“So this ultimatum was presented to Ruth, who asked for a month in which to make up her mind. I saw her going about her work as usual, but I supposed that thoughts more sacred, more speculative, than her ordinary thoughts of daily labour, were coming and going in her brain, hopping, and occasionally twittering, like little birds in a coppice. I did not speak to her much at this time. I pictured her as a nun during her novitiate, or as a young man in vigil beside his unused armour, or as the condemned criminal in his cell, because all three figures share alike a quantity of aloofness from the world. I only wished that Heaven might grant me a second Daphnis and Chloe for my depopulated Arcady, and I asked no greater happiness than to see Ruth and Leslie tangled together in the meshes of love.
“September was merging into October, and again the orchards on the slope of the hill were loaded with fruit, the bushel baskets stood on the ground, and the tall ladders reared themselves into the branches. We were all fruit-pickers for the time being. Of the apples, only the very early kinds were ripe for market, and of this I was glad, for I enjoyed the jewelled orchard, red, green, and russet, and yellow, too, where the quince-trees stood with their roots under the little brook, but the plums were ready, and the village boys swarmed into the trees to pick such fruit as their hands could reach, and to shake the remainder to the ground. We, below, stood clear while a shower of plums bounced and tumbled into the grass, then we filled our baskets with gold and purple, returning homewards in the evening laden like the spies from the Promised Land. Amos stood, nobly apostolic, his great beard spread like a breastplate over his chest, among the glowing plunder. I was reminded of my Greek trader, and of the Tuscan vineyards; and the English country and the southern plenty were again strangely mingled.
“Towards the end of the month, considering that if her mind had not yet sailed into the sea of placidity I so desired it to attain, it would never do so, I decided to sound Ruth upon her decision. You see, she interested me, disappointed as I was in her, and I had nothing else to think about at the time save these, to you no doubt tame, love affairs of my country friends. I had a good deal of difficulty in coaxing her into a sufficiently emotional frame of mind; as fast as I threw the ballast out of our conversational balloon, she threw in the sand-bags from the other side. My speech was all of the lover’s Heaven, hers of the farm-labourer’s earth. She was curiously on the defensive; I could not understand her. I was certain that her matter-of-factness was, that evening, deliberate. She was full of restraint, and yet, a feverishness, an expectancy clung about her, which I could not then explain, but which I think was fully explained by later events.
“We got off at last, we went soaring up into the sky; it was my doing, for I had uttered the wildest words to get her to follow me. I had talked of marriage; Heaven knows what I said. I told her that love was passion and friendship—passion in the secret night, but comradeship in the open places under the sun, and that whereas passion was the drunkenness of love, friendship was its food and clear water and warmth, and bodily health and vigour. I told her that children were to their begetters what flowers are to the gardener: little expanding things with dancing butterflies, sensitive, responsive, satisfying; the crown of life, the assurance of the future, the rhyme of the poem. I told her that in love alone can the poignancy of joy equal the poignancy of sorrow. I told her of that minority that finds its interest in continual change, and of that majority which rests on a deep content, and a great many other things which I do not believe, but which I should wish to believe, and which I should wish all women to believe. I told her all that I had never told a human being before, all that I had, perhaps, checked my tongue from uttering once or twice in my life, because I knew myself to be an inconstant man. I made love by quadruple proxy, not as myself to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself in Leslie Dymock’s name to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself to any named or unnamed woman, but as any man to any woman, and I enjoyed it, because sincerity always carries with it a certain degree of pain, but pure rhetoric carries the pure enjoyment of the creative artist.”
I disliked Malory’s cynicism, and I should have disliked it still more had I not suspected that he was not entirely speaking the truth. I was also conscious of boiling rage against the man for being such a fool.
“When I had finished,” he went on, “she was trembling like a pool stirred by the wind.
“‘You think like that,’ she said, ‘I never heard any one talk like that before.’
“Then I told her a great deal more, about her Spanish heritage and that disturbing blood in her veins, and about Spain, of which she knew next to nothing: that southern Spain was soft and the air full of orange-blossom, but that the north was fierce and arid, and peopled by men who in their dignity and reserve had more in common with the English than with the Latin races to whom they belonged; that as their country had not the kindliness of the English country, so they themselves lacked the kindly English humour, which mocks and smiles and, above all, pities; and that their temper is not swift, but slow like the English temper, but, when roused, ruthless and as little to be checked as a fall of water. I think that for the first time she guessed at a world beyond England, a world inhabited by real men. Before that, Spain and all Europe had been as remote as the stars.”
Malory told her all this, and then, when they were fairly flying through the air—I imagined them as the North Wind and the little girl in the fairy-story: hair streaming, garments streaming, hand pulling hand—he judged the moment opportune to return to Leslie Dymock. I fancy that the crash to earth again must have knocked all consciousness from the girl for a considerable interval. During this interval Malory dilated on the admirableness of the young man, his estimable qualities, and his worldly prospects. I could understand his scheme. He had planned to fill her with electricity, then to switch her suddenly off, sparkling and thrilling, on to Leslie Dymock. He had, I suppose, assumed that a certain sympathy had already inclined her native tenderness towards Leslie Dymock. The scheme was an excellent one in all but one particular: that his initial premise was radically false.
After the interval of her unconsciousness, she returned with slowly opening eyes to what he was saying. God knows what she had expected the outcome of their wild journey to be. Malory only told me that with parted lips and eyes in which all the mysteries of awakened adolescence were stirring, she laid her hand, trembling, on his hand and said,—