Chapter III: Part II: I (1)

He had never seen Eppie again, and sixteen years had passed.

It was of this that Gavan was thinking as the Scotch express bore him northward on a dark October night.

A yellow-bound, half-cut volume of French essays lay beside him. He had lighted a cigar and, his feet warmly ensconced on the hot-water tin, his legs enfolded in rugs, the fur collar of his coat turned up about his ears, he leaned back, well fortified against the sharp air that struck in from the half-opened window.

Gavan, at thirty, had oddly maintained all the more obvious characteristics of his boyhood. He was long, pale, emaciated, as he had been at fourteen. His clean-shaved face was the boy’s face, matured, but unchanged in essentials. The broad, steep brow, the clear, aquiline jut of nose and chin, the fineness and strength of the jaw, sculptured now by the light overhead into vehement relief and shadow, were more emphatic, only, than they had been.

At fourteen his face had surprised with its maturity and at thirty it surprised with its quality of wistful boyishness. This was the obvious. The changes were there, but they were subtle, consisting more in a certain hardening of youth’s hesitancy into austerity; as though the fine metal of the countenance had been tempered by time into a fixed, enduring type. His pallor was the scholar’s, but his emaciation the athlete’s; the fragility, now, was a braced and disciplined fragility. No sedentary softness was in him. In his body, as in his face, one felt a delicacy as strong as it was fine. The great change was that hardening to fixity.

To-night, he was feeling the change himself. The journey to Kirklands, after the long gap that lay between it and his farewell, made something of an epoch for his thoughts. He did not find it significant, but the mere sense of comparison was arresting.

The darkness of the October night, speeding by outside, the solitude of the bright railway carriage, London two hours behind and, before, the many hours of his lonely journey,--time and place were like empty goblets, only waiting to be filled with the still wine of memory.

Gavan had not cast aside his book, lighted his cigar, and, leaning back, drawn his rugs about him with the conscious intention of yielding himself to retrospect. On the contrary, he had, at first, pushed aside the thoughts that, softly, persistently, pressed round him. Then the languor, the opportunity of the hour seized him. He allowed himself to drift hither and thither, as first one eddy lapped over him and then another. And finally he abandoned himself to the full current and, once it had him, it carried him far.

It was, at the beginning, as far back as Eppie and childhood that it carried him, to the sunny summer days and to the speechless parting of the rainy autumn morning. And, with all that sense of change, he was surprised to find how very much one thing had held firm. He had never forgotten. He had kept the mute promise of that misty morning. How well he had kept it he hadn’t known until he found the chain of memory hold so firm as he pulled upon it. The promise had been made to himself as well as to her, given in solemn hostage to his own childish fears. Even then what an intuitive dread had been upon him of the impermanence of things. But it wasn’t impermanent after all, that vision.

Dear little Eppie. It was astonishing now to find how well he remembered, how clearly he could see, in looking back,--more clearly than even his acute child’s perception had made evident to him,--what a dear little Eppie she had been. She lived in his memory, and probably nowhere else: in the present Eppie he didn’t fancy that he should find much trace of the child Eppie, and it was sad, in its funny way, to think that he, who had, with all his forebodings, so felt the need of a promise, should so well remember her who, undoubtedly, had long ago forgotten him. He took little interest in the present Eppie. But the child wore perfectly with time.

Dear child Eppie and strange, distant boy, groping toward the present Gavan; unhappy little boy, of deep, inarticulate, passionate affections and of deep hopes and dreads. There they walked, knee-deep in heather; he smelled it, the sun warm upon it, Eppie in her white, Alice-in-Wonderland frock and her “striped” hair. And there went Robbie, plunging through the heather before them.

Robbie. Eppie had been right, then. He had not forgotten him at all. He and Eppie stood at the window looking out at the dawn; the scent of the wet pine-tree was in the air, and their eyes were heavy with weeping. How near they had been. Had any one, in all his life, ever been nearer him than Eppie?

Curious, when he had so well kept the promise never to forget, that the other promise, the promise to return, he had not been able to keep. In making it, he had not imagined, even with his foreboding, what manacles of routine and theory were to be locked upon him for the rest of his boyhood. He had soon learned that protest, pleading, rebellion, were equally vain, and that outward conformity was the preservative of inner freedom. He could not jeopardize the purpose of his life--his mother’s rescue--by a persistence that, in his uncle’s not unkind and not unhumorous eyes, was merely foolish. He was forced to swallow his own longings and to endure, as best he could, his pangs of fear lest Eppie should think him slack, or even faithless. He submitted to the treadmill of a highly organized education, that could spare no time for insignificant summers in Scotland. Every moment in Gavan’s youth was to be made significant by tangible achievement. The distilled knowledge of the past, the intellectual trophies of civilization, were to be his; if he didn’t want them, they, in the finished and effective figure of his uncle, wanted him, and, in the sense of the fulfilment of his uncle’s hopes, they got him.

