Chapter THE FOURTH: Lonely Hut (2)

"You see," he said, "our lives are nothing--nothing in themselves. I know that; I've never had any doubts of that. We individuals just pick up a mixed lot of things out of the powers that begat us, and lay them down again presently a little altered, that's all--heredities, traditions, the finger nails of my grandfather, a great-aunt's lips, the faith of a sect, the ideas of one's time. We live and then we die, and the threads run, dispersing this way and that. To make other people again. Whatever's immortal isn't that, our looks or our habits, our thoughts or our memories--just the shapes, these are, of one immortal stuff.... One immortal stuff."...

The voice died away as if he was baffled. Then it resumed.

"But we ought to _partake_ of immortality; that's my point. We ought to partake of immortality.

"I mean we're like the little elements in a magnet; ought not to lie higgledy-piggledy, ought to point the same way, bepolarized----Something microcosmic, you know, ought to be found in a man.

"Analogies run away with one. Suppose the bar isn't magnetized yet! Suppose purpose has to come; suppose the immortal stuff isn't yet, isn't being but struggling to be. Struggling to be.... Gods! that morning! When the child was born! And afterwards she was there--with a smile on her lips, and a little flushed and proud--as if nothing had happened so very much out of the way. Nothing so wonderful. And we had another life besides our own!..."

Afterwards he came back to that. "That was a good image," he said, "something trying to exist, which isn't substance, doesn't belong to space or time, something stifled and enclosed, struggling to get through. Just confused birth cries, eyes that hardly see, deaf ears, poor little thrusting hands. A thing altogether blind at first, a twitching and thrusting of protoplasm under the waters, and then the plants creeping up the beaches, the insects and reptiles on the margins of the rivers, beasts with a flicker of light in their eyes answering the sun. And at last, out of the long interplay of desire and fear, an ape, an ape that stared and wondered, and scratched queer pictures on a bone...."

He lapsed into silent thought for a time, and Marjorie glanced at his dim face in the shadows.

"I say nothing of ultimates," he said at last.

He repeated that twice before his thoughts would flow again.

"This is as much as I see, in time as I know it and space as I know it--_something struggling to exist_. It's true to the end of my limits. What can I say beyond that? It struggles to exist, becomes conscious, becomes now conscious of itself. That is where I come in, as a part of it. Above the beast in me is that--the desire to know better, to know--beautifully, and to transmit my knowledge. That's all there is in life for me beyond food and shelter and tidying up. This Being--opening its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend. Every good thing in man is that;--looking and making pictures, listening and making songs, making philosophies and sciences, trying new powers, bridge and engine, spark and gun. At the bottom of my soul, _that_. We began with bone-scratching. We're still--near it. I am just a part of this beginning--mixed with other things. Every book, every art, every religion is that, the attempt to understand and express--mixed with other things. Nothing else matters, nothing whatever. I tell you----Nothing whatever!

"I've always believed that. All my life I've believed that.

"Only I've forgotten."

"Every man with any brains believes that at the bottom of his heart. Only he gets busy and forgets. He goes shooting lynxes and breaks his leg. Odd, instinctive, brutal thing to do--to go tracking down a lynx to kill it! I grant you that, Marjorie. I grant you that."

"Grant me what?" she cried, startled beyond measure to hear herself addressed.

"Grant you that it is rather absurd to go hunting a lynx. And what big paws it has--disproportionately big! I wonder if that's an adaptation to snow. Tremendous paws they are.... But the real thing, I was saying, the real thing is to get knowledge, and express it. All things lead up to that. Civilization, social order, just for that. Except for that, all the life of man, all his affairs, his laws and police, his morals and manners--nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Lynx hunts! Just ways of getting themselves mauled and clawed perhaps--into a state of understanding. Who knows?..."

His voice became low and clear.

"Understanding spreading like a dawn....

"Logic and language, clumsy implements, but rising to our needs, rising to our needs, thought clarified, enriched, reaching out to every man alive--some day--presently--touching every man alive, harmonizing acts and plans, drawing men into gigantic co-operations, tremendous co-operations....

"Until man shall stand upon this earth as upon a footstool and reach out his hand among the stars....

"And then I went into the rubber market, and spent seven years of my life driving shares up and down and into a net!... Queer game indeed! Stupid ass Behrens was--at bottom....

"There's a flaw in it somewhere...."

He came back to that several times before he seemed able to go on from it.

"There _is_ a collective mind," he said, "a growing general consciousness--growing clearer. Something put me away from that, but I know it. My work, my thinking, was a part of it. That's why I was so mad about Behrens."

"Behrens?"

"Of course. He'd got a twist, a wrong twist. It makes me angry now. It will take years, it will eat up some brilliant man to clean up after Behrens----"

"Yes, but the point is"--his voice became acute--"why did I go making money and let Behrens in? Why generally and in all sorts of things does Behrens come in?..."

He was silent for a long time, and then he began to answer himself. "Of course," he said, "I said it--or somebody said it--about this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of life--not the common stuff of life. An exhalation.... It's like the little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet.... The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve Salvation.... Salvation!...

