Part 29 (1/2)
He used to think, ”Of course I fail. Of course she's always in my mind.
But while I make the effort to prevent it, while I do sometimes manage to wrench my mind away, I'm keeping fit; I'm able to go on putting up some sort of a fight. I'm able to help her.”
To help her! But helping her, unfolding before her in his own measured words, as one p.r.o.nouncing sentence, rect.i.tude's austere asylum for their pains, watching her while she listened, hearing her gentle acquiescence,--these were most terrible to his governance upon himself.
VI
He said one day, ”You see, there's this, Nona. Life's got one. We're in the thing. All the time you've got to go on. You can't go back one single second. What you've done, you've done. It may take only a minute in the doing, or in the saying, but it's done, or said, for all your life, perhaps for the whole of some one else's life as well. That's terrific, Nona.
”Nona, that's how life gets us; there's just one way we can get life and that's by thinking forward before we do a thing. By remembering that it's going to be there for always. What's in our hearts for one another, Nona, is no hurt to to-morrow or to next year or to twenty years hence, either to our own lives or to any one else's--no hurt while it's only there and not expressed, or acted on. I've never told you what's in my heart for you, nor you told me what's in your heart for me. It must remain like that. Once that goes, everything goes. It's only a question of time after that. And after that, again, only a question of time before one of us looks back and wishes for the years over again.”
She made the smallest motion of dissent.
He said, ”Yes. There's right and wrong, Nona. Nothing else in between.
No compromise. No way of getting round them or over them. You must be either one thing or the other. Once we took a step towards wrong, there it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it--deceit, concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to dishonour.--It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You can't replace it. I couldn't--”
The austere asylum of their pains. He looked back upon it as he had unfolded it. He looked forward across it as, most stern and bleak, it awaited them. He cried with a sudden loudness, as though he protested, not before her, but before arbitrament in the high court of destiny, ”But I cannot help you upward; I can only lead you downward.”
She said, ”Upward, Marko. You help me upward.”
Her gentle acquiescence!
There swept upon him, as one reckless in sudden surge of intoxication, most pa.s.sionate desire to take her in his arms; and on her lips to crush to fragments the barriers of conduct he had in d.a.m.nable sophistries erected; and in her ears to breathe, ”You are beloved to me! Honour, honesty, virtue, rect.i.tude--words, darling, words, words, words!
Beloved, let the foundations of the world go spinning, so we have love.”
He called most terribly upon himself, and his self answered him; but shaken by that most fierce onset he said thickly, ”I'll have this. If ever it grows too hard for you, tell me--tell me.”
VII
It must be kept locked. In grievous doubt of his own strength, in loneliness more lonely for his doubt, more deeply, as advancing summer lengthened out his waking solitude, he explored among his inmost thoughts; more eagerly, in relief from their perplexities, turned to the companions.h.i.+p of Fargus and the Perches. How very, very glad they always were to see him! It was the strong happiness they manifested in greeting him that most deeply gave the pleasure he had in their company.
He often pondered the fact. It was, in their manifestation of it, as though he brought them something,--something very pleasurable to them and that they much wanted. Certainly he, for his own part, received such from them: a sense of warmth, a kindling of the spirit, a glowing of all his affections and perceptions.
His mind would explore curiously along this train of thought. He came to determine that infinitely the most beautiful thing in life was a face lighting up with the pleasure of friends.h.i.+p: in its apotheosis irradiating with the wonder of love. That frequent idea of his of the ”wanting something” look in the faces of half the people one saw: he thought that the greeting of some one loved might well be a touching of the quality that was to seek. The weariest and the most wistful faces were sheerly transfigured by it. But he felt it was not entirely the secret. The greeting pa.s.sed; the light faded; the wanting returned. But he determined the key to the solution lay within that ambit. The happiness was there. It was here in life, found, realised in loving meeting, as warmth is found on stepping from shadow into the sun. The thing lacking was something that would fix it, render it permanent, establish it in the being as the heart is rooted in the body.--Something? What?
He thought, ”Well, why is it that children's faces are always happy?
There's something they must lose as they grow out of childhood. It's not that cares and troubles come; the absurd troubles of childhood are just as terrific troubles to them as grown-ups' cares are to grown-ups. No, it is that something is lost. Well, what had I as a child that I have not as a man? Would it be hope? Would it be faith? Would it be belief?”
He thought, ”I wonder if they're all the same, those three--belief, faith, hope? Belief in hope. Faith in hope. It may be. Is it that a child knows no limitation to hope? It can hope impossible things. But a man hopes no further than he can see--I wonder--”
And suddenly, in one week, life from its armoury discharged two events upon him. In the next week one upon the world.
CHAPTER III
I
Towards the end of July there was some particularly splendid excitement for the newspaper-reading public. Ireland provided it; and the newspapers, as the events enlarged one upon the other, could scarcely find type big enough to keep pace with them. On the twenty-first, the King caused a conference of British and Irish leaders to a.s.semble at Buckingham Palace. On the twenty-fourth, the British and Irish leaders departed from Buckingham Palace in patriotic halos of national champions who had failed to agree ”in principle or detail.” Deadlock and Crisis flew about the streets in stupendous type; and though they had been doing so almost daily for the past eighteen months, everybody could see, with the most delicious thrills, that these were more firmly locked deadlocks and more critical crises than had ever before come whooping out of the inexhaustible store where they were kept for the public entertainment. Austria, and then Germany, made a not bad attempt on public attention by raking up some forgotten sensation over a stale excitement at a place called Sarajevo; but on the twenty-sixth, Ireland magnificently filled the bill again by the far more serious affair of Nationalist Volunteers landing three thousand rifles and marching with them into Dublin. Troops fired on the mob, and the House of Commons gave itself over to a most exciting debate on the business; the Irish Party demanded a large number of brutal heads to be delivered on chargers; and Unionist politicians, Press, and public declared that the heads were not brutal heads but loyal and devoted heads and should not be delivered; on the contrary they should be wreathed. It was delicious.