XLII
They did not return immediately to New York. Halfway, an unaccountable timidity seized him—the shrinking of a schoolboy before entering a public assemblage—and with a sudden impulse they turned back for a week of Indian summer in the bungalow by the lake where they had gone first. He himself did not in the least comprehend the motives which had made him suddenly delay the test of the return to the old life. Sometimes he thought it was a lack of confidence, a fear of having lived in illusions, that would dissipate before the rude shock of reality. At other times it seemed to him a clinging to the world of solitude in which he had found his happiness, in distrust of what compensation lay ahead. So deep was this indecision of the soul that their days were spent in aimless pleasure. His easel remained unpacked. No desire for work came to him. Now and then, he felt an irresistible longing to plunge back into the world of men, and again, a revolt against himself—a restless shrinking-back, a longing to return deeper into the unquestioning loyalty of the great world of forests and still ranges. At such times, he would gaze for long spaces at Inga, filling his eyes with the healing vision of her youth and charm—wondering.
“Why do you stay?” she asked him, one evening, when they had sat silently, looking across at Catamount, blue and luminous under the scattering sunset clouds which swam like radiant goldfish above its sharp outline.
“I wonder.” After a moment he said, a certain gentleness in his voice which seemed attuned to the gentleness in the skies, “I think it’s because it’s the ending of a phase. I want the other—the big things—and yet I want to hold on to this, to what this has been to us, a little longer and still a little longer. Do you understand?”
She nodded, and her fingers turned gently in his fingers.
“This is personal,” he said slowly, “the other will be different. It will be a sort of renunciation of many things. This is the romance, the great romance of my life, and, well, I want it to go on a little longer.”
Her head went slowly down to his shoulder; he drew his arm about her.
“It is unbelievable, providential—and it is all you,” he said reverentially. “You are as strange to me, Inga, as the first day. I do not know you—no, not at all. Yet, in what you have made me feel and in what you have made me suffer too, you have done everything.”
A certain charm of the twilight, of the quiet spot, and of the youthful ecstasy he had known momentarily swept aside the man that had been built up victoriously and logically. For the instant he was in love with love without reason or reserve with the memory of other moments felt in the passionate moods of the fading day and the poignant floods of moonlight.
“Shall we never go back, Inga?” he said breathlessly. “Shall we stay here all winter, just you and I?”