"I wonder, is Salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one man Salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit...."

There came a silence as though some difficulty baffled him, and he was feeling back to get his argument again.

"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposeless triviality, _isn't_ life. Let me get hold of that. That's a point. That's a very important point."

Something had come to him.

"I've never talked of this to Marjorie. I've lived with her nine years and more, and never talked of religion. Not once. That's so queer of us. Any other couple in any other time would have talked religion no end.... People ought to."

Then he stuck out an argumentative hand. "You see, Marjorie _is_ life," he said.

"She took me."

He spoke slowly, as though he traced things carefully. "Before I met her I suppose I wasn't half alive. No! Yet I don't remember I felt particularly incomplete. Women were interesting, of course; they excited me at times, that girl at Yonkers!--H'm. I stuck to my work. It was fine work, I forget half of it now, the half-concealed intimations I mean--queer how one forgets!--but I know I felt my way to wide, deep things. It was like exploring caves--monstrous, limitless caves. Such caves!... Very still--underground. Wonderful and beautiful.... They're lying there now for other men to seek. Other men will find them.... Then _she_ came, as though she was taking possession. The beauty of her, oh! the life and bright eagerness, and the incompatibility! That's the riddle! I've loved her always. When she came to my arms it seemed to me the crown of life. Caves indeed! Old caves! Nothing else seemed to matter. But something did. All sorts of things did. I found that out soon enough. And when that first child was born. That for a time was supreme.... Yes--she's the quintessence of life, the dear greed of her, the appetite, the clever appetite for things. She grabs. She's so damned clever! The light in her eyes! Her quick sure hands!... Only my work was crowded out of my life and ended, and she didn't seem to feel it, she didn't seem to mind it. There was a sort of disregard. Disregard. As though all that didn't really matter...."

"_My dear!_" whispered Marjorie unheeded. She wanted to tell him it mattered now, mattered supremely, but she knew he had no ears for her.

His voice flattened. "It's perplexing," he said. "The two different things."

Then suddenly he cried out harshly: "I ought never to have married her--never, never! I had my task. I gave myself to her. Oh! the high immensities, the great and terrible things open to the mind of man! And we breed children and live in littered houses and play with our food and chatter, chatter, chatter. Oh, the chatter of my life! The folly! The women with their clothes. I can hear them rustle now, whiff the scent of it! The scandals--as though the things they did with themselves and each other mattered a rap; the little sham impromptu clever things, the trying to keep young--and underneath it all that continual cheating, cheating, cheating, damning struggle for money!...

"Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie! Why is she so good and no better! Why wasn't she worth it altogether?...

"No! I don't want to go on with it any more--ever. I want to go back.

"I want my life over again, and to go back.

"I want research, and the spirit of research that has died in me, and that still, silent room of mine again, that room, as quiet as a cell, and the toil that led to light. Oh! the coming of that light, the uprush of discovery, the solemn joy as the generalization rises like a sun upon the facts--floods them with a common meaning. That is what I want. That is what I have always wanted....

"Give me my time oh God! again; I am sick of this life I have chosen. I am sick of it! This--busy death! Give me my time again.... Why did you make me, and then waste me like this? Why are we made for folly upon folly? Folly! and brains made to scale high heaven, smeared into the dust! Into the dust, into the dust. Dust!..."

He passed into weak, wandering repetitions of disconnected sentences, that died into whispers and silence, and Marjorie watched him and listened to him, and waited with a noiseless dexterity upon his every need.

Sec. 11

One day, she did not know what day, for she had lost count of the days, Marjorie set the kettle to boil and opened the door of the hut to look out, and the snow was ablaze with diamonds, and the air was sweet and still. It occurred to her that it would be well to take Trafford out into that brief brightness. She looked at him and found his eyes upon the sunlight quiet and rather wondering eyes.

"Would you like to get out into that?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes," he said, and seemed disposed to get up.

"You've got a broken leg," she cried, to arrest his movement, and he looked at her and answered: "Of course--I forgot."

She was all atremble that he should recognize her and speak to her. She pulled her rude old sledge alongside his bunk, and kissed him, and showed him how to shift and drop himself upon the plank. She took him in her arms and lowered him. He helped weakly but understandingly, and she wrapped him up warmly on the planks and lugged him out and built up a big fire at his feet, wondering, but as yet too fearful to rejoice, at the change that had come to him.

He said no more, but his eyes watched her move about with a kind of tired curiosity. He smiled for a time at the sun, and shut his eyes, and still faintly smiling, lay still. She had a curious fear that if she tried to talk to him this new lucidity would vanish again. She went about the business of the morning, glancing at him ever and again, until suddenly the calm of his upturned face smote her, and she ran to him and crouched down to him between hope and a terrible fear, and found that he was sleeping, and breathing very lightly, sleeping with the deep unconsciousness of a child....

When he awakened the sun was red in the west. His eyes met hers, and he seemed a little puzzled.

"I've been sleeping, Madge?" he said.

She nodded.

