Of Human Bondage
let his mind dwell on these soft meads and pleasant woods of the land,
the vast deserts of the ocean filled him with anguish. He could not
confront again the loneliness and the tempest. Sally looked at him with
her clear eyes.
“Aren’t you glad?” she asked again. “I thought you’d be as pleased as
Punch.”
He met her gaze haggardly. “I’m not sure,” he muttered.
“You are funny. Most men would.”
He realised that he had deceived himself; it was no self-sacrifice that
had driven him to think of marrying, but the desire for a wife and a
home and love; and now that it all seemed to slip through his fingers
he was seized with despair. He wanted all that more than anything in
the world. What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo,
Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South
Sea Islands? America was here and now. It seemed to him that all his
life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or
their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his
own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he
should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do. He put
all that aside now with a gesture of impatience. He had lived always in
the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his
fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design,
intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life:
had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was
born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most
perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept
defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
He glanced quickly at Sally, he wondered what she was thinking, and
then looked away again.
“I was going to ask you to marry me,” he said.
“I thought p’raps you might, but I shouldn’t have liked to stand in
your way.”
“You wouldn’t have done that.”
“How about your travels, Spain and all that?”
“How d’you know I want to travel?”
“I ought to know something about it. I’ve heard you and Dad talk about
it till you were blue in the face.”
“I don’t care a damn about all that.” He paused for an instant and then
spoke in a low, hoarse whisper. “I don’t want to leave you! I can’t
leave you.”
She did not answer. He could not tell what she thought.
“I wonder if you’ll marry me, Sally.”
She did not move and there was no flicker of emotion on her face, but
she did not look at him when she answered.
“If you like.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Oh, of course I’d like to have a house of my own, and it’s about time
I was settling down.”
He smiled a little. He knew her pretty well by now, and her manner did
not surprise him.
“But don’t you want to marry ME?”
“There’s no one else I would marry.”
“Then that settles it.”
“Mother and Dad will be surprised, won’t they?”
“I’m so happy.”
“I want my lunch,” she said.
“Dear!”
He smiled and took her hand and pressed it. They got up and walked out
of the gallery. They stood for a moment at the balustrade and looked at
Trafalgar Square. Cabs and omnibuses hurried to and fro, and crowds
passed, hastening in every direction, and the sun was shining.