THREE days later Louise stood on the terrace watching the departure of her guests. As the last car disappeared into the pines she thought of the day when Walter and his mother drove away from the cottage which she had named “Sans Souci.” On that day she had tensely waited for some sympathetic sign from Keble, and he had withheld it. Now she knew that the balance was changed, that Keble was waiting for a sign from her. Yet all she could say was, “Thank God, that’s over!”
Recently she had had no time to project her thoughts into the future. Until this family reunion was safely thrust into the past she had schooled herself to be patient, as she had done under the constraint of approaching motherhood. Both events she had regarded as primary clauses in her matrimonial pact, and the reward she had promised herself for executing them was complete moral freedom. She would admit nothing more binding in the pact, for she had made a point of benefiting as little as possible from it. If Keble had provided her with a home, she had managed it skilfully for him. If he had placed his bank account at her disposal, she had gone disproportionately deep into her own. An element unforeseen in the pact was that either party to it might, in the process of carrying out its clauses, develop personal resources for which the other could have little use but which, on sheer grounds of human economy, ought not to be allowed to remain unmined.
Keble had warned her that grappling with ideas might end in one of the ideas knocking her on the head. Which was nonsense. The danger lay not in grappling with ideas but in trying to dodge them, in letting them lurk in your neighborhood ready to take you unawares. If you went at them with all your might they were soon overpowered.
Yet going at them brought you face to face with other ideas lurking farther along the path, and before you knew it you were in a field where no one,—at times not even Dare—was able or cared to follow. And at the prospect of forging on alone your imagination staggered a little; an unwelcome emotion,—unwelcome because more fundamental than you had been willing to admit,—surged up and insisted that nothing in life was worth striving for that carried you out of the warmth of the old community of affection. For, whatever might be achieved through adventuring in wider fields, a catering to new minds would be entailed, an occasional leaning upon new arms, homage from new eyes and hearts. That was inevitable, since human beings were of necessity social. And the overwhelming pity of it was that you would always be conscious that the neatest mind in the world, though not the broadest, the most comfortable arms, though not the most expert, the most candid blue eyes, though not the most compelling, were those of the man from whom your adventurousness had drawn you away. The thought of entirely outgrowing them gave you a chill. When you had penetrated further into the forest of life’s possibilities you couldn’t go on indefinitely playing hide and seek among the trees with that old companion. He would stop at the edge of the forest, and you must make your way through it, alone.
As Louise sat on the terrace, a little weary after the continuous tension, recalling the appealing droop of Keble’s lips as he had turned away from her a few minutes before, she was obliged to face the fact that some chord within her had responded to the appeal, despite her stern censorship. She was obliged to admit that even when her path became definitely distinct from Keble’s, when she should finally throw all the weight of her personality into a passion worthy of her emotional possibilities, or that failing, into some project so vital that she would become oblivious to the trifles that filled so much of Keble’s and Miriam’s attention, she would not be able to extinguish the fragrance of the flower of sentiment that Keble had been the first to coax into blossom. Her feeling toward any new friend who might tread her path would exhale the odor of the phial of affection labelled “Keble”, though that phial lay on a neglected shelf.
Even in the recklessness that had overtaken her beside Billy’s grave, there had been some purring obligato, a running commentary to the effect that her wanton experiment was in Keble’s name, that all the thrills in the universe were reducible to the quieter terms of mere charm, that all the charming things in life were reducible to “Keble”, and it was inherent in the nature of charm that it could not be captured and possessed, except in symbols, or by proxy. One could be so profoundly loyal to one’s personal conception of life,—a conception which exacted unflinching courage at the approach of new ideas and high venturesomeness in tracking down concealed ideas,—that one could accept clues from a stranger even though the accepting might involve a breach of what the world called constancy. Incidentally, the fact that her first breach, whatever it may have meant to Dare, was an erotic fiasco as far as she was concerned, had by no means discountenanced further experimentation. Life should pay her what it owed her, even if she had to pay heavy costs in collecting her due.
On making the shocking discovery that marriage was no solution of her destiny, she had vigorously bestirred herself, only to make the even more shocking discovery that she was shedding her husband as a caterpillar sheds its cocoon. Now, poised for flight, she could cherish a tender sentiment for the cocoon but could scarcely fold her wings and crawl back into it.
She recalled the cruel little poem, still unaccounted for, which had thrown open a door in her mind.
For, being true to you,
Who are but one part of an infinite me,