"And dreaming? I've a vague sort of memory of preaching and preaching in a kind of black, empty place, where there wasn't anything.... A fury of exposition ... a kind of argument.... I say!--Is there such a thing in the world as a new-laid egg--and some bread-and-butter?"

He seemed to reflect. "Of course," he said, "I broke my leg. Gollys! I thought that beast was going to claw my eyes out. Lucky, Madge, it didn't get my eyes. It was just a chance it didn't."

He stared at her.

"I say," he said, "you've had a pretty rough time! How long has this been going on?"

He amazed her by rising himself on his elbow and sitting up.

"Your leg!" she cried.

He put his hand down and felt it. "Pretty stiff," he said. "You get me some food--there _were_ some eggs, Madge, frozen new-laid, anyhow--and then we'll take these splints off and feel about a bit. Eh! why not? How did you get me out of that scrape, Madge? I thought I'd got to be froze as safe as eggs. (Those eggs ought to be all right, you know. If you put them on in a saucepan and wait until they boil.) I've a sort of muddled impression.... By Jove, Madge, you've had a time! I say you _have_ had a time!"

His eyes, full of a warmth of kindliness she had not seen for long weeks, scrutinized her face. "I say!" he repeated, very softly.

All her strength went from her at his tenderness. "Oh, my dear," she wailed, kneeling at his side, "my dear, dear!" and still regardful of his leg, she yet contrived to get herself weeping into his coveted arms.

He regarded her, he held her, he patted her back! The infinite luxury to her! He'd come back. He'd come back to her.

"How long has it been?" he asked. "Poor dear! Poor dear! How long can it have been?"

Sec. 12

From that hour Trafford mended. He remained clear-minded, helpful, sustaining. His face healed daily. Marjorie had had to cut away great fragments of gangrenous frozen flesh, and he was clearly destined to have a huge scar over forehead and cheek, but in that pure, clear air, once the healing had begun it progressed swiftly. His leg had set, a little shorter than its fellow and with a lump in the middle of the shin, but it promised to be a good serviceable leg none the less. They examined it by the light of the stove with their heads together, and discussed when it would be wise to try it. How do doctors tell when a man may stand on his broken leg? She had a vague impression you must wait six weeks, but she could not remember why she fixed upon that time.

"It seems a decent interval," said Trafford. "We'll try it."

She had contrived a crutch for him against that momentous experiment, and he sat up in his bunk, pillowed up by a sack and her rugs, and whittled it smooth, and padded the fork with the skin of that slaughtered wolverine, poor victim of hunger!--while she knelt by the stove feeding it with logs, and gave him an account of their position.

"We're somewhere in the middle of December," she said, "somewhere between the twelfth and the fourteenth,--yes! I'm as out as that!--and I've handled the stores pretty freely. So did that little beast until I got him." She nodded at the skin in his hand. "I don't see myself shooting much now, and so far I've not been able to break the ice to fish. It's too much for me. Even if it isn't too late to fish. This book we've got describes barks and mosses, and that will help, but if we stick here until the birds and things come, we're going to be precious short. We may have to last right into July. I've plans--but it may come to that. We ought to ration all the regular stuff, and trust to luck for a feast. The rations!--I don't know what they'll come to."

"Right O," said Trafford admiring her capable gravity. "Let's ration."

"Marjorie," he asked abruptly, "are you sorry we came?"

Her answer came unhesitatingly. "_No!_"

"Nor I."

He paused. "I've found you out," he said. "Dear dirty living thing!... You _are_ dirty, you know."

"I've found myself," she answered, thinking. "I feel as if I've never loved you until this hut. I suppose I have in my way----"

"Lugano," he suggested. "Don't let's forget good things, Marjorie. Oh! And endless times!"

"Oh, of course! As for _that_----! But now--now you're in my bones. We were just two shallow, pretty, young things--loving. It was sweet, dear--sweet as youth--but not this. Unkempt and weary--then one understands love. I suppose I _am_ dirty. Think of it! I've lugged you through the snow till my shoulders chafed and bled. I cried with pain, and kept on lugging----Oh, my dear! my dear!" He kissed her hair. "I've held you in my arms to keep you from freezing. (I'd have frozen myself first.) We've got to starve together perhaps before the end.... Dear, if I could make you, you should eat me.... I'm--I'm beginning to understand. I've had a light. I've begun to understand. I've begun to see what life has been for you, and how I've wasted--wasted."

"_We've_ wasted!"

"No," she said, "it was I."

She sat back on the floor and regarded him. "You don't remember things you said--when you were delirious?"

"No," he answered. "What did I say?"

"Nothing?"

"Nothing clearly. What did I say?"

"It doesn't matter. No, indeed. Only you made me understand. You'd never have told me. You've always been a little weak with me there. But it's plain to me why we didn't keep our happiness, why we were estranged. If we go back alive, we go back--all that settled for good and all."

"What?"

