The Passionate Friends
intensification in the morning light. "The rule of the game," said I,
"is that one stops and waits for daylight. I wonder if anyone keeps that
rule."
We talked for a time of mountains, I still standing a little aloof until
my coffee came. Miss Summersley Satchel produced that frequent and most
unpleasant bye-product of a British education, an intelligent interest
in etymology. "I wonder," she said, with a brow of ruffled omniscience
and eyeing me rather severely with a magnified eye, "why it is _called_
Titlis. There must be _some_ reason...."
Presently Miss Satchel was dismissed indoors on a transparent excuse and
Mary and I were alone together. We eyed one another gravely. Perhaps all
the more gravely because of the wild excitement that was quickening our
pulse and breathing, and thrilling through our nerves. She pushed back
the plate before her and put her dear elbows on the table and dropped
her chin between her hands in an attitude that seemed all made of little
memories.
"I suppose," she said, "something of this kind was bound to happen."
She turned her eyes to the mountains shining in the morning light. "I'm
glad it has happened in a beautiful place. It might have
been--anywhere."
"Last night," I said, "I was thinking of you and wanting to hear your
voice again. I thought I did."
"I too. I wonder--if we had some dim perception...."
She scanned my face. "Stephen, you're not much changed. You're looking
well.... But your eyes--they're dog-tired eyes. Have you been working
too hard?"
"A conference--what did you call them once?--a Carnegieish conference in
London. Hot weather and fussing work and endless hours of weak grey
dusty speeches, and perhaps that clamber over there yesterday was too
much. It _was_ too much. In India I damaged a leg.... I had meant to
rest here for a day."
"Well,--rest here."
"With you!"
"Why not? Now you are here."
"But---- After all, we've promised."
"It's none of our planning, Stephen."
"It seems to me I ought to go right on--so soon as breakfast is over."
She weighed that with just the same still pause, the same quiet moment
of lips and eyes that I recalled so well. It was as things had always
been between us that she should make her decision first and bring me to
it.
"It isn't natural," she decided, "with the sun rising and the day still
freshly beginning that you should go or that I should go. I've wanted to
meet you like this and talk about things,--ten thousand times. And as
for me Stephen I _won't_ go. And I won't let you go if I can help it.
Not this morning, anyhow. No. Go later in the day if you will, and let
us two take this one talk that God Himself has given us. We've not
planned it. It's His doing, not ours."
I sat, yielding. "I am not so sure of God's participation," I said. "But
I know I am very tired, and glad to be with you. I can't tell you how
glad. So glad---- I think I should weep if I tried to say it...."
"Three, four, five hours perhaps--even if people know. Is it so much
worse than thirty minutes? We've broken the rules already; we've been
flung together; it's not our doing, Stephen. A little while longer--adds
so little to the offence and means to us----"
"Yes," I said, "but--if Justin knows?"
"He won't."
"Your companion?"
There was the briefest moment of reflection. "She's discretion itself,"
she said.
"Still----"
"If he's going to know the harm is done. We may as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb. And he won't know. No one will know."
"The people here."
"Nobody's here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name....
No one ever talks to me."
I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced,
but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....
"You take the good things God sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and
talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We've tired of
letters. You stay and talk to me.
"Here we are, Stephen, and it's the one chance that is ever likely to
come to us in all our lives. We'll keep the point of honor; and you
shall go to-day. But don't let's drive the point of honor into the
quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has
happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you
to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and
this sunlight!..."
I looked up to see her with her elbows on the table and her hands
clasped under her chin; that face close to mine, her dear blue eyes
watching me and her lips a little apart.
No other human being has ever had that effect upon me, so that I seem to
feel the life and stir in that other body more than I feel my own.
§ 3
From the moment when I confessed my decision to stay we gave no further
thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours
together. We thought only of those hours. Things lent themselves to us.
We stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a
stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel
on the Engstlen See. We would take food with us as we decided and row
out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of
earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. And I remember
now how Mary stood and called to Miss Satchel's window to tell her of
this intention, and how I discovered again that exquisite slender grace
I knew so well.
You know the very rowing out from the shore had in it something sweet
and incredible. It was as if we were but dreaming together and might at
any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. I
rowed slowly with those clumsy Swiss oars that one must thrust forward,
breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking
forward, saying very little and with much the same sense I think of
enchantment and unreality. And I saw now for the first time as I watched
her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, I
thought, stronger than the Mary I had known.
Even now I can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. And yet I
remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day's impressions
with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. Perhaps it is that very
luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common
experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that
are ordinarily real.
We rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end
of the water. We had not realized at first that we could row beyond the
range of the hotel windows. The rock that comes out of the lake is a
clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is
wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen
to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. It splinters
vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a
quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become
more rude and massive and begin to overhang. Under the cliffs the water
is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts.
This place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of
the ice, all the rocks immediately about us were ice-worn, and the place
was paved with ice-worn boulders. Two huge bluffs put their foreheads
together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the
near presence of ice in the air. Out between them boiled a little
torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst
the great pebbles. And those pebbles were covered by a network of
marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and
blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a
peculiar gentleness and richness to the Alpine severity that had dwarfed
and tangled them. It was astounding that any plant could find
nourishment among those stones. The great headland, with patches of
yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper masses,
had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it
altogether. There was nothing to remind us of the world that had
separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the
stones at the limpid water's edge.
"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a
voice to my thought.
She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away,
and we looked at one another. "It's still unreal," she said.
I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused
to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.
"You are so _you_," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing--and so
strange too, so far off, that I feel--shy....
"I'm shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will
vanish...."
I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the
whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"
"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is!
Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The
little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save
us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to
ordinary sensible affairs.... This _beauty_....
"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked
about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of
what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy
and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to
know that it is so, that this life--no, not _this_ life, but that life,
is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I think death--just dead
death--after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You
don't want--particularly? I want to passionately. I _want_ to live
again--out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be
free--as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free--an
exquisite clean freedom....
"I can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for
us--or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the
ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do--because they
aren't--_us_.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what
were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such
things. And all the mad fury of sex, Stephen!... We don't live, we
suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and snatch; it isn't
_us_, Stephen, really. It can't be us. It's all so excessive--if it is
anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that
will go on--go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this
perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and
love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It's so incredible that
you and I must part to-day. It's as if--someone told me the sun was a
little mad. It's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."
Her voice sank. She leant a little forward towards me. "Stephen, suppose
that you and I were dead to-day. Suppose that when you imagined you were
climbing yesterday, you died. Suppose that yesterday you died and that
you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me.
Perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and I am lying dead in my
room in this hotel, and this is the Great Beginning....
"Stephen, I am talking nonsense because I am so happy to be with you
here...."
§ 4
For a time we said very little. Then irregularly, disconnectedly, we
began to tell each other things about ourselves.
The substance of our lives seemed strangely objective that day; we had
as it were come to one another clean out of our common conditions. She