During those years Gavan wrote to Eppie, tried to make her share with him in all the lonely and rather abstract interests of his life. But he found that the four years of difference, counting for nothing in the actual intercourse of word and look, counted for everything against any reality of intercourse in writing. Translated into that formality, the childish affection became as unlike itself as a pressed flower is unlike a fresh one. Eppie’s letters, punctual and very fond, were far more immature than she herself. These letters gave accounts of animals, walks, lessons, very bald and concise, and of the Grainger cousins and their doings, and then of her new relation, cousin Alicia, whose daughters, children of Eppie’s own age, soon seemed to poor Gavan, in his distant prison, to fill his place. Eppie went away with these cousins to Germany, where they all heard wonderful music, and after that they came to Kirklands for the summer. Altogether, when Gavan’s opportunity came and, with the dignity of seventeen to back his request, he had his uncle’s consent to his spending of a month in Scotland, he felt himself, even as he made it, rather silly in his determination to cling at all costs to something precious but vanishing. Then it was that Eppie had been swept away by the engulfing relative. At the very moment of his own release, she was taken to the Continent for three years of travel and study. The final effort of childhood to hold to its own meaning was frustrated. The letters, after that, soon ceased. Silence ended the first chapter.

Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years. Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase that sounded in every scene--that fear of life, that deep dread of its evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that, together, they had glanced at.

In that first chapter, whose page he had just turned, he had seen himself as a very unhappy boy--unhappy from causes as apparent as a cage about a pining bird. His youth had been weighted with an over-mature understanding of wrong and sorrow. His childish faith in supreme good had shaped itself to a conception of life as a place of probation where oneself and, far worse, those one loved were burned continually in the fiery furnace of inexplicable affliction. One couldn’t say what God might not demand of one in the way of endurance. He had, helpless, seen his fragile, shrinking mother hatefully bullied and abused or more hatefully caressed. He had been parted from her to brood and tremble over her distant fate. Loved things had died; loved things had all, it seemed, been taken from him; the soulless machinery of his uncle’s system had ground and polished at his stiffening heart. No wonder that the boy of that first chapter had been very unhappy. But in the later chapters, to which he had now come, the causes for unhappiness were not so obvious, yet the gloom that overhung them deepened. He saw himself at Eton in the hedged-round world of buoyant youth, standing apart, preoccupied, indifferent. He had been oddly popular there. His selflessness, his gentle candor, his capacity for a highly keyed joy,--strung, though it was, over an incapacity for peace,--endeared him; but even to his friends he remained a veiled and ambiguous personality. He seemed to himself to stand on the confines of that artificially happy domain, listening always for the sound of sorrow in the greater world outside. History, growing before his growing mind, loomed blood-stained, cruel, disastrous. The defeat of goodness, its degradation by the triumphant forces of evil, haunted him. The dependence of mind, of soul, on body opened new and ominous vistas. For months he was pursued by morbid fears of what a jostled brain-cell or a diseased body might do to one. One might become a fiend, it seemed, or an imbecile, if one’s atoms were disarranged too much. Life was a tragic duty,--he held to that blindly, fiercely at times; but what if life’s chances made even goodness impossible? what if it were to rob one of one’s very selfhood? It became to him a thing dangerous, uncertain, like an insecurely chained wild beast that one must lie down with and rise with and that might spring at one’s throat at any moment.

Under the pressure of this new knowledge, crude enough in its materialistic forms, and keen, new thought, already subtle, already passing from youthful crudity, the skeptical crash of his religious faith came at last upon him. Religion had meant too much to him for its loss to be the merely disturbing epoch of readjustment that it is in much young development. He found himself in a reeling horror of darkness where the only lights were the dim beacons of science and the fantastic will-o’-the-wisps of estheticism. In the midst of the chaos he saw his mother again. He dreaded the longed-for meeting. How could he see her and hide from her the inner desolation? And when she came, at last, after all these years, a desperate pity nerved him to act a part. She was changed; the years had told on her more than even his imagination had feared. She drooped like a tired, fading flower. She was fading, that he saw at the first glance. Mentally as well as physically, there was an air of withering about her, and the look of sorrow was stamped ineffaceably upon her aging features. To know that he had lost his faith, his hold on life, his trust in good, would have been, he thought, to kill her. He kept from her a whisper of his desolation; and to a fundamental skepticism like his, acting was facile. But when she was gone, back to her parched life, he knew that to her, as well as to him, something essential had lacked. Her love, again and again, must have fluttered, however blindly, against that barrier between them. The years of separation had been sad, but, in looking back at it, the summer of meeting was saddest of all.

