Chapter VIII

Anthony knew that Daphne and Jim disapproved of his intimacy with Kitty. They never interfered with him and they never let their disapproval out in words, but it was as solid as a mahogany table. They used the silent pressure of sensible and kindly people who expect common sense to triumph in the end if nothing is done to rouse bad blood by argument. They didn’t invite Kitty to the house, and they never asked Anthony where he had been.

On one occasion Jim, at Daphne’s instigation, went a shade further: he made a statement about Kitty that was not in her favor.

“It’s no use my saying anything,” Daphne privately urged him. “You see, men like Anthony believe what other men tell them about women, when they won’t believe what other women tell them. If I say anything about Kitty, Anthony’ll think it’s because I’m fond of him or vexed with Kitty or recently married; but he’ll think you _know_. Put it in your own words, of course; it’ll be worse if he thinks I’m behind you.”

Jim cleared his throat. He had not even told Daphne what he thought about Kitty in his own words. Men’s thoughts about Kitty eluded words. They did not think about her; they felt her. But Jim realized quite as strongly as Daphne that it would be a good thing to pull Anthony up.

“The trouble is,” he explained a little uncertainly, “that you never know about a girl—whether you’re pulling a man up or setting him on by letting fly at her.”

“Oh, don’t let fly at her!” cried Daphne, suddenly remorseful. “Poor little Kitty! Just say what she _is_, you know.”

Jim grunted. As if he could say what Kitty was without letting fly at her! He was not yet accustomed to the way in which Daphne slipped between the meshes of fact.

Jim chose the occasion when he was walking to the post with Anthony and Kitty whirled by them in a cloud of dust. He stopped to choke, and turned to look after her.

“There,” he remarked, with unmistakable emphasis, “goes a piece of pretty hot stuff.”

He couldn’t have put it more plainly. Anthony’s face set hard; he made no answer.

His mind set hard, too. He wasn’t going to accept any one else’s estimate of Kitty. He had got into the habit of living against current opinion when he was a prisoner, and he knew its value. You just said to your mind, “It is a lie,” and forced your will to accept it.

You said it in the face of newspapers, guards, commandants, and the swift inroads of rumor, and it enabled you to live equably and indifferently among the broken pieces of your fears.

Anthony was in love for the first time in his life, and every one wished him to believe that the object of his love was worthless. Daphne and Jim, with their serene and prosperous happiness, wished him to believe it; a peculiarly stupid and suburban neighborhood offered him their cold shoulders as a proof; and Kitty herself made intermittent efforts to convince him of the same fact.

Anthony was convinced of nothing beyond the sense of Kitty’s presence. She was everywhere, whether she was worthless or not. When he wasn’t with her, he saw her, and heard through whatever else he was listening to, the sound of Kitty’s voice.

He had no terms for what he felt for Kitty. She was part of the spring. The little dawn wind spoke of her; when he looked out of his window into the apple-blossoms, it was to see her face. He heard her hurrying voice in the thrushes’ songs; a group of silver birches at the garden’s edge were counterparts of Kitty.

Kitty wasn’t very tall, and though she was slender, her figure had not the dignity of a silver birch. Her small, provocative face was artificially whitened and not the least like the apple-blossom; her voice was never for long as innocent of innuendo as a thrush’s; and for all these divergencies from his dreams Anthony had for Kitty a fiercer tenderness. She was no longer a single “experience,” however interesting. She had become for Anthony the medium of the spirit of life.

Anthony had never been in love before, and he was unaware that love concentrates the forces of the soul into one channel, and then, transcending concentration, breaks its expression over all the world. He only knew that there were a dozen different Kittys and that he loved them all.

He loved the wicked Kitty, who played on him as if he were an instrument; the gay, nonchalant, flirtatious Kitty, who never let him feel unaware of a secret relationship between them, which might mean anything forever, and the next moment be as finished as a blown candle. He loved the child Kitty, who asked him what the Elizabethans were, with a secret hope that they might turn out to be negro minstrels. She loved people with banjos.

Perhaps Anthony cared for this ignorant child Kitty most of all; he felt he could hardly bear to have her out of his sight. And he loved his dear, confiding comrade Kitty, who told him what he ought to do when he couldn’t sleep, and poured out to him the nuisance money was when you hadn’t got enough. Father always supposed they had more till they found, of course, it was ever so much less. Anthony gathered that father was a great dear, if only people weren’t such sharks. The world, according to Kitty, was divided into sharks and prudes: the sharks (horrid tradespeople who would send in bills when you hadn’t paid them for years and couldn’t be expected to) used up your money, and the prudes prevented you from enjoying what was left.

And there was the cruel Kitty. Anthony put her last in his mind because it hurt him to think of Kitty as cruel. This Kitty was an Ishmaelitish woman whose hand was against every woman, and every woman’s hand against her. Kitty could be very cruel to other women. She left no man alone who belonged to them, she wounded the pride of happy women new to love, and she struck at their trust in their lovers.

