Part 10 (2/2)

CHAPTER X

Yet, knowing himself in love, he was able to set his house in order.

Confusion disappeared. With the method and thoroughness of his character he looked things in the face and put them where they belonged.

Even to wake up to an untidy room was an affliction. He might arrive in a hotel at midnight, but he could not sleep until his trunks were empty and everything in its place. In such outer details the intensity of his nature showed itself: it was the intensity, indeed, that compelled the orderliness.

And the morning after this conversation, he woke up to an ordered mind-- thoughts and emotions in their proper places where he could see and lay his hand upon them. The strength and weakness of his temperament betrayed themselves plainly here, for the security that pedantic order brought precluded the perspective of a larger vision. This careful labelling enclosed him within somewhat rigid fences. To insist upon this precise ticketing had its perilous corollary; the entire view--perspective, proportion, vision--was lost sight of.

'I'm in love: she's beautiful, body, mind and soul. She's high above me, but I'll climb up to where she is.' This was his morning thought, and the thought that accompanied him all day long and every day until the moment came to separate again. . . . 'She's a married woman, but her husband has no claim on her.' Somehow he was positive of that; the husband had forfeited all claim to her; details he did not know; but she was free; she did no wrong.

In imagination he furnished plausible details from sensational experiences life had shown him. These may have been right or wrong; possibly the husband had ill-treated, then deserted her; they were separated possibly, though--she had told him this--there were no children to complicate the situation. He made his guesses. . . . There was a duty, however, that she would not, did not neglect: in fulfilment of its claim she went to Warsaw every year. What it was, of course, he did not know; but this thought and the emotions caused by it, he put away into their proper places; he asked no questions of her; the matter did not concern him really. The shock experienced the day before was the shock of realising that--he loved. Those two significant words had suddenly shown it to him.

The order of his life was changed. 'She is essential to me; I am essential to her.' But 'She's all the world to me,' involved equally 'I'm all the world to her.' The sense of his own importance was enormously increased. The Wave surged upwards with a sudden leap. . . .

There was one thing lacking in this love, perhaps, though he hardly noticed it--the element of surprise. Ever since childhood he had suspected this would happen. The love was predestined, and in so far seemed a deliberate affair, pedestrian, almost calm. This sense of the inevitable robbed it of that amazing unearthly glamour which steals upon those who love for the first time, taking them deliciously by surprise.

He saw her beautiful, and probably she was, but her beauty was familiar to him. He had come up with the childhood dream, and in coming up with it he recognised it. It seemed thus somewhat. . . . But her mind and soul were beautiful too, only these were more beautiful than he had dreamed.

In that lay surprise and wonder too. There was genuine magic here, discovery and exhilarating novelty. He had not caught up with _that_.

The love as a whole, however, was expected, natural. It was inevitable.

The familiarity alone remained strange, a flavour of the uncanny about it almost--yet certainly real.

And these things also he tried to face and label, though with less success. To bring order into them was beyond his powers. She had outstripped him somehow in her soul, but had come back to fetch him--also to get something for herself she lacked. The rest was oddly familiar: it had happened before. It was about to happen now again, but on a higher level; only before it could happen completely he must overtake her.

The spiral idea lay in it somewhere. But the Wave contained and drove it. . . . His mind was not supple; a.n.a.logy, that spiritual solvent, did not help him. Yet the fact remained that he somehow visualised the thing in picture form; a rising wave bore them charging up the spiral curve to a point whence they both looked down upon a pa.s.sage they had made before.

She was always a little in front of him, beyond him. But when the Wave finally broke they would rush together--become one . . . there would be pain, but joy would follow.

And during all their subsequent happy days of companions.h.i.+p this one thing alone marred his supreme contentment--this sense of elusiveness, that while he held her she yet slipped between his fingers and escaped.

He loved; but whereas to most men love brings a feeling of finality and rest, as of a search divinely ended, to Tom came the feeling that his search was merely resumed, or, indeed, had only just begun. He had not come into full possession of this woman: he had only found her. . . .

She was deep; her deceptive simplicity hid surprises from him; much--and it was the greater part--he could not understand. Only when he came up with that would possession be complete. Not that she said or did a single thing that suggested this; she was not elusive of set purpose; she was entirely guiltless of any desire to hold back a fraction of herself, and to conceal was as foreign to her nature as to play with him; but that some part of her hung high above his reach, and that he, knowing this, admitted a subtle pain behind the joy. 'I can't get at her--quite,' he put it to himself. 'Some part of her is not mine yet--doesn't belong to me.'

He thought chiefly, that is, of his own possible disabilities rather than of hers.

'I often wonder why we've come together like this,' he said once, as they lay in the shade of a larch wood above Corvaux and looked towards the snowy summits of Savoy. 'What brought us together, I mean? There's something mysterious about it to me----'

'G.o.d,' she said quietly. 'You needed me. You've been lonely. But you'll never be lonely again.'

Her introduction of the Deity into a conversation did not displease.

Fate, or any similar word, could have taken its place; she merely conveyed her sense that their coming together was right and inevitable.

Moreover, now that she said it, he recognised the fact of loneliness--that he always had been lonely, but that it was no longer possible. He felt like a boy and spoke like a boy. She had come to look after, care for him. She asked nothing for herself. The thought gave him a sharp and sudden pang.

'But my love means a lot to you, doesn't it?' he asked tenderly.

'I mean, you need me too?'

'Everything, Tom,' she told him softly. He was conscious of the mother in her, as though the mother overshadowed the woman. But while he loved it, the tinge of resentment still remained.

'You couldn't do without me, could you?' He took the hand she placed upon his knee and looked up into her quiet eyes. 'You'd be lonely too if--I went?'

For a moment she gazed down at him and did not answer; he was aware of both the pain and sweetness in her face; an interval of thoughtfulness again descended on them both: then a great tenderness came welling up into her eyes as she answered slowly: 'You couldn't go, Tom. You couldn't leave me ever.'

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