Chapter 2: Love Among The Wreckage

I

When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character. For two weeks I was kept in London “facing the music,” as he would have said, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at the consideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open and manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modern species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer wantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced a reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring and difficult feat than it was, and I couldn’t very well write to the papers to sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that men infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple honesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yet they favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupy my chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers, calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in disorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap heaps.

I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whom I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was short of money, so I let him go and managed very philosophically by myself.

But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had been away from the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded with intense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fine problems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think about my uncle’s dropping jaw, my aunt’s reluctant tears, about dead negroes and pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and pain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful pile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.

On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memories and striving in vain to attend to some too succinct pencil notes of Cothope’s, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind the pavilion, and pulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a little flushed from riding and sitting on a big black horse.

I did not instantly rise. I stared at her. “YOU!” I said.

She looked at me steadily. “Me,” she said

I did not trouble about any civilities. I stood up and asked point blank a question that came into my head.

“Whose horse is that?” I said.

She looked me in the eyes. “Carnaby’s,” she answered.

“How did you get here--this way?”

“The wall’s down.”

“Down? Already?”

“A great bit of it between the plantations.”

“And you rode through, and got here by chance?”

“I saw you yesterday. And I rode over to see you.” I had now come close to her, and stood looking up into her face.

“I’m a mere vestige,” I said.

She made no answer, but remained regarding me steadfastly with a curious air of proprietorship.

“You know I’m the living survivor now of the great smash. I’m rolling and dropping down through all the scaffolding of the social system ... It’s all a chance whether I roll out free at the bottom, or go down a crack into the darkness out of sight for a year or two.”

“The sun,” she remarked irrelevantly, “has burnt you ... I’m getting down.”

She swung herself down into my arms, and stood beside me face to face.

“Where’s Cothope?” she asked.

“Gone.”

Her eyes flitted to the pavilion and back to me. We stood close together, extraordinarily intimate, and extraordinarily apart.

“I’ve never seen this cottage of yours,” she said, “and I want to.”

She flung the bridle of her horse round the veranda post, and I helped her tie it.

“Did you get what you went for to Africa?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I lost my ship.”

“And that lost everything?”

“Everything.”

She walked before me into the living-room of the chalet, and I saw that she gripped her riding-whip very tightly in her hand. She looked about her for a moment, --and then at me.

“It’s comfortable,” she remarked.

Our eyes met in a conversation very different from the one upon our lips. A sombre glow surrounded us, drew us together; an unwonted shyness kept us apart. She roused herself, after an instant’s pause, to examine my furniture.

“You have chintz curtains. I thought men were too feckless to have curtains without a woman. But, of course, your aunt did that! And a couch and a brass fender, and--is that a pianola? That is your desk. I thought men’s desks were always untidy, and covered with dust and tobacco ash.”

She flitted to my colour prints and my little case of books. Then she went to the pianola. I watched her intently.

“Does this thing play?” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“Does this thing play?”

I roused myself from my preoccupation.

“Like a musical gorilla with fingers all of one length. And a sort of soul ... It’s all the world of music to me.”

“What do you play?”

“Beethoven, when I want to clear up my head while I’m working. He is--how one would always like to work. Sometimes Chopin and those others, but Beethoven. Beethoven mainly. Yes.”

Silence again between us. She spoke with an effort.

“Play me something.” She turned from me and explored the rack of music rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, hesitated. “No,” she said, “that!”

She gave me Brahms’ Second Concerto, Op. 58, and curled up on the sofa watching me as I set myself slowly to play...

“I say,” he said when I had done, “that’s fine. I didn’t know those things could play like that. I’m all astir...”

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?”