Robert Elsmere
speculative thought. All his life, reserve to those nearest to him had
been pain and grief to him. He was one of those people, as we know, who
throw off readily; to whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who
suffer physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them.
And now, at every turn, in their talk, their reading, in many of the
smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere began to feel the
presence of this cold and rigid something. He was ever conscious of
self-defence on her side, of pained drawing back on his. And with every
succeeding effort of his at self-repression, it seemed to him as though
fresh nails were driven into the coffin of that old free habit of
perfect confidence which had made the heaven of their life since they
had been man and wife.
He sat on for long, through the September evening, pondering, wrestling.
Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of his own act, and of her
antecedents, to which he must submit himself, as to any mutilation or
loss of power in the body? The young lover and husband rebelled--the
believer rebelled--against the admission. Probably if his change had
left him anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have
been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness should
bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual confusion, which
inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction of a man's platform of
action, he had never been more sure of God, or the Divine aims of the
world, than now; never more open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine
world, to those passionate moments of religious trust which are man's
eternal defiance to the iron silences about him. Originally, as we know,
he had shrunk from the thought of change in her corresponding to his
own; now that his own foothold was strengthening, his longing for a new
union was overpowering that old dread. The proselytising instinct may be
never quite morally defensible, even as between husband and wife.
Nevertheless, in all strong, convinced, and ardent souls it exists, and
must be reckoned with.
At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse which
neutralised for the moment his nervous dread of hurting her. Some little
incident of their day together was rankling, and it was borne in upon
him that almost any violent protest on her part would have been
preferable to this constant soft evasion of hers, which was gradually,
imperceptibly dividing heart from heart.
They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the huge
newly-built hotels which during the last twenty years have invaded all
the high places of Switzerland. The August which had been so hot in
England had been rainy and broken in Switzerland. But it had been
followed by a warm and mellow September, and the favourite hotels below
a certain height were still full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les
Avants, this scantily furnished garret, out of which some servants had
been hurried to make room for them, was all that could be found. They,
however, liked it for its space and its view. They looked sideways from
their windows on to the upper end of the lake, three thousand feet below
them. Opposite, across the blue water, rose a grandiose rampart of
mountains, the stage on which from morn till night the sun went through
a long transformation scene of beauty. The water was marked every now
and then by passing boats and steamers--tiny specks which served to
measure the vastness of all around them. To right and left, spurs of
green mountains shut out alike the lower lake and the icy splendours of
the 'Valais depths profound.' What made the charm of the narrow prospect
was, first, the sense it produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily
above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the magical
effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist would blot out the
valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face
across the fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain mass, and its
attendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he were alone in the
universe.
It was a peaceful September night. From the open window beside him
Robert could see a world of high moonlight, limited and invaded on all
sides by sharp black masses of shade. A few rare lights glimmered on the
spreading alp below, and every now and then a breath of music came to
them wafted from a military band playing a mile or two away. They had
been climbing most of the afternoon, and Catherine was lying down, her
brown hair loose about her, the thin oval of her face and clear line of
brow just visible in the dim candlelight.
Suddenly he stretched out his hand for his Greek Testament, which was
always near him, though there had been no common reading since that
bitter day of his confession to her. The mark still lay in the well-worn
volume at the point reached in their last reading at Murewell. He opened
upon it, and began the eleventh chapter of St. John.
Catherine trembled when she saw him take up the book. He began without
preface, treating the passage before him in his usual way,--that is to
say, taking verse after verse in the Greek, translating and commenting.
She never spoke all through, and at last he closed the little Testament,
and bent towards her, his look full of feeling.
'Catherine! can't you let me--will you never let me tell you, now, how
that story--how the old things--affect me, from the new point of view?
You always stop me when I try. I believe you think of me as having
thrown it all away. Would it not comfort you sometimes, if you knew that
although much of the Gospels, this very raising of Lazarus, for
instance, seem to me no longer true in the historical sense, still they
are always full to me of an ideal, a poetical truth? Lazarus may not
have died and come to life, may never have existed; but still to me, now
as always, love for Jesus of Nazareth is "resurrection" and "life"?'
He spoke with the most painful diffidence, the most wistful tenderness.
There was a pause. Then Catherine said, in a rigid constrained voice,--
'If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, as reality, I cannot
see how they are true at all, or of any value.'
