Dare struck Keble as a philosopher who through excess of physical energy had turned to mechanical science. Or perhaps a born engineer whose talent for organizing matter had a sort of spiritual echo. At one moment he would make his facts support his philosophical speculations; at the next his philosophy, like a gigantic aeroplane, would mount into the sky with tons of fact stowed away in neat compartments. The result was that Keble didn’t know whether to marvel at the load Dare could mount with, or be alarmed at the whirling away into space of so much solid matter.
“Contact with this chap,” wrote Keble, “has taught me this, that to me who,—it must alas be admitted,—am merely on the brink of understanding my epoch, individuality has seemed almost an end in itself, as though the object of life were achieved when the flower blossomed. (I remember romantic nights during my furloughs in Paris when I paid mute tribute to long-haired, be-sandalled creatures who were, to my excessively English eyes, ‘being individual’). But egos are passé; mass ego, it seems (or egi) have come in. For Dare the blossoming, even the fructifying, are incidental. His interest (at least in the reflective lulls after dinner, for during the daytime he’s the most practical of men) extends to the cosmic activity which is (in some manner I have yet to comprehend) rendered possible by the virtually automatic living and procreating and dying of millions upon millions of violets and pine trees and rabbits and ladies and gentlemen and glaciers and republics and solar systems. He assaults the subject with these stimulating volleys of odds and ends.
“Now imagine, Walter, for only you can, the effect of all this on my wife. It’s turning into ‘a case unprecedented’, and before long I may, like Bunthorne, have to be ‘contented with a tulip or li-lie’. Louise long ago talked me into a cocked hat. Miriam, through the mysterious licence she had been endowed with, kept up a semblance of intellectual alto to Louise’s dizzy soprano. But now, oh dear me now, Miriam and I aren’t even in tempo with her, much less in key. My household,—I still claim it as mine through force of habit, which is always imperative with me,—has become a china shop for the taurean and matadorean antics of two of the most ruthlessly agile products of the age.
“Louise is for the moment (and you can only define her momentarily) an interpreting link between Dare (twenty-first century) and me (nineteenth). Her original association with me awakened her consciousness to a delicate scale of weights and measures in matters of taste and opinion. When she had acquired my acuteness of perception she discovered that she was naturally endowed with Alpine talents that made my hilltop look like a mound. From her easy victories over Miriam and me she concluded that there were endless enterprises awaiting her. When she was alone she began to feel herself operating on a higher gear, making for herself new speed records. Now that I look back, I know that my cautiousness, in more than one crisis, gave her ample excuse for going her own gait. I have it from her lips that she has kept her love (whatever we mean by that enormously capacious word) for me brightly burning, as I, in all the welter, have done. Her religious nature, for want of a cult, has always centered round an exquisite instinct which I suspect to be a sort of sublimated eroticism: something that I suppose no man ever understands,—or would some other man? That’s the devilish puzzle of it. Yet almost without being aware of it she seems to have kindled new fires before an altar so much more important and all-embodying than her feeling for me or mere anybody else that the light of her little lamp of constancy is like the light of a star in the blaze of noon.
“What one does in a case like that is more than I know. All I am sure of at this moment is you, my son, a lighthouse that flashes at dependable intervals through my fogs. Do you, for one, stay a little in the rear of the procession if every one else gets out of sight. I don’t deserve it of you; I merely exact it,—again through force of habit: the same habit that, in our school holidays suffered me to play with your yacht on the Kensington round pond after I had wrecked my own.”
3
Miriam, who had watched Louise as one watches an acrobat,—with excitement and dread,—felt herself in a sense frustrated by Louise’s continued apathy. If it had been punctuated by new verbal heresies, new feats of talk with Trenholme Dare, now the dominating figure at Hillside, Miriam, like Keble, would at least have been able to account for it even had she failed to sympathize. But Louise’s indifference seemed to have spread even to the realm of ideas, and there had been very few acrobatic displays of late. Possibly Louise was in love; but if so, it would have been much more like her to say so, flatly.
The effect of this on Miriam was to make her more sharply conscious of the anomaly of her rôle. More than once she had argued that her mission was at an end, but in each instance Louise had induced her to remain. Having yielded at first with a faint sense of guilt, Miriam had come through custom to accept her position with all its ambiguities. As Keble’s activities increased, she had stepped into the breach and relieved him of many daily transactions, delighted at being able to offer a definite service for the cheque which was left on her dressing table every month. Keble ended by turning over to her his ledgers and most of his correspondence.
But her feeling of guilt recurred at moments when the house seemed to be an armed camp, with Keble and herself deep in their estimates; and Louise inciting Dare to phantastic metaphysical speculation. At such moments her mind persisted in criticizing Louise. It was not exactly that she lacked confidence in her, for Louise was in her own fashion surefooted and loyal. But Miriam was a little appalled at the extensity of the ground Louise could be surefooted on, the sweeping nature of her conception of loyalty. Louise, scorner of the ground, was all for steering in a direct line to her goal and ignoring the conventional railway routes whose zigzags were conditioned by topographical exigencies not pertinent to fliers. Her loyalty would not fail Keble, for she could cherish him in the spirit without subscribing to him in the letter. Louise’s loyalty might be expressed in idioms which were not to be found in Keble’s moral vocabulary. Just as there were some eternal truths which could be expressed more adequately in French than in English, so, conceivably, there might be vital experiences which Louise could obtain more adequately through the agency of some man other than Keble; certainly she would not acknowledge any law that attempted to prevent her doing so, had she a mind to it.
There were times when Miriam felt herself to be an interpreter; more than once in tête-à-têtes with Keble she had found herself de-coding some succinct remark of Louise’s to explain away a worried line in his forehead, and it was on those occasions that she had felt especially guilty,—not because she ran the risk of giving an unfair interpretation, but because it was conceivable that, had she not been there to decipher, Louise would have taken more pains to employ a language Keble could understand.