"That discord. My dear, I've been a fool, selfish, ill-trained and greedy. We've both been floundering about, but I've been the mischief of it. Yes, I've been the trouble. Oh, it's had to be so. What are we women--half savages, half pets, unemployed things of greed and desire--and suddenly we want all the rights and respect of souls! I've had your life in my hands from the moment we met together. If I had known.... It isn't that we can make you or guide you--I'm not pretending to be an inspiration--but--but we can release you. We needn't press upon you; we can save you from the instincts and passions that try to waste you altogether on us.... Yes, I'm beginning to understand. Oh, my child, my husband, my man! You talked of your wasted life!... I've been thinking--since first we left the Mersey. I've begun to see what it is to be a woman. For the first time in my life. We're the responsible sex. And we've forgotten it. We think we've done a wonder if we've borne men into the world and smiled a little, but indeed we've got to bear them all our lives.... A woman has to be steadier than a man and more self-sacrificing than a man, because when she plunges she does more harm than a man.... And what does she achieve if she does plunge? Nothing--nothing worth counting. Dresses and carpets and hangings and pretty arrangements, excitements and satisfactions and competition and more excitements. We can't _do_ things. We don't bring things off! And you, you Monster! you Dream! you want to stick your hand out of all that is and make something that isn't, begin to be! That's the man----"

"Dear old Madge!" he said, "there's all sorts of women and all sorts of men."

"Well, our sort of women, then, and our sort of men."

"I doubt even that."

"I don't. I've found my place. I've been making my master my servant. We women--we've been looting all the good things in the world, and helping nothing. You've carried me on your back until you are loathing life. I've been making you fetch and carry for me, love me, dress me, keep me and my children, minister to my vanities and greeds.... No; let me go on. I'm so penitent, my dear, so penitent I want to kneel down here and marry you all over again, heal up your broken life and begin again."...

She paused.

"One doesn't begin again," she said. "But I want to take a new turn. Dear, you're still only a young man; we've thirty or forty years before us--forty years perhaps or more.... What shall we do with our years? We've loved, we've got children. What remains? Here we can plan it out, work it out, day after day. What shall we do with our lives and life? Tell me, make me your partner; it's you who know, what are we doing with life?"

Sec. 13

What are we doing with life?

That question overtakes a reluctant and fugitive humanity. The Traffords were but two of a great scattered host of people, who, obeying all the urgencies of need and desire, struggling, loving, begetting, enjoying, do nevertheless find themselves at last unsatisfied. They have lived the round of experience, achieved all that living creatures have sought since the beginning of the world--security and gratification and offspring--and they find themselves still strong, unsatiated, with power in their hands and years before them, empty of purpose. What are they to do?

The world presents such a spectacle of evasion as it has never seen before. Never was there such a boiling over and waste of vital energy. The Sphinx of our opportunity calls for the uttermost powers of heart and brain to read its riddle--the new, astonishing riddle of excessive power. A few give themselves to those honourable adventures that extend the range of man, they explore untravelled countries, climb remote mountains, conduct researches, risk life and limb in the fantastic experiments of flight, and a monstrous outpouring of labour and material goes on in the strenuous preparation for needless and improbable wars. The rest divert themselves with the dwarfish satisfactions of recognized vice, the meagre routine of pleasure, or still more timidly with sport and games--those new unscheduled perversions of the soul.

We are afraid of our new selves. The dawn of human opportunity appals us. Few of us dare look upon this strange light of freedom and limitless resources that breaks upon our world.

"Think," said Trafford, "while we sit here in this dark hut--think of the surplus life that wastes itself in the world for sheer lack of direction. Away there in England--I suppose that is westward"--he pointed--"there are thousands of men going out to-day to shoot. Think of the beautifully made guns, the perfected ammunition, the excellent clothes, the army of beaters, the carefully preserved woodland, the admirable science of it--all for that idiot massacre of half-tame birds! Just because man once had need to be a hunter! Think of the others again--golfing. Think of the big, elaborate houses from which they come, the furnishings, the service. And the women--dressing! Perpetually dressing. _You_, Marjorie--you've done nothing but dress since we married. No, let me abuse you, dear! It's insane, you know! You dress your minds a little to talk amusingly, you spread your minds out to backgrounds, to households, picturesque and delightful gardens, nurseries. Those nurseries! Think of our tremendously cherished and educated children! And when they grow up, what have we got for them? A feast of futility...."

Sec. 14

On the evening of the day when Trafford first tried to stand upon his leg, they talked far into the night. It had been a great and eventful day for them, full of laughter and exultation. He had been at first ridiculously afraid; he had clung to her almost childishly, and she had held him about the body with his weight on her strong right arm and his right arm in her left hand, concealing her own dread of a collapse under a mask of taunting courage. The crutch had proved admirable. "It's my silly knees!" Trafford kept on saying. "The leg's all right, but I get put out by my silly knees."

They made the day a feast, a dinner of two whole day's rations and a special soup instead of supper. "The birds will come," they explained to each other, "ducks and geese, long before May. May, you know, is the latest."

Marjorie confessed the habit of sharing his pipe was growing on her. "What shall we do in Tyburnia!" she said, and left it to the imagination.