The next minute she rose, and, going to the little wooden
dressing-table, she began to brush out and plait for the night her
straight silky veil of hair. As she passed him Robert saw her face pale
and set.
He sat quiet another moment or two, and then he went towards her and
took her in his arms.
'Catherine,' he said to her, his lips trembling, 'am I never to speak my
mind to you any more? Do you mean always to hold me at arm's length--to
refuse always to hear what I have to say in defence of the change which
has cost us both so much?'
She hesitated, trying hard to restrain herself. But it was of no use.
She broke into tears--quiet but most bitter tears.
'Robert, I cannot! Oh! you must see I cannot. It is not because I am
hard, but because I am weak. How can I stand up against you? I dare
not--I dare not. If you were not yourself--not my husband----'
Her voice dropped. Robert guessed that at the bottom of her resistance
there was an intolerable fear of what love might do with her if she once
gave it an opening. He felt himself cruel, brutal, and yet an urgent
sense of all that was at stake drove him on.
'I would not press or worry you, God knows!' he said, almost piteously,
kissing her forehead as she lay against him. 'But remember, Catherine, I
cannot put these things aside. I once thought I could--that I could fall
back on my historical work, and leave religious matters alone as far as
criticism was concerned. But I cannot. They fill my mind more and more.
I feel more and more impelled to search them out, and to put my
conclusions about them into shape. And all the time this is going on,
are you and I to remain strangers to one another in all that concerns
our truest life--are we, Catherine?'
He spoke in a low voice of intense feeling. She turned her face and
pressed her lips to his hand. Both had the scene in the wood-path after
her flight and return in their minds, and both were filled with a
despairing sense of the difficulty of living, not through great crises,
but through the detail of every day.
'Could you not work at other things?' she whispered.
He was silent, looking straight before him into the moonlit shimmer and
white spectral hazes of the valley, his arms still round her.
'No!' he burst out at last; 'not till I have satisfied myself. I feel it
burning within me, like a command from God, to work out the problem, to
make it clearer to myself--and to others,' he added deliberately.
Her heart sank within her. The last words called up before her a dismal
future of controversy and publicity, in which at every step she would be
condemning her husband.
'And all this time, all these years, perhaps,' he went on--before, in
her perplexity, she could find words,--'is my wife never going to let me
speak freely to her? Am I to act, think, judge, without her knowledge?
Is she to know less of me than a friend, less even than the public for
whom I write or speak?'
It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every moment they stood
there together it was being impressed upon him that in fact this was
what she meant, what she had contemplated from the beginning.
'Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,' she cried, again clinging
to him. 'Oh, think for me! You know what I feel; that I dare not risk
what is not mine!'
He kissed her again, and then moved away from her to the window. It
began to be plain to him that his effort was merely futile, and had
better not have been made. But his heart was very sore.
'Do you ever ask yourself,' he said presently, looking steadily into the
night--no, I don't think you can, Catherine--what part the reasoning
faculty, that faculty which marks us out from the animal, was meant to
play in life? Did God give it to us simply that you might trample upon
it and ignore it, both in yourself and me?'
She had dropped into a chair, and sat with clasped hands, her hair
falling about her white dressing-gown, and framing the nobly-featured
face blanched by the moonlight. She did not attempt a reply, but the
melancholy of an invincible resolution, which was, so to speak, not her
own doing, but rather was like a necessity imposed upon her from
outside, breathed through her silence.
He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the gesture
reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in the Murewell
library--the same delicate austere beauty, the same tenderness, the same
underlying reserve. He took her outstretched hands and held them against
his breast. His hotly-beating heart told him that he was perfectly
right, and that to accept the barriers she was setting up would
impoverish all their future life together. But he could not struggle
with the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a practical
trial. Moreover, he felt strangely as he stood there the danger of
rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of the religious temper,
the dread of which had once before risen spectre-like in his heart.
So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the charm, all the
delightfulness, of which under the circumstances she was mistress. They
wandered up the Rhone valley, through the St. Gothard, and spent a
fortnight between Como and Lugano. During these days her one thought was
to revive and refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself to
the various heroic futilities by which she would try--as part of her
nursing mission--to make the future look less empty and their distress
less real. Of course under all this delicate give and take both
suffered; both felt that the promise of their marriage had failed them,