The experience put an edge to his hardening strength. He must fail her in essentials; they could never meet in the blessed nearness of shared hopes; but he wouldn’t fail her in all the lesser things of life. The time of her deliverance was near. Love and beauty would soon be about her. He worked at Oxford with the inner passion of a larger purpose than mere scholarship that is the soul of true scholarship. He felt the sharp, cold joy of high achievement, the Alpine, precipitous scaling of the mind. And here he embarked upon the conscious quest for truth, his skepticism grown to a doubt of its own premises.

Gavan looked quietly back upon the turmoil of that quest.

He watched himself in those young years pressing restlessly, eagerly, pursued by the phantoms of death and nothingness, through spiral after spiral of human thought: through Spinoza’s horror of the meaninglessness of life and through Spinoza’s barren peace; through Kant’s skepticism that would not let him rest in Kant’s super-rational assurance; precipitated from Hegel’s dialectics--building their pyramid of paradox to the apex of an impersonal Absolute--into Schopenhauer’s petulant despair. And more and more clearly he saw, through all the forms of thought, that the finite self dissolved like mist in the one all-embracing, all-transcending Subject. Science, philosophy, religion, seemed, in their final development, to merge in a Monism that conceived reality as spirit, but as impersonal spirit, a conception that, if in western thought it did not reduce to illusion every phase of experience, yet reduced the finite self to a contradiction and its sense of moral freedom, upon which were built all the valuations of life and all its sanctions, to a self-deception. His own dual life deepened his abiding intuition of unreality. There was the Gavan of the river, the debate, the dinner, popular among his fellows, gentle, debonair; already the man of the world through the fineness of his perception, his instinct for the fitting, his perfection of mannerless manner that was the flower of selflessness. And there was the Gavan of the inner thought, fixed, always, in its knot of torturing perplexity. To the inner Gavan, the Gavan of human relations was a wraith-like figure. Now began for him the strange experience at which childish terrors had hinted. It was in the exhaustions that followed a long wrench of thought, or after an illness, a shock of sorrow that left one pulseless and inert, that these pauses of an awful peace would come to him. One faced, then, the dread vision, and it seized one, as when, in the deep stillness of the night, the world drops from one and only a consciousness, dispassionate and contemplative, seeing all life as dream, remains. It was when life was thus stilled, its desires quenched by weakness or great sorrow, that this peace stole into the empty chambers, and whispered that all pain, all evil, all life were dreams and that the dreams were made by the strife and restlessness of the fragmentary self in its endless discord. See oneself as discord, as part of the whole, every thought, every act, every feeling determined by it, and one entered, as it were, into the unwilling redemption. Desire, striving, hope, and fear fell from one. One found the secret of the Eternal Now, holding in its timelessness the vast vision of a world of change. But to Gavan, in these moments, the sorrow, the striving, the agony of life was sweet and desirable; for, to the finite life that strove, and hoped, and suffered the vision became the sightless gaze of death, and nothingness was the guerdon of such attainment. To turn, with an almost physical sickness of horror, from the hypnotic spell, to forcibly forget thought, to clasp life about him like a loved Nessus-robe, was a frequent solution during these years of struggle; to reënter the place of joy and sorrow, taking it, so to speak, at its own terms. But the specter was never far from the inner Gavan, who more and more suspected that the longing for reality, for significance, that flamed up in him with each renewal of personal force and energy, was the mere result of life, not its sanction. And more and more, when, in such renewals, his nature turned with a desperate trust to action, as a possible test of worth, he saw that it was not action, not faith, that created life and the trust in life, but life, the force and will incarnated in one, that created faith and action. The very will to act was the will to live, and the will to live was the will of the Whole that the particular discord of one’s personal self should continue to strive and suffer.

Life, indeed, clutched him, and that quite without any artificial effort of his own, when his mother came home to England to die.

Gavan had just left Oxford. He was exquisitely equipped for the best things of life, and, with the achievement, his long dependence on his uncle suddenly ceased. An eccentric old cousin, a scholarly recluse, who had taken a fancy to him, died, leaving him a small estate in Surrey and fifteen hundred pounds a year.

With the good fortune came the bitter irony that turned it to dust and ashes. All his life he had longed to help his mother, to smooth her rough path and put power over fate into her hand. Now he could only help her to die in peace.

He took her to the quiet old house, among its lawns, its hedges, its high-walled gardens and deep woods. He gave her all that it was now too late to give--beauty, ease, and love.

She was changed by disease, more changed than by life and sorrow; gentle, very patient, but only by an effort showing her appreciation of the loveliness, only by an effort answering his love.

Of all his fears the worst had been the fear that, with the conviction of the worthlessness of life, the capacity for love had left him. Now, as with intolerable anguish, her life ebbed from her, there was almost relief in his own despair; in feeling it to the full; in seeing the heartlessness of thought wither in the fierce flame of his agony.