"If ever we get back there," he said.

"I don't much fancy kicking a skirt before my shins again--and I'll be a black, coarse woman down to my neck at dinner for years to come!..."

Then, as he lay back in his bunk and she crammed the stove with fresh boughs and twigs of balsam that filled the little space about them with warmth and with a faint, sweet smell of burning and with flitting red reflections, he took up a talk about religion they had begun some days before.

"You see," he said, "I've always believed in Salvation. I suppose a man's shy of saying so--even to his wife. But I've always believed more or less distinctly that there was something up to which a life worked--always. It's been rather vague, I'll admit. I don't think I've ever believed in individual salvation. You see, I feel these are deep things, and the deeper one gets the less individual one becomes. That's why one thinks of those things in darkness and loneliness--and finds them hard to tell. One has an individual voice, or an individual birthmark, or an individualized old hat, but the soul--the soul's different.... It isn't me talking to you when it comes to that.... This question of what we are doing with life isn't a question to begin with for you and me as ourselves, but for you and me as mankind. Am I spinning it too fine, Madge?"

"No," she said, intent; "go on."

"You see, when we talk rations here, Marjorie, it's ourselves, but when we talk religion--it's mankind. You've either got to be Everyman in religion or leave it alone. That's my idea. It's no more presumptuous to think for the race than it is for a beggar to pray--though that means going right up to God and talking to Him. Salvation's a collective thing and a mystical thing--or there isn't any. Fancy the Almighty and me sitting up and keeping Eternity together! God and R. A. G. Trafford, F.R.S.--that's silly. Fancy a man in number seven boots, and a tailor-made suit in the nineteen-fourteen fashion, sitting before God! That's caricature. But God and Man! That's sense, Marjorie."...

He stopped and stared at her.

Marjorie sat red-lit, regarding him. "Queer things you say!" she said. "So much of this I've never thought out. I wonder why I've never done so.... Too busy with many things, I suppose. But go on and tell me more of these secrets you've kept from me!"

"Well, we've got to talk of these things as mankind--or just leave them alone, and shoot pheasants."...

"If I could shoot a pheasant now!" whispered Marjorie, involuntarily.

"And where do we stand? What do we need--I mean the whole race of us--kings and beggars together? You know, Marjorie, it's this,--it's Understanding. That's what mankind has got to, the realization that it doesn't understand, that it can't express, that it's purblind. We haven't got eyes for those greater things, but we've got the promise--the intimation of eyes. We've come out of an unsuspecting darkness, brute animal darkness, not into sight, that's been the mistake, but into a feeling of illumination, into a feeling of light shining through our opacity....

"I feel that man has now before all things to know. That's his supreme duty, to feel, realize, see, understand, express himself to the utmost limits of his power."

He sat up, speaking very earnestly to her, and in that flickering light she realized for the first time how thin he had become, how bright and hollow his eyes, his hair was long over his eyes, and a rough beard flowed down to his chest. "All the religions," he said, "all the philosophies, have pretended to achieve too much. We've no language yet for religious truth or metaphysical truth; we've no basis yet broad enough and strong enough on which to build. Religion and philosophy have been impudent and quackish--quackish! They've been like the doctors, who have always pretended they could cure since the beginning of things, cure everything, and to this day even they haven't got more than the beginnings of knowledge on which to base a cure. They've lacked humility, they've lacked the honour to say they didn't know; the priests took things of wood and stone, the philosophers took little odd arrangements of poor battered words, metaphors, analogies, abstractions, and said: "That's it! Think of their silly old Absolute,--ab-solutus, an untied parcel. I heard Haldane at the Aristotelian once, go on for an hour--no! it was longer than an hour--as glib and slick as a well-oiled sausage-machine, about the different sorts of Absolute, and not a soul of us laughed out at him! The vanity of such profundities! They've no faith, faith in patience, faith to wait for the coming of God. And since we don't know God, since we don't know His will with us, isn't it plain that all our lives should be a search for Him and it? Can anything else matter,--after we are free from necessity? That is the work now that is before all mankind, to attempt understanding--by the perpetual finding of thought and the means of expression, by perpetual extension and refinement of science, by the research that every artist makes for beauty and significance in his art, by the perpetual testing and destruction and rebirth under criticism of all these things, and by a perpetual extension of this intensifying wisdom to more minds and more minds and more, till all men share in it, and share in the making of it.... There you have my creed, Marjorie; there you have the very marrow of me."...

He became silent.

"Will you go back to your work?" she said, abruptly. "Go back to your laboratory?"

He stared at her for a moment without speaking. "Never," he said at last.

"But," she said, and the word dropped from her like a stone that falls down a well....

"My dear," he said, at last, "I've thought of that. But since I left that dear, dusty little laboratory, and all those exquisite subtle things--I've lived. I've left that man seven long years behind me. Some other man must go on--I think some younger man--with the riddles I found to work on then. I've grown--into something different. It isn't how atoms swing with one another, or why they build themselves up so and not so, that matters any more to me. I've got you and all the world in which we live, and a new set of riddles filling my mind, how thought swings about thought, how one man attracts his fellows, how the waves of motive and conviction sweep through a crowd and all the little drifting crystallizations of spirit with spirit and all the repulsions and eddies and difficulties, that one can catch in that turbulent confusion. I want to do a new sort of work now altogether.... Life has swamped me once, but I don't think it will get me under again;--I want to study men."

