and which is the real world?”
“When I first saw you,” he began, “I thought you were like a creature who’d lived all its life among pearls and old bones. Your hands were wet, d’you remember, and you never said a word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said, ‘Human Beings!’”
“And I thought you—a prig,” she recollected. “No; that’s not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and I thought you and St. John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”
“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. “You were in love with me all the time, only you didn’t know it.”
“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.
“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”
“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”
She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement.
That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn’t feel a thing why did they go and pretend to? The simplicity and arrogance and hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single spark as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence; being engaged had not that effect on him; the world was different, but not in that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted, and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people more than ever perhaps. He took the letters out of her hand, and protested:
“Of course they’re absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan is; you can’t deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”
But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her own destiny.
“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were a horse.”
“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education—how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their son—he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.
At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them; he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians, bigots,—why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.
“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re essentially feminine.” She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.
“But I like him,” she said, and she thought to herself that she also pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who are outside the warm mysterious globe full of changes and miracles in which we ourselves move about; she thought that it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.
She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she would not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not likely.
As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which she then bestowed upon him, Terence protested:
“And compared with Hirst I’m a perfect Zany.”
The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven.
“We’re wasting the morning—I ought to be writing my book, and you ought to be answering these.”
“We’ve only got twenty-one whole mornings left,” said Rachel. “And my father’ll be here in a day or two.”
However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began to write laboriously,
“My dear Evelyn—”
Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had written, a process which he found essential to the composition of his own. For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel’s pen, as she produced phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she had condemned. She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner, at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that and her sheet of paper. Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even with Terence himself—how far apart they could be, how little she knew what was passing in his brain now! She then finished her sentence, which was awkward and ugly, and stated that they were “both very happy, and going to be married in the autumn probably and hope to live in London, where we hope you will come and see us when we get back.” Choosing “affectionately,” after some further speculation, rather than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly beginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his book:
“Listen to this, Rachel. ‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female.… At first they had been very happy. The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them. Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade.… They had shouted Love inthe Valley to each other across the snowy slopes of the Riffelhorn’ (and so on, and so on—I’ll skip the descriptions).… ‘But in London, after the boy’s birth, all was changed. Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise.…’ (In short she began to give tea-parties.)… ‘Coming in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where the two men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind…he found women’s hats dotted about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall.… Then the bills began to come in.… He tried to speak frankly to her. He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin in their bedroom,