It seemed to him that he had never before known what it was to love. It was as if he were more her than himself. He relived her life and its sorrows. He relived her miserable married years, the long loneliness, parted from her child, her terror of the final parting, coming so cruelly upon them; and he lived the pains of her dissolution. He understood as he had never understood, all that she was and felt; he yearned as he had never yearned, to hold and keep her with him in joy and security; he suffered as he had never suffered.

Such passionate rebellion filled him that he would walk for hours about the country, while merciful anesthetics gave her oblivion, in a blind rage of mere feeling--feeling at a white heat, a core of tormented life. And the worst was that her life of martyrdom was not to be crowned by a martyr’s happy death; the worst was that her own light died away from before her feet, that she groped in darkness, and that, since he was to lose her, he might not even have her to the end.

For months he watched the slow fading of all that had made her herself, her relapse into the instinctive, almost into the animal. Her lips, for many days, kept the courage of their smile, but it was at last only an automatic courage, showing no sweetness, no caress. Her eyes, in the first tragic joy of their reunion, had longed, grieved, yearned over the son who hid his sorrow for her sake. Afterward, all feeling, except a sort of chill resentment, died from her look. For the last days of her life, when, in great anguish, she never spoke at all, these eyes would turn on him with a strange immensity of indifference. It was as if already his mother were gone and as if a ghost had stolen into his life. She died at last, after a long night of unconsciousness, without a word or look that brought them near.

Gavan lived through all that followed in a stupor.

On the day of her funeral, when all was over, he walked out into the spring woods.

The day was sweet and mild. Pools of shallow water shone here and there in the hollows, among the slender tree-stems. Pale slips of blue were seen among the fine, gray branches, and pushing up from last year’s leaves were snowdrops growing everywhere, white and green among the russet leaves, lovely, lovely snowdrops. Seeing them, in his swift, aimless wandering, Gavan paused.

The long nights and days had worn him to that last stage of exhaustion where every sense is stretched fine and sharp as the highest string of a musical instrument. Leaning against a tree, his arms folded, he looked at the snowdrops, at their vivid green, and their white, as fresh, as delicate as flakes of newly fallen snow.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said, and, looking all about him, at the fretwork of gray branches on the blue, the pale, shining water,--a little bird just hopping to its edge among the shorter grass to drink,--he repeated, “Lovely,” while the anguish in his heart and the sweet beauty without combined in the sharp, exquisite tension of a mood about to snap, the fineness of a note, unendurably high, held to an unendurable length.

A dimness overtook him: as if the note, no longer keenly singing, sank to an insect-like buzz, a chaos of minute, whirring vibrations that made a queer, dizzy rhythm; and, in a daze of sudden indifference, both to beauty and anguish, he seemed to see himself standing there, collapsed against the tree, his frail figure outworn with misery,--to see himself, and the trees, the pools of water, the drinking bird, and the snowy flowers,--like a picture held before calm, dying eyes.

“Yes,” he thought, “she saw it like this,--me, herself, life; that is why she didn’t care any longer.”

He continued to look, and from the dimness and the buzzing the calm grew clear--clear as a sharply cut hallucination. He knew the experience, he had often before known it; but he had never yet felt it so unutterably, so finally. Something in him had done struggling forever; something was relinquished; he had accepted something. “Yes, it is like that,” he thought on; “they are all of them right.”

With the cold eye of contemplation he gazed on the illusion of life: joy, suffering, beauty, good and evil. His individual life, enfranchised from its dream of a separate self, drifted into the life about him. He was part of it all; in him, as in those other freed ones, the self suddenly knew itself as fleeting and unsubstantial as a dream, knew its own profound irrationality and the suffering that its striving to be must always mean.

He was perfectly at peace, he who had never known peace. “I am as dead as she is,” he thought.

In his peace he was conscious of no emotion, yet he found himself suddenly leaning his head against the tree and weeping. He wept, but he knew that it was no longer with grief or longing. He watched the exhausted machine give way, and noted its piteous desolation of attitude,--not pitying it,--while he thought, “I shall feel, perhaps suffer, perhaps enjoy again; but I shall always watch myself from above it all.”

The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness, untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.

He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky.

All was quiet. She was gone as he would go. The laboring breath was stilled forever.

II

Gavan did not address himself to an ascetic remodeling of his life. He pursued the path traced out before him. He yielded placidly to the calls of life, willing to work, to accomplish, willing even to indulge his passions, since there could lurk for him no trap among the shows of life. His taste soon drew back, disdainful and delicate, from his experience of youthful dissipation; his ironic indifference made him deaf to the lures of ambition; but he was an accurate and steady worker and a tolerably interested observer of existence.