He paused and she waited, with a face aglow.

"I want to go back to watch and think--and I suppose write. I believe I shall write criticism. But everything that matters is criticism!... I want to get into contact with the men who are thinking. I don't mean to meet them necessarily, but to get into the souls of their books. Every writer who has anything to say, every artist who matters, is the stronger for every man or woman who responds to him. That's the great work--the Reality. I want to become a part of this stuttering attempt to express, I want at least to resonate, even if I do not help.... And you with me, Marjorie--you with me! Everything I write I want you to see and think about. I want you to read as I read.... Now after so long, now that, now that we've begun to talk, you know, talk again----"

Something stopped his voice. Something choked them both into silence. He held out a lean hand, and she shuffled on her knees to take it....

"Don't please make me," she stumbled through her thoughts, "one of those little parasitic, parroting wives--don't pretend too much about me--because you want me with you----. Don't forget a woman isn't a man."

"Old Madge," he said, "you and I have got to march together. Didn't I love you from the first, from that time when I was a boy examiner and you were a candidate girl--because your mind was clear?"

"And we will go back," she whispered, "with a work----"

"With a purpose," he said.

She disengaged herself from his arm, and sat close to him upon the floor. "I think I can see what you will do," she said. She mused. "For the first time I begin to see things as they may be for us. I begin to see a life ahead. For the very first time."

Queer ideas came drifting into her head. Suddenly she cried out sharply in that high note he loved. "Good heavens!" she said. "The absurdity! The infinite absurdity!"

"But what?"

"I might have married Will Magnet----. That's all."

She sprang to her feet. There came a sound of wind outside, a shifting of snow on the roof, and the door creaked. "Half-past eleven," she exclaimed looking at the watch that hung in the light of the stove door. "I don't want to sleep yet; do you? I'm going to brew some tea--make a convivial drink. And then we will go on talking. It's so good talking to you. So good!... I've an idea! Don't you think on this special day, it might run to a biscuit?" Her face was keenly anxious. He nodded. "One biscuit each," she said, trying to rob her voice of any note of criminality. "Just one, you know, won't matter."

She hovered for some moments close to the stove before she went into the arctic corner that contained the tin of tea. "If we can really live like that!" she said. "When we are home again."

"Why not?" he answered.

She made no answer, but went across for the tea....

He turned his head at the sound of the biscuit tin and watched her put out the precious discs.

"I shall have another pipe," he proclaimed, with an agreeable note of excess. "Thank heaven for unstinted tobacco...."

And now Marjorie's mind was teaming with thoughts of this new conception of a life lived for understanding. As she went about the preparation of the tea, her vividly concrete imagination was active with the realization of the life they would lead on their return. She could not see it otherwise than framed in a tall, fine room, a study, a study in sombre tones, with high, narrow, tall, dignified bookshelves and rich deep green curtains veiling its windows. There should be a fireplace of white marble, very plain and well proportioned, with furnishings of old brass, and a big desk towards the window beautifully lit by electric light, with abundant space for papers to lie. And she wanted some touch of the wilderness about it; a skin perhaps....

The tea was still infusing when she had determined upon an enormous paper-weight of that iridescent Labradorite that had been so astonishing a feature of the Green River Valley. She would have it polished on one side only--the other should be rough to show the felspar in its natural state....

It wasn't that she didn't feel and understand quite fully the intention and significance of all he had said, but that in these symbols of texture and equipment her mind quite naturally clothed itself. And while this room was coming into anticipatory being in her mind, she was making the tea very deftly and listening to Trafford's every word.

Sec. 15

That talk marked an epoch to Marjorie. From that day forth her imagination began to shape a new, ordered and purposeful life for Trafford and herself in London, a life not altogether divorced from their former life, but with a faith sustaining it and aims controlling it. She had always known of the breadth and power of his mind, but now as he talked of what he might do, what interests might converge and give results through him, it seemed she really knew him for the first time. In his former researches, so technical and withdrawn, she had seen little of his mind in action: now he was dealing in his own fashion with things she could clearly understand. There were times when his talk affected her like that joy of light one has in emerging into sunshine from a long and tedious cave. He swept things together, flashed unsuspected correlations upon her intelligence, smashed and scattered absurd yet venerated conventions of thought, made undreamt-of courses of action visible in a flare of luminous necessity. And she could follow him and help him. Just as she had hampered him and crippled him, so now she could release him--she fondled that word. She found a preposterous image in her mind that she hid like a disgraceful secret, that she tried to forget, and yet its stupendous, its dreamlike absurdity had something in it that shaped her delight as nothing else could do; she was, she told herself--hawking with an archangel!...

