"Home, of course," he had said, and of a sudden had experienced an almost physical sickness of longing for the humid foggy land in the Northern Sea, the land of dark green headlands showing chalk-white below, of hedges like thick black ropes on the landscape, with sunken roads between, of little towns of gray and black stone with the dark red roofs and stumpy spires against the sky of clouds like heaps of comfortable cushions. He had been amazed at her cool suggestion that they go to Germany, and she had been amazed at him. For she had all the news from Constantinople, news that told her that the British fleets were at the bottom of the sea, that the millions in England were starving, the King fled to America, and that the great Kaiser in his palace in Berlin was setting out on his triumphal march to London to be crowned Czar of Europe. And why then should he not go to Germany? That was what she would do. She looked at him curiously as he said "Home!" not understanding, of course, the meaning of the word. She had a house, but the subtle implications of the word home, the word saturated with a thousand years of local traditions and sympathies, the word that is the invisible centre of our world, she did not comprehend. For her, patriotism was a dim and unfamiliar perplexity. She had no abstract ideas at all. She could not read very well. She personified the things in her heart. To her they were men as real as her husband and Mr. Spokesly himself. Husband, house, money, sun, moon, sea, and earth—on these concrete manifestations of existence she based an uncurious philosophy. And it must be understood that love was very much the same. Esther had none of Evanthia's untutored theatricality. She never saw herself as the Queen of Sheba or the mistress of a King. She had had a pretty hard life of it in Odessa as a child, and when she was fifteen she began to divide men into two main classes, the generous and the stingy. It never entered her head she could live without being dependent upon men. And then she made a fresh discovery, that generous men were often foolish and spent their money on women who were monsters of infidelity. Esther was faithful. Even when she was left with a baby and no money, when she was under no obligation to treat men with consideration, she remained one of those who keep their word out of an allegiance to some obscure instinct for probity. And now she was married to her Armenian, a serious creature with vague longings after Western ideas or what he imagined were Western ideas. She was conscious of both love and happiness as tangible facets of her existence. She had hold of them, and in her strong capable hands she turned them to good account. She liked Evanthia because she had that ineluctable quality of transfiguring an act into a grandiose gesture. When Esther's little boy came on Sunday to visit his mother, it was Evanthia who swooped upon him, crushed him to her bosom with an exquisitely dramatic gesture of motherhood, stroked his sleek dark head and smooth little face, and forgot all about him an hour later. Esther never did that. When she looked at her son she seemed to see through the past into the future. Her kind capable face was grave and abstracted as she watched him. She seemed to be apprehensive of their security. Her husband did not dislike the child. But if they could only get to Buenos Aires!
She came with them now and soon they were in the water racing to the end of the jetty and diving into the flickering green transparency towards the white sand bottom. He watched the two of them sometimes, while he sat on the jetty and they tried to pull each other under, noting the differences of their characters and bodies. Esther was something beyond his past experience. She had the sturdy muscular form of a strong youth and the husky voice of a man. As she climbed up towards him, the water glistening on the smooth sinewy arms and legs, and as she shook the drops from her eyes with a boyish energy and seating herself beside him accepted a cigarette, he was conscious of that delicious sensuous emotion with which a man regards the friend of his beloved without invalidating for a moment his own authentic fidelity. His love for one woman reveals to him the essential beauty of all women. And it was characteristic of Evanthia to swim back to the bath-house steps and go in to dress, leaving them there to talk for a moment.
"Say, Esther, where does your husband go every night? Why don't he come home and eat early?"
"He go to some club," she said, blowing a jet of smoke upwards. "He very fond of his club. He read plenty book, my 'usban'."
"What sort of books?"
"I don' know. Politics, Science, Philosophy. You go to that club, too. Your friend the Englishman, him with Armenian wife, he go there."
"I know he does. I was thinkin' about it. But it's a long way out here at night."
Esther laughed, a low husky chuckle, as she rose, flung away the cigarette and ran back to the bath house.
"Oh-ho! You love Evanthia too much!" she flung over her firm vigorous shoulder.
He knew by now that she meant "very much"; and as he followed her he agreed she was right. He had reached that stage when the past and the future were both obliterated by the intense vitality of existence. Only the never-ending desire to get her away into his own environment, to see her against a familiar background, held him to the plan he had worked out to get away. And it was the source of much of his irony in later, more prosperous years that he had come to see how essentially egotism and male vanity that never-ending desire happened to be. He saw the sharp cleavage, as one sees a fault in a range of cliffs at a distance, between his love and his pride. He saw that the fear in his heart was for himself all the time, lest he should not come out of the adventure with his pride entire.