As he had ceased to have value for himself, so others had no value in his eyes. Social effort and self-realization were, as ideals, equally meaningless to him; and though pity was always with him, it was a pity gentle and meditative, hopeless of alleviation: for suffering was life, and to cure one, one must abolish the other. Material remedies seemed to him worse than useless; they merely renewed the craving forces. The Imitation of Christ was a fitter panacea than organized charities and progressive legislation.

Physical pain in the helpless, the dumbly conscious, in children or animals, hurt him and made him know that he, too, lived; and he would spend himself to give relief to any suffering thing. He sought no further in metaphysical systems; he desired no further insight. Now and then, finding their pensive pastures pleasant, he would read some Hindoo or medieval mystic; but ecstasies were as alien to him as materialism: both were curious forms of self-deception--one the inflation of the illusory self into the loss of any sense of relation, and the other the self’s painful concentration into imbecilely selfish aims. The people most pleasing to him were the people who, without self-doubt and without self-consciousness, performed some inherited function in the state; the simply great in life; or those who, by natural gift, the fortunately finished, the inevitably distinguished, followed some beautifully complex calling. The mediocre and the pretentious were unpleasing phenomena, and the ideals of democracy mere barbarous nonsense.

His own pursuits were those of a fashionable and ambitious man, and, to the casual observer, the utter absence of any of the pose of disillusionized youth made all the more apparent what seemed to be a man of the world cynicism. Those who knew him better found him charming and perplexing. He seemed to have no barriers, yet one could not come near him. His center receded before pursuit. And he was much pursued. He aroused conjecture, interest, attachment. His exquisite head, the chill sweetness of his manner, the strange, piercing charm of his smile, drew eyes and hearts to him. Idly amused, he saw himself, all inert, boosted from step to step, saw friends swarm about him and hardly an enemy’s face.

It was rare for him to meet dislike. One young man, vaguely known at Oxford, noticed with interest as a relative of Eppie’s, he had, indeed, by merely being, it seemed, antagonized. Gavan had really felt something of a shy, derivative affection for this Jim Grainger, a dogged, sullen, strenuous youth; because of the dear old memory, he had made one or two delicate, diffident approaches--approaches repulsed with bull-dog defiance. Gavan, who understood most things, quite understood that to the serious, the plain, the obviously laborious son of an impecunious barrister, he might have given the impression, so funnily erroneous, of a sauntering dilettantism, an aristocratic _flânerie_. At all events, Grainger was intrenched in a resolute disapproval, colored, perhaps, with some tinge of reminiscent childish jealousy. When their paths again crossed in London and Gavan found his suavity encountered by an even more scowling sarcasm, jealousy, of another type, was an obvious cause. Grainger, scornful of social dexterities and weapons, had worked himself to skin and bone in preparation for a career, and a career that he intended to be of serious significance. And at its outset he found himself in apparent competition with Gavan for a post that, significant indeed to him, as the first rung on the political ladder, could only be decorative to his rival--the post of secretary to a prominent cabinet-minister. Grainger had his justified hopes, and he was, except for outward graces, absolutely fitted for the place.

In his path he found the listless figure of the well-remembered and heartily disliked Gavan--a gilded youth, pure and simple, and as such being lifted, by all accounts, onto the coveted rung of the coveted ladder. Gavan’s scholarly fitness for the post Grainger only half credited. Of the sturdy professional class, with a streak of the easily suspicious bourgeois about him, he was glad to believe tales of drawing-room influence. He expressed himself with disgusted openness as to the fatal effect of a type like Palairet’s on public life. Gavan heard a little and guessed more. He found himself sympathizing with Grainger; he had always liked him. With an effort that he had never used on his own behalf, he managed to get him fitted into the pair of shoes that were standing waiting for his own feet. It had been, indeed, though in superficial ways, an affair of drawing-room influence. The wife of the great statesman, as well as that high personage himself, was one of Gavan’s devoted and baffled friends. She said that he made her think of a half-frozen bird that one longed to take in one’s hands and warm, and she hopefully communed with her husband as to the invigorating effect of a career upon him. She suspected Gavan--his influence over her husband--when she found that an alien candidate was being foisted upon her.

“Grainger!” she exclaimed, vexed and incredulous. “Why Grainger? Why not anybody as well as Grainger? Yes, I’ve seen the young man. He looks like a pugilistic Broad-Church parson. All he wants is to climb and to reform everything.”

“Exactly the type for British politics,” Gavan rejoined. “He is in earnest about politics, and I’m not; you know I’m not.” His friend helplessly owned that he was exasperating. Grainger, had he known to whom he was indebted for his lift, would have felt, perhaps, a heightened wrath against “drawing-room influence.”

Happily and justifiably unconscious, he proceeded to climb.

