Part 19 (2/2)

My words were far too unexpected for Tarvrille to understand. ”The flies,” I repeated with an air of explanation.

”You're sure she'll be all right?” I said abruptly.

”You've done the best thing you can for her.”

”I suppose I have. I have to go.” And then I saw ahead of me a world full of the tiresome need of decisions and arrangements and empty of all interest. ”Where the _devil_ am I to go, Tarvrille? I can't even get out of things altogether....”

And then with a fresh realization of painful difficulties ahead: ”I have to tell this to my father. I've got to explain---- And he thought--he expected----”

Tarvrille opened the half of the heavy front door for me, hesitated, and came down the broad steps into the chilly grey street and a few yards along the pavement with me. He wanted to say something that he found difficult to say. When at last he did find words they were quite ridiculous in substance, and yet at the time I took them as gravely as he intended them. ”It's no good quoting Marcus Aurelius,” said Tarvrille, ”to a chap with his finger in the crack of a door.”

”I suppose it isn't,” I said.

”One doesn't want to be a flatulent a.s.s of course,” said Tarvrille, ”still----”

He resumed with an air of plunging. ”It will sound just rot to you now, Stratton, but after all it comes to this. Behind us is a--situation--with half-a-dozen particular persons. Out here--I mean here round the world--before you've done with them--there's a thousand million people--men and women.”

”Oh! what does that matter to me?” said I.

”Everything,” said Tarvrille. ”At least--it ought to.”

He stopped and held out his hand. ”Good-bye, Stratton--good luck to you!

Good-bye.”

”Yes,” I said. ”Good-bye.”

I turned away from him. The image of Mary crying as a child cries suddenly blinded me and blotted out the world.

-- 2

I want to give you as clearly as I can some impression of the mental states that followed this pa.s.sion and this collapse. It seems to me one of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no description at all of most of the mental states that make up life.

Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and a.n.a.lysis it begins with the rash a.s.sumption of elements and starts out upon ridiculous syntheses. Who with a sick soul would dream of going to a psychologist?...

Now here was I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and pa.s.sionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. I had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a friend. I kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. If some momentary distraction released me for a time, back I would fall presently before I knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging defeat. I would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to Mary, some violent return and attack upon the situation....

One very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense of wild rightness about pa.s.sionate love that no reasoning and no training will ever altogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and treacheries and a.s.suage my smarting shame. And round these deep central preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards secondary people. There had been interventions, judgments upon insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments, that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.

I had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that I was still ent.i.tled to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. I clung fiercely to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be dishonorable.... This state of mind I am describing is, I am convinced, the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once questionable and pa.s.sionate. He seems free, but he is not free; he is the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.

And we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for ourselves, Philip, Guy, Justin, the friends involved, and all in the measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic realization. Even when we slept, the clenched fist of the att.i.tudes we had a.s.sumed gave a direction to our dreams.

You see the same string of events that had produced all this system of intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. I had had to leave England and all the political beginnings I had been planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....

And then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! The desire for a voice! The arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who will listen in peace no more! From that lonely distress even rage, even the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. From that pitiless travail of emptiness I was ready to turn desperately to any offer of excitement and distraction.

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