These were her moods of exaltation. And she was sure she had never loved her man before, that this was indeed her beginning. It was as if she had just found him....

Perhaps, she thought, true lovers keep on finding each other all through their lives.

And he too had discovered her. All the host of Marjories he had known, the shining, delightful, seductive, wilful, perplexing aspects that had so filled her life, gave place altogether for a time to this steady-eyed woman, lean and warm-wrapped with the valiant heart and the frost-roughened skin. What a fine, strong, ruddy thing she was! How glad he was for this wild adventure in the wilderness, if only because it had made him lie among the rocks and think of her and wait for her and despair of her life and God, and at last see her coming back to him, flushed with effort and calling his name to him out of that whirlwind of snow.... And there was at least one old memory mixed up with all these new and overmastering impressions, the memory of her clear unhesitating voice as it had stabbed into his life again long years ago, minute and bright in the telephone: "_It's me, you know. It's Marjorie!_"

Perhaps after all she had not wasted a moment of his life, perhaps every issue between them had been necessary, and it was good altogether to be turned from the study of crystals to the study of men and women....

And now both their minds were Londonward, where all the tides and driftage and currents of human thought still meet and swirl together. They were full of what they would do when they got back. Marjorie sketched that study to him--in general terms and without the paper-weight--and began to shape the world she would have about it. She meant to be his squaw and body-servant first of all, and then--a mother. Children, she said, are none the worse for being kept a little out of focus. And he was rapidly planning out his approach to the new questions to which he was now to devote his life. "One wants something to hold the work together," he said, and projected a book. "One cannot struggle at large for plain statement and copious and free and courageous statement, one needs a positive attack."

He designed a book, which he might write if only for the definition it would give him and with no ultimate publication, which was to be called: "The Limits of Language as a Means of Expression." ... It was to be a pragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of all that scholasticism and logic chopping which still lingers like the _sequelae_ of a disease in our University philosophy. "Those duffers sit in their studies and make a sort of tea of dry old words--and think they're distilling the spirit of wisdom," he said.

He proliferated titles for a time, and settled at last on "From Realism to Reality." He wanted to get at that at once; it fretted him to have to hang in the air, day by day, for want of books to quote and opponents to lance and confute. And he wanted to see pictures, too and plays, read novels he had heard of and never read, in order to verify or correct the ideas that were seething in his mind about the qualities of artistic expression. His thought had come out to a conviction that the line to wider human understandings lies through a huge criticism and cleaning up of the existing methods of formulation, as a preliminary to the wider and freer discussion of those religious and social issues our generation still shrinks from. "It's grotesque," he said, "and utterly true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of generalization." There was not even paper for him to make notes or provisional drafts of the new work. He hobbled about the camp fretting at these deprivations.

"Marjorie," he said, "we've done our job. Why should we wait here on this frosty shelf outside the world? My leg's getting sounder--if it wasn't for that feeling of ice in it. Why shouldn't we make another sledge from the other bunk and start down--"

"To Hammond?"

"Why not?"

"But the way?"

"The valley would guide us. We could do four hours a day before we had to camp. I'm not sure we couldn't try the river. We could drag and carry all our food...."

She looked down the wide stretches of the valley. There was the hill they had christened Marjorie Ridge. At least it was familiar. Every night before nightfall if they started there would be a fresh camping place to seek among the snow-drifts, a great heap of wood to cut to last the night. Suppose his leg gave out--when they were already some days away, so that he could no longer go on or she drag him back to the stores. Plainly there would be nothing for it then but to lie down and die together....

And a sort of weariness had come to her as a consequence of two months of half-starved days, not perhaps a failure so much as a reluctance of spirit.

"Of course," she said, with a new aspect drifting before her mind, "then--we _could_ eat. We _could_ feed up before we started. We could feast almost!"

Sec. 16

"While you were asleep the other night," Trafford began one day as they sat spinning out their mid-day meal, "I was thinking how badly I had expressed myself when I talked to you the other day, and what a queer, thin affair I made of the plans I wanted to carry out. As a matter of fact, they're neither queer nor thin, but they are unreal in comparison with the common things of everyday life, hunger, anger, all the immediate desires. They must be. They only begin when those others are at peace. It's hard to set out these things; they're complicated and subtle, and one cannot simplify without falsehood. I don't want to simplify. The world has gone out of its way time after time through simplifications and short cuts. Save us from epigrams! And when one thinks over what one has said, at a little distance,--one wants to go back to it, and say it all again. I seem to be not so much thinking things out as reviving and developing things I've had growing in my mind ever since we met. It's as though an immense reservoir of thought had filled up in my mind at last and was beginning to trickle over and break down the embankment between us. This conflict that has been going on between our life together and my--my intellectual life; it's only just growing clear in my own mind. Yet it's just as if one turned up a light on something that had always been there....