Meanwhile another pair of shoes was swiftly found for Gavan. He went out to India as secretary to the viceroy.

Here, in the surroundings of his early youth, the second great moral upheaval of his life came to him. Three years had passed since his mother’s death. He was twenty-six years old.

During a long summer among the mountains of Simla, he met Alice Grafton. She was married, a year older than himself, but a girl still in mind and appearance--fragile, hesitant, exquisite. Gavan at his very first seeing of her felt something knocking in his heart. It seemed like pity, instinctive pity, the bond between him and life, and for some time he deluded himself with this comparatively safe interpretation. He did not quite know why he should pity Mrs. Grafton. That she should look like a girl was hardly a reason, nor that her husband, large, masterful, embossed with decorations, was uninteresting. She had been married to him--by all accounts the phrase applied--at nineteen and could not find him sympathetic; but, after all, many cheerful women were in that situation. He was a kindly, an admiring husband, and her life was set in luxurious beauty. Yet piteousness was there. She was all promise and unfulfilment; and dimly, mutely, she seemed to feel that the promise would never be fulfilled, as though a too-early primrose smiled wistfully through a veil of ice. Should she never become consciously unhappy that would be but another symptom of permanent immaturity.

Gavan rode with her and talked with her, and read with her in her fresh, flower-filled drawing-room. Their tastes were not at all alike; but he did not in the least mind that when she lifted her lovely eyes to him over poor poetry; and when she played and sang to him her very ineffectuality added a pathos, full of charm, to the obvious ballads that she liked. It was sweet, too, and endearing, to watch her, by degrees, molding her taste to his until it became a delightful and intuitive echo.

He almost wondered if it was also in echo that she began to feel for herself his own appreciation of her. Certainly she matured to consciousness of lack. She began to confide; not with an open frankness, but vaguely, as though she groped toward the causes of her sadness. She shrank, and knew now why she shrank, when her loud-voiced, cheerful husband came tramping into the room. Then she began to see that she was horribly lonely. Unconsciously, in the confidences now, she plead for help, for reassurance. She probed him constantly as to religious hopes and the real significance of life. Her soft voice, with its endearing little stammer, grew to Gavan nearer and dearer than all the voices of the world. At first it appealed, and then it possessed him. He had thought that what he felt for her was only pity. He had thought himself too dead to all earthly pangs for the rudimentary one of love to reach him. But when, one day, he found her weeping, alone, among her flowers, he took her into his arms and the great illusion seized him once more.

It seized him, though he knew it for illusion. He laughed at the specter of nothingness and gloried in the beauty of the rainbow moment. This human creature needed him and he her: that was, for them, the only reality; who cared for the blank background where their lives flashed and vanished? The flash was what mattered. He sprang from the dead self, as from a tomb, when he kissed her lips. Life might mean sorrow and defeat, but its tragedy was atoned for by a moment of such joy.

“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” she wept.

He saw illusion and joy where her woman’s heart felt only reality and terror in the joy.

They obviously loved each other, though it was without a word of love that they found themselves in each other’s arms. Had ever two beings so lonely so needed love? Her sweet, stunned eyes were a rapture of awakening to him, and though, under all, ran the deep, buried river of knowledge, whispering forever, “Vanity of vanities,” he was far above it in the sunlight of the upper air. He felt himself, knew himself only as the longing to look forever into her eyes, to hold her to him forever. That, on the day of awakening, seemed all that life meant.

Later on he found that more fundamental things had clutched him through the broken barriers of thought--jealousies and desires that showed him his partaking of the common life of humanity.

Gavan’s skepticism had not come face to face with a moral test as yet, and he could but contemplate curiously in himself the strong, instinctive revolt of all the man of hereditary custom and conscience from any dishonorable form of illegal love. He couldn’t justify it, but it was there, as strong as his longing for the woman.

It was not that he cared a rap, so he analyzed it, for laws or conventions: it was merely that he could not do anything that he felt as dishonorable.

He told Alice that she must leave her husband and come openly to him. They would go back to Europe; live in Italy--the land of happy outcasts from unhappy forms; there they would study and travel and make beauty grow about them. Holding her hands gently, he put it all before her with a reverent devotion that gave the proposal a matrimonial dignity.

“You know me well enough, dear Alice,” he said, “to know that you need fear none of the usual dangers in such cases. I don’t care about anything but you; I never will--ambition, country, family. Nothing outside me, or inside me, could make me fail you. All I want, or shall ever want, is to make you happy, and to be happy with you.”

But the things he put away as meaningless dreams the poor woman with the girl’s mind saw as grim realities. It was easy for Gavan to barter a mirage for the one thing he cared to have; the world was not a mirage to her, and even her love could not make it so. Her thin young nature knew only the craving to keep and not the revulsion from a hidden wrong. Every fiber in her shrank from the facing of a hostile order of things, the bearing through life of a public dishonor. It was as if it were he who purposed the worse disgrace, not she.

