he stood, the cove lay revealed, the mellow sands and the back of the cliff, inky there in the frown of the full moon which flooded the shore, the water, and the dominion of the air above him. Then he went quietly up the path, and stole over the bank. Below, in the phosphorescent waters that rose luminously over her white body, Inga was floating over the long, slow, in-drifting swell. He moved down cautiously in the deep shadows, careful to make no sound, taking his seat on a projecting ledge. Below, the sanded strip lay glistening like an Arabian Nights’ field of jewels.