Chapter V: Part II: I (3)

The first of these occasions was on Sunday evening when, after tea and in the gloaming, they sat together in the deep window-seat of one of the library windows and listened to Miss Barbara softly touching the chords of a hymn on the plaintive old piano and softly singing--a most unobtrusive accompaniment, at her distance and with her softness, for any talk or any thoughts of theirs. They had talked very little, watching the sunset burn itself out over the frosty moorland, and Gavan presently, while he listened, closed his eyes and leaned his head back upon the oak recess. Eppie, looking now from the sunset to him, observed him with an open, musing curiosity. His head, leaning back in the dusk, was like the ivory carving of a dead saint--a saint young, beautiful, at peace after long sorrow. Peace; that was the quality that his whole being expressed, though, with opened eyes, his face had the more human look of patience, verging now and then on a quiet dejection that would overspread his features like a veil. In boyhood, the peace, the placid dejection, had not been there; his face then had shown the tension of struggle and endurance.

“Till in the ocean of thy love
We lose ourselves in heaven above,”

Miss Barbara quavered, and Gavan, opening his eyes at the closing cadence, found Eppie’s bent upon him. He smiled, and looked still more, she thought, the sad saint, all benediction and indifference, and an impulse of antagonism to such sainthood made her say, though smiling back, “How I dislike those words.”

“Do you?” said Gavan.

“Hate them? Why, dear child?” asked Miss Barbara, who had heard through the sigh of her held-down pedal.

“I don’t want to lose myself,” said Eppie. “But I didn’t mean that I wanted you to stop, Aunt Barbara. Do go on. I love to hear you sing, however much I disapprove of the words.”

But Miss Barbara, clasping and unclasping her hands a little nervously, and evidently finding the moment too propitious to be passed over, backed as she was by an ally, rose and came to them.

“That is the very point you are so mistaken about, dear. It’s the self, you know, that keeps us from love.”

“It’s the self that makes love possible,” said Eppie, taking her hand and looking up at her. “Do you want to lose me, Aunt Barbara? If you lose yourself you will have to lose me too, you know.”

Miss Barbara stood perplexed but not at all convinced by these subtleties, turning mild eyes of query upon Gavan and evidently expecting him to furnish the obvious retort.

“We will all be at one with God,” she reverently said at length, finding that her ally left the defense to her.

Eppie met this large retort cheerfully. “You can’t love God unless you have a self to love him with. I know what you mean, and perhaps I agree with what you really mean; but I want to correct your Buddhistic tendencies and to keep you a good Christian.”

“I humbly hope I’m that. You shouldn’t jest on such subjects, Eppie dear.”

“I’m not one bit jesting,” Eppie protested. And now Gavan asked, while Miss Barbara looked gratefully at him, sure of his backing, though she might not quite be able to understand his methods, “Are they such different creeds?”

Still holding her aunt’s hand and still looking up into her face, Eppie answered: “One is despair of life, the other trust in life. One takes all meaning out of life and the other fills it with meaning. The secret of one is to lose life, and the secret of the other to gain it. There is all the difference in the world between them; all the difference between life and death.”

“As interpreted by Western youth and vigor, yes; but what of the mystics? I suppose you would call them Christians?”

“Yes, dear, they are Christians. What of them?” Miss Barbara echoed, though slightly perturbed by this alliance with heathendom.

“Buddhists, not Christians,” Eppie retorted.

“That’s what I mean; in essentials they are the same creed: the differences are only the differences of the races or individuals who hold them.”

At this Miss Barbara’s free hand began to flutter and protest. “Oh, but, Gavan dear, there I’m quite sure that you are wrong. Buddhism is, I don’t doubt, a very noble religion, but it’s not the true one. Indeed they are not the same, Gavan, though Christianity, of course, is founded on the renunciation of self. ‘Lose your life to gain it,’ Eppie dear.”

“Yes, to gain it, that’s just the point. One renounces, and one wins a realer self.”

“What is real? What is life?” Gavan asked, really curious to hear her definition.

She only needed a moment to find it, and, with her answer, gave him her first glance during their battledore colloquy with innocent Aunt Barbara as the shuttlecock. “Selves and love.”

“Well, of course, dear,” Miss Barbara cried. “That’s what heaven will be. All love and peace and rest.”

“But you have left out the selves; you won’t get love without them. And as for rest and peace--Love is made by difference, so that as long as there is love there must be restlessness.”

“Isn’t it made by sameness?” Gavan asked.

“No, by incompleteness: one loves what could complete oneself and what one could complete; or so it seems to me.”