She wept and wept in his arms, hoping, perhaps, to weaken him by her feebleness and her abandonment, so that an open avowal of cowardice, an open appeal that he should yield to it, might be needless; but at last, since he would not speak, only stroking her hair, her hand, sharing her sorrow, she moaned out, “Oh, Gavan, I can’t, I can’t.”

He only half understood, feeling his heart freeze in the renunciation that she might demand. But when she sobbed on brokenly, “Don’t leave me. Stay with me. I can’t live without you. No one need ever know,” he understood.

Standing white and motionless, it was he now who repeated, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

She wept on, incredulous, supplicating, reproachful. “You will not leave me! You will not abandon me!”

“I cannot--stay with you.”

“You win my heart--humiliate me,--see that I’m yours--only yours,--and then cast me off!”

“Don’t speak so cruelly, Alice. Cast you off? I, who only pray you to let me take you with me?”

“A target for the world!”

“Darling, poor darling, I know that I ask all--all; but what else is there--unless I leave you?”

She hid her face on his shoulder, sobbing miserably, her sobs her only answer, and to it he rejoined: “We can’t go on, you know that; and to stay, to deceive your husband, to drag you through all the baseness, the ugliness, the degradation, Alice, of a hidden intrigue--I can’t do that; it’s the only thing I can’t do for you.”

“You despise me; you think me wicked--because I can’t have such horrible courage. I think what you ask is more wicked; I think it hurts everybody more; I think that it would degrade us more. People can’t live like that--cut off from everything--and not be degraded in the end.”

It was a new species of torture that now tore at Gavan’s heart and mind. He saw too clearly the force of the arguments that underlay her specious appeal--more clearly, far, than she could see. It was horribly true that the life of happy outlawry he proposed might wither and debase more than a conscious sin. The organized, crafty wisdom of life was on her side. And on his was a mere matter of taste. He could find no sanction for his resistance to her and to himself except in that instinctive recoil from what he felt as dishonor. He was sacrificing them both to a silly, subjective figment. The lurid realization, that burned and froze, went through him, and with it the unanswerable necessity. He must, he must, sacrifice them. And he must talk the language of right and wrong as though he believed in it. He acted as if he did, yet nothing was further from him than such belief; that was the strange agony that wrenched his brain as he said: “You are blind, not wicked. Some day you will thank me if I make it possible for you to let me go.” And, he too incredulous, he cried, “Alice, Alice, will you really let me go without you?”

She would not consent to the final alternative, and the struggle lasted for a week, through their daily meetings--the dream-like, deft meetings under the eyes of others,--and while they rode alone over the hills--long, sad rides, when both, often in a moody silence, showed at once their hope and their resistance.

Her fear won at last. “And I can’t even pretend that it’s goodness,” she said, her voice trembling with self-scorn. “You’ve abased me to the dust, Gavan. Yes, it’s true, if you like--my fear is greater than my love.” Irony, a half-felt anger, helped her to bear the blow, for, to the end, she could not believe that he would find strength to leave her.

The parting came suddenly. Wringing her hands, looking hard into her face, where he saw still a fawning hope and a half-stupefied despair, he left her, and felt that he had torn his heart up by the very roots.

And he had sacrificed her and himself, to what? Gavan could ask himself the question at leisure during the following year.

Yet, from the irrational sacrifice was born a timid, trembling trust, a dim hope that the unbannered combat had not been in vain, that even the blind holding to the ambiguous right might blossom in a better life for her than if he had taken the joy held out to him. The trust was as irrational as the sacrifice, but it was dear to him. He cherished it, and it fluttered in him, sweet, intangible, during all the desolate year. Then, at the year’s end, he met Alice, suddenly, unexpectedly, and found her ominously changed. Her girlhood was gone. A hard, glittering surface, competent, resourceful, hid something.

The strength of his renouncement was so rooted that he felt no personal fear, and for her, too, he no longer felt fear in his nearness. What he felt was a new pity--a pity suffocating and horrible. Whispers of discreet scandal enlightened him. Alice was in no danger of what she most shrank from--a public pillory; but she was among those of whom the world whispers, with a half-condoning smile and shrug.

Gavan saw her riding one morning with a famous soldier, a Nietzschian type of strength, splendor, and high indifference. And now he understood all. He knew the man. He was one who would have stared light irony at Gavan’s chivalrous willingness to sacrifice his life to a woman; to such a charming triviality as an intrigue he would sacrifice just enough and no more. He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.

A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.

She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair.

She confessed all at his knees. Hardness and glitter had been the shield of the racked, terror-stricken heart. The girl was a woman and knew the use of shields.

