Part 13 (1/2)

'There's no need for us to race,' he complained at last; upon which she immediately slackened her pace, and walked too slowly to suit him. In desperation he said the first thing he thought of, very peevishly and without the dignified prelude which he had intended.

'I've not enjoyed my holiday.'

'No?'

'No. I shall be glad to get back to work again.'

'Sat.u.r.day, Sunday, Monday-there are only three days more,' she counted.

'No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people,' he blurted out, for his irritation rose as she spoke, and got the better of his awe of her, and was inflamed by that awe.

'That refers to me, I suppose,' she said calmly.

'Every day since we've been here you've done something to make me appear ridiculous,' he went on. 'Of course, so long as it amuses you, you're welcome; but we have to remember that we are going to spend our lives together. I asked you, only this morning, for example, to come out and take a turn with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten minutes, and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-boys saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the drive you hardly spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every one notices it... You find no difficulty in talking to Henry, though.'

She noted these various complaints and determined philosophically to answer none of them, although the last stung her to considerable irritation. She wished to find out how deep his grievance lay.

'None of these things seem to me to matter,' she said.

'Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue,' he replied.

'In themselves they don't seem to me to matter; if they hurt you, of course they matter,' she corrected herself scrupulously. Her tone of consideration touched him, and he walked on in silence for a s.p.a.ce.

'And we might be so happy, Katharine!' he exclaimed impulsively, and drew her arm through his. She withdrew it directly.

'As long as you let yourself feel like this we shall never be happy,' she said.

The harshness, which Henry had noticed, was again unmistakable in her manner. William flinched and was silent. Such severity, accompanied by something indescribably cold and impersonal in her manner, had constantly been meted out to him during the last few days, always in the company of others. He had recouped himself by some ridiculous display of vanity which, as he knew, put him still more at her mercy. Now that he was alone with her there was no stimulus from outside to draw his attention from his injury. By a considerable effort of self-control he forced himself to remain silent, and to make himself distinguish what part of his pain was due to vanity, what part to the certainty that no woman really loving him could speak thus.

'What do I feel about Katharine?' he thought to himself. It was clear that she had been a very desirable and distinguished figure, the mistress of her little section of the world; but more than that, she was the person of all others who seemed to him the arbitresscg of life, the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and pa.s.sionate in their heart. of life, the woman whose judgment was naturally right and steady, as his had never been in spite of all his culture. And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and pa.s.sionate in their heart.

'If she were callous all the time and had only led me on to laugh at me I couldn't have felt that about her,' he thought. 'I'm not a fool, after all. I can't have been utterly mistaken all these years. And yet, when she speaks to me like that! The truth of it is,' he thought, 'that I've got such despicable faults that no one could help speaking to me like that. Katharine is quite right. And yet those are not my serious feelings, as she knows quite well. How can I change myself? What would make her care for me?' He was terribly tempted here to break the silence by asking Katharine in what respects he could change himself to suit her; but he sought consolation instead by running over the list of his gifts and acquirements, his knowledge of Greek and Latin, his knowledge of art and literature, his skill in the management of metres, and his ancient west-country blood. But the feeling that underlay all these feelings and puzzled him profoundly and kept him silent was the certainty that he loved Katharine as sincerely as he had it in him to love any one. And yet she could speak to him like that! In a sort of bewilderment he lost all desire to speak, and would quite readily have taken up some different topic of conversation if Katharine had started one. This, however, she did not do.

He glanced at her, in case her expression might help him to understand her behaviour. As usual, she had quickened her pace unconsciously, and was now walking a little in front of him; but he could gain little information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather, or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose touch with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so unpleasant to him that he began to talk about his grievances again, without, however, much conviction in his voice.

'If you have no feeling for me, wouldn't it be kinder to say so to me in private?'

'Oh, William,' she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorbing train of thought, 'how you go on about feelings! Isn't it better not to talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that don't really matter?'

'That's the question precisely,' he exclaimed. 'I only want you to tell me that they don't matter. There are times when you seem indifferent to everything. I'm vain, I've a thousand faults; but you know they're not everything; you know I care for you.'

'And if I say that I care for you, don't you believe me?'

'Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you care for me!'

She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask her for pa.s.sion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault of June.

He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore, even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally, she attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her rouse herself from her torpor.

Why should she not simply tell him the truth-which was that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him. He had ceased to speak; he had told her once more how he loved her and why. She summoned her courage, fixed her eyes upon a lightning-splintered ash-tree, and, almost as if she were reading a writing fixed to the trunk, began: 'I was wrong to get engaged to you. I shall never make you happy. I have never loved you.'

'Katharine!' he protested.

'No, never,' she repeated obstinately. 'Not rightly. Don't you see, I didn't know what I was doing?'

'You love some one else?' he cut her short.

'Absolutely no one.'

'Henry?' he demanded.

'Henry? I should have thought, William, even you-'

'There is some one,' he persisted. 'There has been a change in the last few weeks. You owe it to me to be honest, Katharine.'

'If I could, I would,' she replied.

'Why did you tell me you would marry me, then?' he demanded.

Why, indeed? A moment of pessimism, a sudden conviction of the undeniable prose of life, a lapse of the illusion which sustains youth midway between heaven and earth, a desperate attempt to reconcile herself with facts-she could only recall a moment, as of waking from a dream, which now seemed to her a moment of surrender. But who could give reasons such as these for doing what she had done? She shook her head very sadly.

'But you're not a child-you're not a woman of moods,' Rodney persisted. 'You couldn't have accepted me if you hadn't loved me!' he cried.

A sense of her own misbehaviour, which she had succeeded in keeping from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney's faults, now swept over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash the conviction that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength. Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women, perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second of such submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.

'I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong,' she forced herself to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming submission of that separate part of her; 'for I don't love you, William; you've noticed it, every one's noticed it; why should we go on pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I knew to be untrue.'

As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she saw his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed across her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her bewilderment at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a desperate sense that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she then put her arms about him, drew his head for a moment upon her shoulder, and led him on, murmuring words of consolation, until he heaved a great sigh. They held fast to each other; her tears, too, ran down her cheeks; and were both quite silent. Noticing the difficulty with which he walked, and feeling the same extreme la.s.situde in her own limbs, she proposed that they should rest for a moment where the bracken was brown and shrivelled beneath an oak-tree. He a.s.sented. Once more he gave a great sigh, and wiped his eyes with a childlike unconsciousness, and began to speak without a trace of his previous anger. The idea came to her that they were like the children in the fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them3 which had been blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there. which had been blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two deep, here and there.

'When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?' he said; 'for it isn't true to say that you've always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind. Still, where's the fault in that? I could promise you never to interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that's not unreasonable either when one's engaged. Ask your mother. And now this terrible thing-' He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed any further. 'This decision you say you've come to-have you discussed it with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?'

'No, no, of course not,' she said, stirring the leaves with her hand. 'But you don't understand me, William-'

'Help me to understand you-'

'You don't understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I've only now faced them myself. But I haven't got the sort of feeling-love, I mean-I don't know what to call it'-she looked vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist-'but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be a farce-'

'How a farce?' he asked. 'But this kind of a.n.a.lysis is disastrous!' he exclaimed.

'I should have done it before,' she said gloomily.

'You make yourself think things you don't think,' he continued, becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. 'Believe me, Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full of plans for our house-the chair-covers, don't you remember?-like any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the usual result. I a.s.sure you, Katharine, I've been through it all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn't been for my poetry, I a.s.sure you, I should often have been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret,' he continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost a.s.sured, 'I've often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head. Ask Denham; he'll tell you how he met me one night; he'll tell you what a state he found me in.'