She came and stood over me, looking at me. "I'm going to have a concert," she said abruptly, and laughed uneasily and hovered at the pigeon-holes. "Now--now what shall I have?" She chose more of Brahms. Then we came to the Kreutzer Sonata. It is queer how Tolstoy has loaded that with suggestions, debauched it, made it a scandalous and intimate symbol. When I had played the first part of that, she came up to the pianola and hesitated over me. I sat stiffly--waiting.
Suddenly she seized my downcast head and kissed my hair. She caught at my face between her hands and kissed my lips. I put my arms about her and we kissed together. I sprang to my feet and clasped her.
"Beatrice!" I said. "Beatrice!"
"My dear," she whispered, nearly breathless, with her arms about me. "Oh! my dear!"
II
Love, like everything else in this immense process of social disorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its connexions. I tell of this love affair here because of its irrelevance, because it is so remarkable that it should mean nothing, and be nothing except itself. It glows in my memory like some bright casual flower starting up amidst the debris of a catastrophe. For nearly a fortnight we two met and made love together. Once more this mighty passion, that our aimless civilisation has fettered and maimed and sterilised and debased, gripped me and filled me with passionate delights and solemn joys--that were all, you know, futile and purposeless. Once more I had the persuasion "This matters. Nothing else matters so much as this." We were both infinitely grave in such happiness as we had. I do not remember any laughter at all between us.
Twelve days it lasted from that encounter in my chalet until our parting.
Except at the end, they were days of supreme summer, and there was a waxing moon. We met recklessly day by day. We were so intent upon each other at first so intent upon expressing ourselves to each other, and getting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearance of our relationship.
We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousand things, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose of mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing.
Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can I render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession?
I sit here at my desk thinking of untellable things.
I have come to know so much of love that I know now what love might be. We loved, scarred and stained; we parted--basely and inevitably, but at least I met love.
I remember as we sat in a Canadian canoe, in a reedy, bush-masked shallow we had discovered operating out of that pine-shaded Woking canal, how she fell talking of the things that happened to her before she met me again....
She told me things, and they so joined and welded together other things that lay disconnected in my memory, that it seemed to me I had always known what she told me. And yet indeed I had not known nor suspected it, save perhaps for a luminous, transitory suspicion ever and again.
She made me see how life had shaped her. She told me of her girlhood after I had known her. "We were poor and pretending and managing. We hacked about on visits and things. I ought to have married. The chances I had weren't particularly good chances. I didn't like 'em."
She paused. "Then Carnaby came along."
I remained quite still. She spoke now with downcast eyes, and one finger just touching the water.
"One gets bored, bored beyond redemption. One does about to these huge expensive houses I suppose--the scale's immense. One makes one's self useful to the other women, and agreeable to the men. One has to dress.... One has food and exercise and leisure, It's the leisure, and the space, and the blank opportunity it seems a sin not to fill. Carnaby isn't like the other men. He's bigger.... They go about making love. Everybody's making love.
I did.... And I don't do things by halves."
She stopped.
"You knew?"--she asked, looking up, quite steadily. I nodded.
"Since when?"
"Those last days.... It hasn't seemed to matter really. I was a little surprised"
She looked at me quietly. "Cothope knew," she said. "By instinct. I could feel it."
"I suppose," I began, "once, this would have mattered immensely.
Now--"
"Nothing matters," she said, completing me. "I felt I had to tell you. I wanted you to understand why I didn't marry you--with both hands. I have loved you"--she paused--"have loved you ever since the day I kissed you in the bracken. Only--I forgot."
And suddenly she dropped her face upon her hands, and sobbed passionately--"I forgot--I forgot," she cried, and became still....
I dabbled my paddle in the water. "Look here!" I said; "forget again! Here am I--a ruined man. Marry me."
She shook her head without looking up.
We were still for a long time. "Marry me!" I whispered.
She looked up, twined back a whisp of hair, and answered dispassionately--"I wish I could. Anyhow, we have had this time. It has been a fine time--has it been--for you also? I haven't nudged you all I had to give. It's a poor gift--except for what it means and might have been. But we are near the end of it now."
"Why?" I asked. "Marry me! Why should we two--"
"You think," she said, "I could take courage and come to you and be your everyday wife--while you work and are poor?"
"Why not?" said I.
She looked at me gravely, with extended finger. "Do you really think that--of me? Haven't you seen me--all?"
I hesitated.
"Never once have I really meant marrying you," she insisted.
"Never once. I fell in love with you from the first. But when you seemed a successful man, I told myself I wouldn't. I was love-sick for you, and you were so stupid, I came near it then.
But I knew I wasn't good enough. What could I have been to you?
A woman with bad habits and bad associations, a woman smirched.