“And Gavan, Gavan, worst of all,--far worst,--I don’t love him; I never loved him. It was simply--simply”--she could hardly speak--“that he frightened and flattered me. It was vanity--recklessness--I don’t know what it was.”

After the confession, she waited, her face hidden, for his reproach or anger. Neither came. Instead, she felt, in the long silence, that something quiet enveloped her.

She looked up to see his eyes far from her.

“Gavan, can you forgive me?” she whispered.

Once more he was looking at it all--all the cruel, the meaningless drama in which he had been enmeshed for a little while. Once more his thought had risen far above it, and the old peace, the old, dead peace, with no trembling of the hopes that meant only a deeper delusion, was regained. He knew how deep must be the reattained tranquillity, when, the woman he had loved at his feet, he felt no shrinking, no reproach, no desire, only an immense, an indifferent pity.

“Forgive you, Alice? Poor, poor Alice. Perhaps you should forgive me; but it isn’t a question of that. Don’t cry; don’t cry,” he repeated mechanically, gently stroking her hair--hair whose profuse, wonderful gold he had once kissed with a lover’s awed delight.

“You forgive me--you do forgive me, Gavan?”

“It isn’t a question of forgiveness; but of course I forgive you, dear Alice.”

“Gavan, tell me that you love me still. Can you love me? Oh, say that I haven’t lost that.”

He did not reply, looking away and lifting his hand from her hair.

The woman, leaning on his knees, felt a stealing sense of awe, worse than any fear of his anger. And worse than a vehement disavowal of love, worse than a spurning of her from him, were his words: “I want you not to suffer, dear Alice; I want you to find peace.”

“Peace! What peace can I find?”

He looked at her now, wondering if she would understand and willing to put it before her as he himself saw it: “The peace of seeing it all, and letting it all go.”

“Gavan, I swear to you that I will never see him again. Oh, Gavan, what do you mean? If you would forgive me--really forgive me--and take me now, I would follow you anywhere. I am not afraid any longer. I have found out that the only thing to be afraid of is oneself. If I have you, nothing else matters.”

He looked steadily at her, no longer touching her. “You have said what I mean. You have found it out. The only thing to be afraid of is ourselves. You will not see this man again? You will keep that promise to me?”

“Any promise! Anything you ask! And, indeed, indeed, I could not see him now,” she shuddered. “Gavan, you will take me away with you?”

He wondered at her that she did not see how far he was from her--how far, and yet how one with her, how merged in her through his comprehension of the essential unity that bound all life together, that made her suffering part of him, even while he looked down upon it from an almost musing height.

He felt unutterable gentleness and unutterable ruthlessness. “I don’t mean that, Alice. You won’t lose yourself by clinging to me, by clinging to what you want.”

“You don’t love me! Oh, you don’t love me! I have killed your love!” she wailed out, rising to her feet, pierced by her full realization. She stepped back from him to gaze at him with a sort of horror. “You talk as if you had become a priest.”

He appreciated what his attitude must seem to her--priestly indeed, almost sleek in its lack of personal emotion, its trite recourse to the preaching of renunciation. And, almost with a sense of humor, that he felt as hateful at such a moment, the perception came that he might serve her through the very erroneousness of her seeing of him. The sense of humor was hateful, and his skilful seizing of her suggestion had a grotesque aspect as well. Even in his weariness, he was aware that the cup of contemplation was full when it could hold its drop of realized irony.

“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way--to go to church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”

Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh, you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it from me! What is religion to me, what is anything--anything in the world to me--if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.

He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked--no more--no less--than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true--the only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is to--is to”--he paused, hearing the triteness of his own words and wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their ever-verdant youth--“is to renounce,” he finished.

He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.

“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand--“dear Alice.” And, with all the delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly--or foolish--again.”

Her lover lost,--the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,” told her how utterly lost,--a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to sink at the knees of the priest.

“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps in heaven--we will find each other.”

Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him, when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;--that lasted for a year;--and then, alas! alas!--but, after all, the smile and shrug was the best philosophy,--that she rode once more with the Nietzschian lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard--perhaps, at any rate, he would know what to think when he did hear that she saw the man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he might think: she really loved him now--the other; not as she had loved Gavan,--that would always be first,--but very much; and she needed love, she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.

There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,--there had been, for him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic effigy of the past--his father, poor and broken in health, the old serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its fangs drawn.

People probably thought that he had been soured by an initial defeat. Gavan knew that the game had merely ceased to amuse him. What amused him most was concentrated and accurate scholarship. He was writing a book on some of the obscurer phases of religious enthusiasm, studying from a historical and psychological point of view the origin and formation of queer little sects,--failures in the struggle for survival,--their brief, ambiguous triumphs and their disintegrations.