The Passionate Friends
told me of her troubles and her secret weaknesses; we bared our spirits
and confessed. Both of us had the same tale of mean and angry and hasty
impulses, both of us could find kindred inconsistencies, both had an
exalted assurance that the other would understand completely and forgive
and love. She talked for the most part, she talked much more than I,
with a sort of wonder at the things that had happened to her, and for
long spaces we did not talk at all nor feel the need of talking, and
what seems very strange to me now, seeing that we had been impassioned
lovers, we never kissed; we never kissed at all; I do not even remember
that I thought of kissing her. We had a shyness between us that kept us
a little apart, and I cannot remember that we ever touched one another
except that for a time she took me and led me by the hand towards a
little place of starry flowers that had drawn her eyes and which she
wished me to see. Already for us two our bodies were dead and gone. We
were shy, shy of any contact, we were a little afraid of one another,
there was a kind of awe between us that we had met again.
And in that strange and beautiful place her fancy that we were dead
together had a fitness that I cannot possibly convey to you. I cannot
give you by any writing the light and the sweet freshness of that high
desolation. You would need to go there. What was lovely in our talk,
being said in that setting, would seem but a rambling discourse were I
to write it down,--as I believe that even now I could write it
down--word for word almost, every thought of it, so fresh does it remain
with me....
My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to
tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two
years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together
there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were
little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....
§ 5
It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the
meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed
slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....
Little we knew to what it was we rowed.
As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly
into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a
little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a
little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it's
done."
"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It's just as if--when I
was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and
despaired altogether,--some power had said, 'Have you forgotten the
friendship I gave you?' ... But we shall have had our time. We've
met,--we've seen one another, we've heard one another. We've hurt no
one...."
"You will go?"
"To-day. Before sunset. Isn't it right that I should go?"
"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.
"No. I dare not."
She did not speak for a long time.
"Of course," she said at last, "you're right. You only said--I would
have said it for you if you had not. You're so right, Stephen.... I
suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should
certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We
should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to
stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn't what we want.
You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In
spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we
hadn't made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could
_make_ you stay....
"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet,
and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love
will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born,
got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....
"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind,
that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan't be tormented by
the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so
sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I've never done
her justice--never. Nor she me. I snatched you from her. I snatched
you....
"Someday we shall be different.... All this putting oneself round
another person like a fence, against everyone else, almost against
everything else; it's so wicked, so fierce.
"It's so possible to be different. Sometimes now, sometimes for long
parts of a day I have no base passions at all--even in this life. To be
like that always! But I can't see clearly how these things can be; one
dreams of them in a kind of luminous mist, and if one looks directly at
them, they vanish again...."
§ 6
And at last we came to the landing, and moored the little boat and
walked up the winding path to the hotel. The dull pain of separation was
already upon us.
I think we had forgotten Miss Summersley Satchel altogether. But she
appeared as we sat down to tea at that same table at which we had
breakfasted, and joined us as a matter of course. Conceivably she found
the two animated friends of the morning had become rather taciturn.
Indeed there came a lapse of silence so portentous that I roused myself
to effort and told her, all over again, as I realized afterwards, the
difficulties that had benighted me upon Titlis. Then Miss Satchel
regaled Mary with some particulars of the various comings and goings of
the hotel. I became anxious to end this tension and went into the inn to
pay my bill and get my knapsack. When I came out Mary stood up.
"I'll come just a little way with you, Stephen," she said, and I could
have fancied the glasses of the companion flashed to hear the surname of
the morning reappear a Christian name in the afternoon....
"Is that woman behind us safe?" I asked, breaking the silence as we went
up the mountain-side.
Mary looked over her shoulder for a contemplative second.
"She's always been--discretion itself."
We thought no more of Miss Satchel.
"This parting," said Mary, "is the worst of the price we have to
pay.... Now it comes to the end there seem a thousand things one hasn't
said...."
And presently she came back to that. "We shan't remember this so much
perhaps. It was there we met, over there in the sunlight--among those
rocks. I suppose--perhaps--we managed to say something...."
As the ascent grew steeper it became clear that if I was to reach the
Melch See Inn by nightfall, our moment for parting had come. And with a
"Well," and a white-lipped smile and a glance at the Argus-eyed hotel,
she held out her hand to me. "I shall live on this, brother Stephen,"
she said, "for years."
"I too," I answered....
It was wonderful to stand and face her there, and see her real and
living with the warm sunlight on her, and her face one glowing
tenderness. We clasped hands; all the warm life of our hands met and
clung and parted.
I went on alone up the winding path,--it zigzags up the mountain-side in
full sight of the hotel for the better part of an hour--climbing
steadily higher and looking back and looking back until she was just a
little strip of white--that halted and seemed to wave to me. I waved
back and found myself weeping. "You fool!" I said to myself, "Go on";
and it was by an effort that I kept on my way instead of running back to
her again. Presently the curvature of the slope came up between us and
hid her altogether, hid the hotel, hid the lakes and the cliffs....
It seemed to me that I could not possibly see her any more. It was as if
I knew that sun had set for ever.
§ 7
I lay at the Melch See Inn that night, and rose betimes and started down
that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. I walked to Sachseln,
caught an early train to Lucerne and went on in the afternoon to Como.
And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up
the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the
accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not
thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the
finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when
the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by
the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was
alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. It seemed to me that
at any moment I could go to her. And the last vestige of any cloud
between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of
distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.
In the afternoon I wrote to Rachel. I had not written to her for three
days, and even now I told her nothing of my meeting with Mary. I had not
written partly because I could not decide whether I should tell her of
that or not; in the end I tried to hide it from her. It seemed a little
thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as
detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.
Three days later I reached Milan, a day before the formal opening of the
Peace Congress. But I found a telegram had come that morning to the
Poste Restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my
mind. It came from Paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:
_"Come back at once to London. Justin has been told of our meeting
and is resolved upon divorce. Will do all in my power to explain
and avert but feel you should know at once."_
There are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear
that for a time it is impossible to believe them. I remember now that as
I read that amazing communication through--at the first reading it was a
little difficult to understand because the Italian operator had guessed
at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me.
That followed sluggishly. I felt as one might feel when one opens some
offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.
"What _nonsense_!" I said, faint-heartedly. I stood for a time at my
bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. But it
stayed, and became more and more real. Suddenly with a start I perceived
it was real. I had to do things forthwith.
I rang the bell and asked for an _Orario_. "I shan't want these rooms. I
have to go back to England," I said. "Yes,--I have had bad news." ...
§ 8
"We've only got to explain," I told myself a hundred times during that
long sleepless journey. The thundering wheels so close beneath my head
echoed: "Explain. Oh yes! Explain! Explain! Explain!"
And something, a voice to which I would not listen, urged: "Suppose
they do not choose to believe what you explain."
When I sat face to face with Maxwell Hartington, my solicitor, in his
ink-splashed, dirty, yellow-grained room with its rows of black tin
boxes, I could no longer ignore that possibility. Maxwell Hartington sat
back in his chair after his fashion, listening to my story, breathing
noisily through his open mouth, perspiring little beads and looking more
out of condition than ever. I never knew a man so wine-sodden and so
sharp-witted.
"That's all very well, Stratton," he said, "between ourselves. Very
unfortunate and all that sort of thing. But it doesn't satisfy Justin
evidently; and we've got to put a different look on it if we can, before
we go before a jury: You see----" He seemed to be considering and
rejecting unpalatable phrases "They won't understand."
"But," I said, "after all--, a mere chance of the same hotel. There must
be more evidence than that."
"You spent the night in adjacent rooms," he said dryly.
"Adjacent rooms!" I cried.