"Paul, dear, if Jesus calls you, you must do what He says."
Parrot-like, he had answered her with the old cry: "But I don't know!"
He could feel now her fingers on his arm, clutching a little more tightly. "Don't, Paul," she had said. "It seems to me quite plain. Jesus doesn't hide Himself. He speaks plainly enough in our hearts, and you—you 'know His voice.'"
He had stared hard at her in the light of a street lamp as they passed: the firm little face rather sedate; the precise, neat dress; her gloved hand; the little hymn and prayer book she carried which he had given her, surreptitiously. Intuitively he saw that she belonged to Claxted; yes, though he knew that he had modified her views not a little, Claxted was bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Life was amazingly simple to her. She might question the form in which the things of religion reached her—the authority of Christ, His presence in the Sacrament; she might become High Church in practice; but nothing in Claxted rubbed her up the wrong way. And he saw suddenly just what it meant that her home was in Edward Street and her father a photographer. She was unobtrusive, trim, conventional. He had wanted to seize her almost roughly, shake her, drag her out, and he had not been able to do it at all because she would not have understood the first syllable of explanation. Come to that, did he? Perhaps, that very day, he had come to see more plainly the point. The scarlet jersey—well, it was just a scarlet jersey to Edith Thornton. You put it on, if Christ said so. Why not?
Lying there then, in the flush of success, blue shining sky above, clear shining river hard by, her words in his pocket, no, in his heart, Paul nevertheless saw a shadow athwart the sky. He had known long that an impermeable curtain was slowly dropping between him and his people; he had known that their very voices sounded odd—familiar, arrestingly familiar, but as those who speak another tongue; and he had known that the change lay in him and not in them. There were notes in the past that no longer struck response, that reached him muffled, through the curtain. And he saw plainly enough that Edith belonged to that side.
There was a shadow then even on this bright day. He loved her so. One moment, was it quite that? Was it not rather that he wanted to love her so much, wanted that they should speak and walk together, and knew they could not? Inexorably, hate it as he might, the irresistible tides were sweeping them apart. He was being moved on and out, protest as he would and did. Yet he could not protest altogether as he would, for his very heart was shaken. There was a "war in his members"—the old, old phrase rose unbidden in his mind. And, serene and far as that blue sky, God seemed to be.
Thus a thoughtful Paul went in to luncheon, yet wholly unaware of the new flood that was even then gathering to its height and was about to overmaster him. For a while the two talked inconsequently, on small things. Then, when the coffee was on the table, Tressor reopened the conversation of the morning.
"So, honestly, you don't quite know what to do next?"
"No. But I suppose I shall teach for a year or two, if possible do some private coaching. I must earn money; I shall have to say no definitely to the theological college next year, not this."
"Literature?"