Part 35 (1/2)

”I can't tell you,” said Judith dully. ”You wouldn't understand and you'd be shocked.”

Boase smiled as he sat down in the pew just in front of her. She leant back against her seat and looked pitifully at his kind deeply-lined old face.

”Besides, I'm not sorry!” she went on; ”at least, not the sorry that means to give it up, only the sorry that wishes I had never started....”

”Tell me about him, my child!” said Boase. And Judy did. It was the first time she had ever spoken of him--what he was to her and what her life had been--to anyone. She made no wail beyond once saying, ”I did not know it was possible that a person could make one suffer so....”

Gradually Boase drew what little story there was to tell from her, but more than she told him he gathered for himself, from his watching of her and his knowledge of Killigrew. He was an old man now and a wise one. The priest in him yearned over her to wean her from her sin, but the patient wisdom in him told him that not that way had she yet come.

He talked quietly to her, soothing her by his calmness, his lack of reproaches or adjurations, and presently she was sitting forward in the pew in the gathering dusk talking more normally.

”There are some sheep who are not only not of this fold,” he said at last, ”but who seem as though they never could be on this side of the grave. Joe has the odd quality of never having felt spiritual want, and probably he never will.”

”It is that uncertainty of edge about him that has always been the difficulty,” she said. ”That--oh, it's so difficult to explain. I mean, he has never seemed to realise the limits of individuality. Woman is woman to him--not one woman. He's often said that the affinity made-for-each-other theory must be pure nonsense; that you meet during your little life hundreds of people who all have more or less of an affinity for you--some more, some less--and that it's practically your duty to fuse that alikeness wherever you meet it. Of course he agrees that among the lot there's bound to be one with whom the overlap is bigger than it is with any of the others, but then he looks on that as no reason for thinking that person is the one person for you. There are probably several more people knocking round with whom your overlap would be still wider, only you never happen to meet them. And to bind yourself irrevocably to one would be to prevent your fusing with them if you did meet them. It works out at this--that the greatest giving and the greatest taking is the ideal state of affairs. Give to everyone you meet and take all you can from them. But, you see, my trouble is I have nothing left to give anyone but him. I've always given him everything--I want no one and nothing else. And he's wanted so many and so much. I see the logic and admirable sense of his att.i.tude so clearly that even while a primitive root jealousy is eating me up I am so infected by his theory that I don't blame him. I feel myself nebulous as regards him, as blurred at edge as he is.”

”Oh, my dear child!” said Boase, ”this--this in a way bigness of his view just makes him more of an individualist than anyone. He limits himself nowhere, but simply because it's all gain to his individuality.

That it is gain to others too is neither here nor there.”

”It can be loss to the others; there is such a thing as all taking and no giving.”

”Ah, now you're looking on it from the point of view of payment! Take for a moment the truer view that sorrow is as much gain as pleasure. The only gain on earth is experience, and both emotions go to feed that.”

”And then,” continued Judith, pursuing her own line of thought, ”something in me seems to say that that wide view, that merging of individuality, has the right idea at the root of it. It's an old strain of Puritanism in me, I suppose, that tells me anything is good which implies a loosening of individualism.”

”I don't agree with you,” said Boase energetically. ”The root of all things good and great is personality. The success of any movement depends on the individuality of the leader, just as the whole of creation depends, whether it knows it or not, on the personality of Christ. 'Be individual' is a counsel of perfection--that is the only drawback to it. If the great ma.s.s of people were only nearer perfection the rein could be given to individualism; as it is it's a dangerous horse to drive--it so often runs away with its driver. Conceive now of the immense advantage it would be if, instead of a criminal being tried by the clumsy machinery of the law, the judge were to investigate the case quietly and thoroughly himself, get to know the man, his belongings and environment, and then deal with him as he saw fit. The thing's not workable; the judge might have an attack of indigestion that would jaundice his view, or be in a rosy glow of sentimentality after port.

But if the judge could be depended on for sympathy and intuitiveness, half the crime in the world would be stamped out. It's the same everywhere. If priests could be allowed to discriminate between divorced persons they thought it fit and desirable to remarry and those they did not, much sin might be avoided. But it wouldn't work, simply because the individual can't yet be trusted, and so it is quite right that the law should be as it is. But that doesn't prevent rank individualism from being the counsel of perfection--in which, curiously enough, Joe would agree with me more than Ishmael, who fights against the individual in life to an extraordinary extent. I wish something would happen to make him succ.u.mb to it again. I don't want him to grow inhuman....”

”I wish it were possible to grow inhuman,” said Judy.

”If you knew,” said Boase slowly, ”that besides doing--as I must tell you--a right action by leaving off all connection with Joe Killigrew, you could also cease at once to feel anything for him, would you then leave him?”

”Ah! not yet ...” said Judith. ”I must have a little longer. Wait till I'm older--till I can't make him want me....”

As she went home, comforted more than she could have thought possible by the mere telling of what had accompanied her so long, she knew that she had not been wholly disingenuous. That Killigrew would cease to want her for at least a good while to come she did not believe, and it was not that dread which had sent her shaking for the first time to the help from which she had hitherto held proudly aloof. As a matter of fact she kept up the illusion of youth better with Killigrew than with the rest of the world, and she knew it. For one thing, he was never away from her long enough at a time to get a thoroughly new vision of her on his return, a vision apart from that which he was expecting to see. For another, she took more care with him. Other people might see her unpowdered, bleak--never he. And for this, too, she had paid the penalty. Sometimes when he held her, gazing down into the face she had prepared with so much skill to meet that look--counting half upon the material aids upon her skin and half upon the state she should have evoked in him before she courted that gaze--then she would think to herself: ”And if I were not 'tidied,' if I were 'endy,' looking greasy, as I have all day, he would not be feeling like this....” Then with that thought would flash into her aching heart: ”On so frail a thread hangs love....”

But it was not anything in Killigrew which had eaten into her consciousness this past week--it was something in herself. Something which had risen to its crest that night among the bracken had failed ever since, was falling on deadness, and that something was her own power to feel the love which had made her life for so long. There were always periods of deadness--she knew that--but this held a quality none of them had had. What if even she were subject to the inevitable law, if for her too after the apex came the downward slope? That was the fear that gnawed at her, that was what she dreaded when the Parson had held out exactly that as a hope.

While she had been suffering and loving she had longed for the release of cessation; now she dreaded it, for it undermined to her the whole of the past. She was one of those women to whom faithfulness in herself was a necessity of self-respect, and failure of love, without any deflection of it, was to her a failure of faithfulness. She had nothing tangible to go upon; it was only that she felt this deadness now upon her was not the mere reaction of feeling, but an actual snapping of something in the fabric of life. She told herself it was not possible, that not so could she give the lie to all she had suffered.

As she went up the lane to Paradise she met Ishmael coming down it; evidently he had been taking Georgie home. She stopped to speak to him, and, feeling he was reluctant to pa.s.s on by himself yet awhile, she leant over a gate and let him talk to her. For a minute or so he said nothing that was not an ordinary commonplace of encounter, but after a short silence had fallen between them he began abruptly on another note.

”Judy,” he said, ”do you believe in what is called 'falling in love'?”

”Do I believe in it?” echoed Judith. ”It depends on how you mean that.

If you ask do I believe that there is such a phenomenon, I do, for the simple reason that one sees it happening all around one and people doing the maddest things under its influence. If you mean do I think it's a good thing, or a pleasant thing, or a thing that lasts ...?”

”Yes, that's what I meant, I think.”