The Three Furlongers

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

In his hand he crushed a letter. Behind his teeth words were forming, and fighting through to his colourless lips. "Janey!—my Janey! Oh, my God! I can't bear this."

He suddenly twisted himself round on to his back, and faced the aching, yellow square of the window, where a May day was mocked by rain. There was a pipe close to the window, and the water poured from it in a quick tinkling trickle, cheering in rhythm, tragic in tone. Quentin unfolded Janey's letter.

He read it—but that word is inadequate, for he read it in the same spirit as an Egyptian priest might read the glyphs of his divinity, seeing in each sign a volume of esoteric meaning, so that every jot and tittle was worthy of long minutes' contemplation.

It was some time since Janey's letters had ceased to be for Quentin what she hoped. Literally they were rather bald and laboured, for Janey was no penwoman, but she put a wealth of thought and passion into the straggling lines, and for a long while he had seen this. But now he saw much more, she would have trembled to think of the meaning he read into her words—he tested each phrase for the insincerity he felt sure it must conceal, he hunted up and down the pages for that monster unknown to Janet, the arrière pensée. Her letters were a torture to him—they tortured his brain with shadows and seekings, they tortured his heart with blue fires of misgiving and scorchings of jealousy. She did not write oftener than once a week, but the torment of a single letter lasted till its successor at once varied and renewed it.

Lying there in the hideous dusk of what should have been a summer afternoon, Quentin wondered if the doom of love and lovers had not been spoken him—"thou canst not see My Face and live."

It was a vital fear. Before he had brought his love to its consummation, snatched the veil from its mysteries, and looked it in the face, it had, in spite of hours of anguish, been his comfort, the strongest, tenderest, purest thing in his life. But now he saw, without much searching, that this love, though deeper and fiercer than ever, belonged somehow to his lower self. To realise it brought despair instead of comfort, wreckage instead of calm. He dared not, as in former days, plunge his sick heart into it as into a spring of healing waters—rather it was a scalding fountain, bubbling and seething out of death.

He had hoped that perhaps separation would make him calmer. Of late he had often denied himself the sight of Janey in that same vain hope. But now, as then, he found her letters almost as disintegrating as her presence—indeed more so, since they gave wider scope to his familiar demon of doubt. He wondered if he would ever find rest. Would marriage give it to him? He started up suddenly on the bed. An awful thought was thrust like a sword against his heart—the thought that even in marriage he would not find peace.

He had fallen into the habit of looking on marriage as the end of sorrows—and now, when fate and hard work seemed to have brought it within gazing-distance of hope, he suddenly saw that it would be as full of torment as his present state; or rather, more so—just as his present state was an intensification of the pain of earlier days. He realised—hardly definitely, but with horrible acuteness—that he had allowed love to frustrate love, and that by his demand to look into that great dread Face, he had brought on himself scorching and blindness and doom.

"Thou canst not see my Face and live."

He sprang off the bed. His pulses were hammering, his blood was thick, a kind of film obscured his eyes, so that he groped his way to the dressing-table. A clock struck four, and he suddenly remembered an engagement he had that afternoon. He would go—it would distract him. He might forget Janey—if only for an hour, he would be free of the torment that each thought of her carried like poison in a golden bowl. It was strange, it was terrible, that he should ever have come to want to forget Janey—and it was not because he did not love her; he loved her a hundred times more passionately than ever. But the love which had once been his strength and salve had now become a rotten sickness of the soul.