Chapter XVIII

Anthony’s hardly won control snapped like a broken twig; he turned from Kitty, and walked quickly out into the road. His mind was held in the suspension of shock. He neither knew where he was going nor considered what he meant to do. He stumbled as he walked with his head bowed and pushed forward as if he were tied to something he could not get rid of.

There was a desperate urgency in his broken mind, like the urgency of high fever; he knew there was something he mustn’t think about, some dreadful image just beyond his conscious will which was prepared to leap into his mind. Fear ran at his heels. It had neither face nor name, but it pursued him like a shadow along the hot, white road.

Motors overtook and passed him, people watched him from their garden gates, and wondered at his crouched, absorbed figure hurrying past them. He never turned his head through the small, chattering villages or on the open road. Max followed him, foot-sore and perplexed, but one-indeaed as Ruth. He knew that there was something strangely wrong with his master, and he was determined that whatever was wrong or strange, he would share it.

Anthony had lost his self-consciousness; he ceased to be aware of his own significance. Self-control and the governance of his mind dropped away from him like unheeded, unessential things. He was a human being hounded by an obscure emotion that he dared not face. Anthony ran from it, but he was conscious as he ran that he could not escape it. There would be a moment when exhaustion would catch him and force him to give battle, and there was nothing left in him to fight with. His heart was as empty as his mind.

They were passing the entrance to a small orchard that lay fronting an old farm-house when Max felt that they had gone far enough. He whined suddenly and ran in front of Anthony, lifting a dusty paw, and fixing his burning topaz eyes on Anthony’s face. He would go on if Anthony went on, but he had made his protest. Anthony paused uncertainly, looking about him at the unfamiliar road, the distant red-brick farm, and the space of white blooms vivid against the evening light. He turned stumblingly, and sank on the bank under the apple-blossoms. Max crept beside him, pushing his head against his master’s chest.

Dogs have only one way of showing sympathy with human beings; they offer themselves up upon the altar of their master’s pain. Max pushed himself relentlessly into Anthony’s suffering; he would not stay outside and be safe. He would be a part of Anthony’s pain till the pain stopped. Anthony felt the warmth reach his heart and was a little comforted.

A late lark was still singing above the orchard trees, very high and shrill in the clear evening air; the sun lay like a sea of fire across the fields; every separate grass in the hedge stood up alive in it.

There was no curtain left between Anthony and his pain. He saw its face and eyes, and they were the face and eyes of Kitty. She had done an incredible thing incredibly, like some fifth-rate girl in a café. It was not only cruel; it was vulgar. She had said words that drew blood. They disfigured Anthony’s love for her.

He might have stood the fact, but not Kitty’s throwing it between the two men to force on a fight; and for what other reason had she thrown it? She was bored and light, and, like a bad little tune, her words ran on in his mind and tortured him. They did not set him free—spiritually Kitty was dead to him; but Kitty dead was Kitty accessible—the image of her pulled him back like a strong cable.

If this was what she was, why could he not take advantage of it, satisfy the hard hunger that possessed him, and grant himself at least the release of his strained senses?

He told himself this was what love was worth. It was the master miracle and cheat of life. Anthony had been let out of prison and confronted with ecstasy, and ecstasy was a trap. He buried his face in his hands and shut out the lark’s song and the intolerable world.

If he went back, he had nothing to lose. Kitty had destroyed the spiritual part of love. The man who did not take the actual and make the best of it was a fool.

It was better to be like an ordinary man, and pigeon-hole women: one kind—Miss Mellicot, for instance—you marry and respect, and the other you go wild over and spiritually ignore. Anthony had never believed this method fair to women. He had not liked to think that any human being should be treated without respect to his humanity; but perhaps the judgment of the normal world was sound, and there were people—people like Kitty—too light to touch even the honor in others. One did not let them down by treating them at their own valuation because they were too low to be let down.

But one ought to be very sure of this condition. A memory stirred in Anthony of how he had thought the same once of his fellow prisoners: he had condemned them root and branch as fellows who had thrown away their codes and were therefore worthless.

Afterwards his condemnation had worn thin, he had found so many excuses, the black clouds of their follies and their failures had been stripped away like mists, and he had seen through the mists the havoc and struggle of their souls, for even below their code something had struggled in them.

Anthony was not sure of Kitty. He thought of her skimming life like a summer gnat above a pool, a light thing in the light air of her life, without balance or stability; but he could not be certain that she, too, had had no struggle. She had worked and suffered. For two years she had helped to stem the tide of suffering in France when France was the cockpit of the world, and she had shirked nothing.

She did not shirk anything now, Anthony did not deny her pluck, and once he had seen her cry. The memory of Kitty’s tears was a strange comfort to Anthony.

Love rose slowly in his heart and shook him; it would not let him be driven back cheaply to a worthless Kitty, it would not let Kitty be worthless. Love held him to her courage and her tears; it even involved him in her disasters and suggested that if he had been wiser, kinder, less full of the sense of what was due to the rules of his life—he might have served her.

Love did not seem to wish for a freed Anthony.

His mind caught against a new point. Whatever Kitty was like, he needn’t make her worse, he needn’t add humiliation to her. And it would be a new humiliation if he went back to take her on her own terms; for she would know that in doing so he despised her. She would let him despise her because she would think it was only fair, but she would not like it, and because she would not like it, he must not do it. He must let her at least feel that the man who had respected her still respected her enough to leave her alone. He tried to hold himself to this decision, but it took the taste out of his life.

He did not know now what to do. He realized that his body was exhausted and wanted food, but he had no wish to fight this exhaustion. He would have liked to crawl farther into the hedge and become invisible and part of the earth. Max stirring in his arms roused him to his feet. He pushed on heavily, with his face towards London.

The apple-blossoms were spectral in the evening light; the sun fell behind a group of flaming elms; for a long time the sky held a delicate mauve color, fading into darkness.

The endless houses of the suburbs began; they streamed past him with long gaps of ugly, empty fields and half-built roads. He noticed nothing but a sense of closing in and the merciful quieting of night. He did not hurry any more.

Pain had got up to him now and was no longer pursuing him, and pain had a familiar face, there was no surprise in it.

Beauty and joy had been the surprise and fear was the race to escape losing them. Anthony had been overtaken and the race had gone against him; but there was still pain and the mastery of pain.

Anthony had been near enough to happiness to divine that there is no such personal success as the success of joy.

He realized that joy is the chief principle of life, and that without it the Kingdom of Heaven must be entered maimed. Anthony ignored the Kingdom of Heaven because he could not see it; but he could see, in flashes, that he was maimed; and unconsciously he felt that the Kingdom of Heaven was anything that lay beyond the fact of his maiming.

Anthony tried to think about his work, but his mind beat relentlessly against the thought of Kitty.

His life had no value to himself without joy, but he could still serve the community. If the world was hard, it was the more important for those who had tasted the quality of hardness to set themselves towards discovering possible alleviations for others.

The success of the personal life was not the boundary of the human spirit.

Happiness serves life unconsciously and has chosen the better part, but pain is the Martha who must busy herself about many things. Anthony was like a drowning man clinging to a straw. He did not know that he was drowning, but the thought of helping the world against pain was the straw to which he clung.

As the persistent streets closed in upon Anthony a strange feeling of exhilaration stole across his senses. He had a lift of the mind, and was possessed by that false sense of strength which comes on the verge of complete exhaustion.

He told himself that, after all, happiness was the only risk, and that he had survived it.