She did it deliberately, with hard eyes and malicious laughter. She knew that she could set men alight, and she used her power indiscriminately. She made herself cheap in order to attract attention; but making herself cheap paid. Kitty always secured short successes. Sometimes they were short because Kitty didn’t want to go on with them, but often because, after their first response to her, the men collected themselves and made a successful resistance. But whether they succeeded in resisting her or she succeeded in attracting them, Kitty always laughed. She laughed at the men for being such fools as to yield to her; she laughed at the other women for minding, because, as she pointed out to Anthony, she really wouldn’t have done it if the other women hadn’t minded; and she laughed at herself for not always being able to pull it off.

It was as if she did not care for her own discredit, and this was what hurt Anthony sharpest. One cannot protect people who do not mind discrediting themselves.

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Anthony argued defensively to himself. “She’s only twenty-three. Girls are blind to passion; they’re brought up blind and explosive. It’s a wicked combination, and they’re the first victims of the explosion when it takes place, though they are not the only victims, of course! We’re wretchedly uncivilized, and our worst sign of it is our fear of revealing nature to the young. They’ve got to handle it, and not to warn them is like putting a gun into a child’s hands and not telling him what happens when you pull the trigger.”

Anthony assured himself that Kitty did not know what happened when one pulled the trigger. He let life slip between him and his wits, he forgot Pannell, and he even put aside the preoccupation of his profession. He had some excuse for this, for a surgeon must have steady hands, and his hands were not quite steady yet.

Rochett was doing what it could for Anthony, and spring had set itself into his heart, but his raw nerves were not wholly covered yet. He could not count on his serenity.

Every morning he woke at dawn to listen to the country sounds. The earth stirred at three o’clock in a faint, gray light—a light which was like the mere absence of darkness. All the birds moved in their nests at its approach, and shook out a sleepy protest before they sank into their last short sleep. A wind sprang up suddenly and passed across the fields with a faint shuddering of shaken leaves; sometimes a brief shower fell, a hurrying small shower, leaving behind it the sweetness of the visited earth.

Anthony would lean out of his open window, watching the light come across the sloping fields. The big row of elms at the foot of the apple-orchard moved first; they drove their heavy, grave heads out of the dark, and between them the gray, clear fields tentatively took color.

The apple-orchard beyond the kitchen-garden became for a brief moment an unearthly splendor; the white and pink of its blossoms shone like an alabaster screen. The light deepened and kindled under a colorless sky; pink clouds floated up into it with golden edges; the sunshine came softly without fire. There was no direct moment of transformation before Anthony found the flowers in the garden had their natural colors, the fields their dew-washed green, and all the quiet land its daily covering of tranquil light.

Anthony drank in the sounds of life, the little regular country sounds, with a quickened sense of reassurance and returning energy. The mildness of England sank into his being, not all at once, and not with the blinding ecstasy he had expected, but at last it came. He felt he was at home and free. He slept quietly at night, and when he woke he knew before he remembered that nothing terrible was going to happen. He found himself not able to say which was stronger in him, love of Kitty or love of England. Both consumed and restored him, and at first Kitty helped England to quiet Anthony.

It pleased her to see him happy, to make his restless, haunted eyes turn to laughter, to watch his strained senses relax under her confident gentleness.

He didn’t make love to her. This was odd, of course, but Kitty rather liked it. His eyes showed her that he felt for her the hungry, obedient worship of a good dog. He looked at her with all the gentleness of a first passion before it turns to fire.

Anthony was not a weak person, but when he looked at Kitty his eyes were often as appealing as a child’s.

He tremendously wanted her to be kind to him; and sometimes Kitty was cold and hard and shut him out of her eyes. She wanted him to entertain her, and took the life out of him by showing him that he didn’t. Or she tried to hurt him by saying reckless things. Kitty didn’t have to try very hard in this direction; she knew she could always hurt Anthony by depreciating herself.

It was the way she punished him for his occasional attempts to hold her in. Anthony always wanted to take care of Kitty. In order to take care of her, it was necessary to see as much of her as possible. The really awkward part of this task was the little that is possible in censorious small places like Rochett, when sooner or later people have to be in for meals, and neighbors do not acknowledge the lengthening out of spring evenings as a definite alteration to the clock.

Of course Anthony met Kitty every day, but this wasn’t nearly enough for him. There was all the part of the day when he wasn’t with her, when she might get her feet wet, or break without the immunity of his protection into some danger zone of mischief.

Kitty couldn’t be expected to know the perils of life when Anthony wasn’t there. She hadn’t known them before he came, and she only laughed when he tried to point them out to her and to lay down laws and arrangements for the rest of her time. She either laughed or she grew a little restive; and when she grew restive, Anthony, who knew that nothing in the world could hold her, least of all his heart, quickly withdrew his claims.

He told her that of course he wouldn’t bother her; she must do exactly as she liked, only for his sake to be a little careful. And Kitty laughed still more. It was so absurd of Anthony to suppose for a single moment that she wouldn’t do exactly what she liked whether he told her to or not. But it was nice of him to want her to be careful; it was not what men usually wanted of Kitty.