"It's a most extraordinary thing to think out, Marjorie, that antagonism. Our love has kept us so close together and always our purposes have been--like that." He spread divergent hands. "I've speculated again and again whether there isn't something incurably antagonistic between women (that's _you_ generalized, Marjorie) and men (that's me) directly we pass beyond the conditions of the individualistic struggle. I believe every couple of lovers who've ever married have felt that strain. Yet it's not a difference in kind between us but degree. The big conflict between us has a parallel in a little internal conflict that goes on; there's something of man in every woman and a touch of the feminine in every man. But you're nearer as woman to the immediate personal life of sense and reality than I am as man. It's been so ever since the men went hunting and fighting and the women kept hut, tended the children and gathered roots in the little cultivation close at hand. It's been so perhaps since the female carried and suckled her child and distinguished one male from another. It may be it will always be so. Men were released from that close, continuous touch with physical necessities long before women were. It's only now that women begin to be released. For ages now men have been wandering from field and home and city, over the hills and far away, in search of adventures and fresh ideas and the wells of mystery beyond the edge of the world, but it's only now that the woman comes with them too. Our difference isn't a difference in kind, old Marjorie; it's the difference between the old adventurer and the new feet upon the trail."

"We've got to come," said Marjorie.

"Oh! you've got to come. No good to be pioneers if the race does not follow. The women are the backbone of the race; the men are just the individuals. Into this Labrador and into all the wild and desolate places of thought and desire, if men come you women have to come too--and bring the race with you. Some day."

"A long day, mate of my heart."

"Who knows how long or how far? Aren't you at any rate here, dear woman of mine.... (_Surely you are here_)."

He went off at a tangent. "There's all those words that seem to mean something and then don't seem to mean anything, that keep shifting to and fro from the deepest significance to the shallowest of claptrap, Socialism, Christianity.... You know,--they aren't anything really, as yet; they are something trying to be.... Haven't I said that before, Marjorie?"

She looked round at him. "You said something like that when you were delirious," she answered, after a little pause. "It's one of the ideas that you're struggling with. You go on, old man, and _talk_. We've months--for repetitions."

"Well, I mean that all these things are seeking after a sort of co-operation that's greater than our power even of imaginative realization; that's what I mean. The kingdom of Heaven, the communion of saints, the fellowship of men; these are things like high peaks far out of the common life of every day, shining things that madden certain sorts of men to climb. Certain sorts of us! I'm a religious man, I'm a socialistic man. These calls are more to me than my daily bread. I've got something in me more generalizing than most men. I'm more so than many other men and most other women, I'm more socialistic than you...."

"You know, Marjorie, I've always felt you're a finer individual than me, I've never had a doubt of it. You're more beautiful by far than I, woman for my man. You've a keener appetite for things, a firmer grip on the substance of life. I love to see you do things, love to see you move, love to watch your hands; you've cleverer hands than mine by far.... And yet--I'm a deeper and bigger thing than you. I reach up to something you don't reach up to.... You're in life--and I'm a little out of it, I'm like one of those fish that began to be amphibian, I go out into something where you don't follow--where you hardly begin to follow.

"That's the real perplexity between thousands of men and women....

"It seems to me that the primitive socialism of Christianity and all the stuff of modern socialism that matters is really aiming--almost unconsciously, I admit at times--at one simple end, at the release of the human spirit from the individualistic struggle----

"You used 'release' the other day, Marjorie? Of course, I remember. It's queer how I go on talking after you have understood."

"It was just a flash," said Marjorie. "We have intimations. Neither of us really understands. We're like people climbing a mountain in a mist, that thins out for a moment and shows valleys and cities, and then closes in again, before we can recognize them or make out where we are."

Trafford thought. "When I talk to you, I've always felt I mustn't be too vague. And the very essence of all this is a vague thing, something we shall never come nearer to it in all our lives than to see it as a shadow and a glittering that escapes again into a mist.... And yet it's everything that matters, everything, the only thing that matters truly and for ever through the whole range of life. And we have to serve it with the keenest thought, the utmost patience, inordinate veracity....

"The practical trouble between your sort and my sort, Marjorie, is the trouble between faith and realization. You demand the outcome. Oh! and I hate to turn aside and realize. I've had to do it for seven years. Damnable years! Men of my sort want to understand. We want to understand, and you ask us to make. We want to understand atoms, ions, molecules, refractions. You ask us to make rubber and diamonds. I suppose it's right that incidentally we should make rubber and diamonds. Finally, I warn you, we will make rubber unnecessary and diamonds valueless. And again we want to understand how people react upon one another to produce social consequences, and you ask us to put it at once into a draft bill for the reform of something or other. I suppose life lies between us somewhere, we're the two poles of truth seeking and truth getting; with me alone it would be nothing but a luminous dream, with you nothing but a scramble in which sooner or later all the lamps would be upset.... But it's ever too much of a scramble yet, and ever too little of a dream. All our world over there is full of the confusion and wreckage of premature realizations. There's no real faith in thought and knowledge yet. Old necessity has driven men so hard that they still rush with a wild urgency--though she goads no more. Greed and haste, and if, indeed, we seem to have a moment's breathing space, then the Gawdsaker tramples us under."

"My dear!" cried Marjorie, with a sharp note of amusement. "What _is_ a Gawdsaker?"