At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

“But you don't regret it, do you, Thornton?” she asked, womanlike.

“Look at me and see if I do,” he said.

Clytie obeyed him, half shyly, feeling, as she always did since her return to Paris, the fascination, half pleasant, half painful, of his eyes. He loved her. There was no doubt of that. Yet the nature of his love sometimes frightened her a little if she strayed for a moment off the “love plane.” Her own responsiveness she never questioned, preferring to shut her eyes and let the current of his love carry her whither it would. But at times now, during her solitary walks through the Louvre, the thought obtruded, What would the new life be like? Not these early days, which were holidays from the seriousnesses of existence, but the life in the years that lay before her, of whose responsibilities she had as yet but vague premonitions. How would her art be affected?

Would it lose or gain in that breadth and insight that it needed? Would she continue to reckon herself an artist at all, or would she only degenerate into the amateur—painting little meaningless pictures for amusement? And at the end of a year would she not stand face to face with a new Clytie, paler, more shadowy, and therefore less insistently demanding self-expression? Even these few weeks had changed her: what would she be at the end of one year, two years, twenty years? Happier, with all her old cravings satisfied, with her individuality worked out to its fullest, with the riddle of life joyously solved? Or else——She scarcely dared think of it. She looked at what had been written in her Book of New Formulas, and found that the marriage service had been omitted. It merely said that marriage was unformularisable, an easy way of curving a contumelious lip at the old formulas which she had rebelled against, but scarcely satisfactory in her present position. Now, in the Old Formulas, marriage was minutely, scrupulously regulated by the most definite of rules. Although they broke up the poem of life into a disjointed copy-book, or at best into a collection of elegant extracts, still they presented a homogeneous scheme. Should she at last have to accept this, confess to Mrs. Blather smiling complacently that the Durdleham philosophy was the only one? But then she would look at her husband and take a measure of comfort. Such a man could not come out of Durdleham.

That was her consolation in the perplexities that the problem of her married life caused her. She took refuge from herself, her thoughts, her forebodings, in his grand strength and personal magnetism. It was intermittent intoxication, this long Paris after-honeymoon, rather than continuous charm, and the intervals of soberness had their wearinesses. She had thrown her cap over the windmills. Sometimes she regretted it.

On the evening after the above conversation they went to the opera, where they had taken a box with the Claverings, army people with whom Thornton had been intimate in Cairo. Clytie had met them only for a moment the day before, and had not been favourably impressed. However, they were Thornton's friends, and it behoved her to appreciate them. Mrs. Clavering passed for being a clever woman by virtue of a plain face and a vivacious manner; also because she ruled her husband and had a cultivated taste in sherry.

Thornton had admired her some years before. Mammas with marriageable daughters put it in that way; those who could afford to be independent put it in another. Whichever way they put it in no wise affected the parties concerned. Mrs. Clavering was too superior a woman to allow idle gossip to influence her or her husband. Now she was eight-and-thirty, she had seen the world and had preserved few illusions, least of all any respecting Thornton Hammerdyke. She met him with a cynical encouragement, which to some men is flattering.

Clytie was quick to notice her manner towards Thornton, and resented it. There was a touch of banal familiarity, too, in his talk with Mrs. Clavering that jarred upon her. The tone was undignified, suggestive of the falser strata of regimental society, in which frankness stands for scarcely veiled mutual contempt.

He was sitting behind Mrs. Clavering, who smiled in a superior, half-patronising way at his remarks. Clytie listened to the music absently, wished they had come alone. The house was crowded, and the air was stifling. She found the opera, “La Juive,” uninteresting.

“I am going to carry off your husband to the terrace, Mrs. Hammerdyke,” said Mrs. Clavering at the end of the second act, “and I leave you mine in pledge. I hope he will take good care of you.”