“And as long as there are selves, will there be suffering, too?”

Her eyes met his thought fearlessly.

“That question, I am sure, is the basis for all the religions of cowardice, religions that deny life because of their craving for peace.”

“Isn’t the craving for peace as legitimate as the craving for life?”

“Nothing that denies life can be legitimate. Life is the one arbitrator. And restlessness need not mean suffering. A symphony is all restlessness--a restlessness made by difference in harmony; forgive the well-worn metaphor, but it is a good one. And, suppose that it did mean suffering, all of it. Isn’t it worth it?” Her eyes measured him, not in challenge, but quietly.

“What a lover of life you are,” he said. It was like seeing him go into his house and, not hastily, but very firmly, shut the door. And as if, rather rudely, she hurled a stone at the shut door, she asked, “Do you love anything?”

He smiled. “Please don’t quarrel with me.”

“I wish I could make you quarrel. I suspect you of loving everything,” Eppie declared.

She didn’t pursue him further on this occasion, when, indeed, he might accuse himself of having given her every chance; but on the next day, as they sat out at the edge of the birch-wood in a wonderfully warm afternoon sun, he, she, and Peter the dog (what a strange, changed echo it was), she returned, very lightly, to their discussion, tossing merely a few reconnoitering flowers in at his open window.

She had never, since their remeeting, seemed to him so young. Holding a little branch of birch, she broke off and aimed bits of its bark at a tall gorse-bush near them. Peter basked, full length, in the sunlight at their feet. The day had almost the indolent quiet of summer.

Eppie said, irrelevantly, for they had not been talking of that, but of people again, gossiping pleasantly, with gossip tempered to the day’s mildness: “I can’t bear the religions of peace, you see--any faith that takes the fight out of people. That Molly Carruthers I was telling you about has become a Christian Scientist, and she is in an imbecile condition of beatitude all the time. ‘Isn’t the happiness that comes of such a faith proof enough?’ she says to me. As if happiness were a proof! A drunkard is happy. Some people seem to me spiritually tipsy, and as unfit for usefulness as the drunkard. I think I distrust anything that gives a final satisfaction.”

She amused him in her playing with half-apprehended thoughts. Her assurance was as light as though they were the bits of birch-bark she tossed.

“You make me think a little of Nietzsche,” he said.

“I should rather like Nietzsche right side up, I think. As he is standing on his head most of the time, it’s rather confusing. If it is a blind, unconscious force that has got hold of us, we get hold of it, and of ourselves, when we consciously use it for our own ends. But I’m not a bit a Nietzschian, Gavan, for, as an end, an Overman doesn’t at all appeal to me and I don’t intend to make myself a bridge for him to march across. Of course Nietzsche might reply, ‘You are the bridge, whether you want to be or not.’ He might say, ‘It’s better to walk willingly to your inevitable holocaust than to be rebelliously haled along; whatever you do, you are only the refuse whose burning makes the flame.’ I reply to that, that if the Overman is sure to come, why should I bother about him? I wouldn’t lift my finger for a distant perfection in which I myself, and all those I loved, only counted as fuel. But, on the other hand, I do believe that each one of us is going to grow into an Overman--in a quite different sense. Peter, too, will be an Overdog, and will, no doubt, sometime be more conscious than we are now.”

Gavan glanced at her and at Peter with his vague, half-unseeing glance.

“Why don’t you smile?” Eppie asked. “Not that you don’t smile, often. But you haven’t a scrap of gaiety, Gavan. Do stop soaring in the sky and come down to real things, to the earth, to me, to dear little rudimentary Overdogs.”

“Do you think that dear little rudimentary dogs are nearer reality than the sky?” He did smile now.

“Much nearer. The sky is only a background, an emptiness that shows up their meaning.”

She had brought him down, for his eyes lingered on her as she leaned to Peter and pulled him up from his sun-baked recumbency. “Come, sit up, Peter; don’t be so comfortable. Watch how well I’ve trained him, Gavan. Now, Peter, sit up nicely. A dog on all fours is a darling heathen; but a dog sitting up on his hind legs is an ethical creature, and well on his way to Overdogdom. Peter on his hind legs is worth all your tiresome Hindoos--aren’t you, dear, Occidental dog?”

He knew that through her gaiety she was searching him, feeling her way, with a merry hostility that she didn’t intend him to answer. It was as if she wouldn’t take seriously, not for a moment, the implications of his thought--implications that he suspected her of already pretty sharply guessing at. To herself, and to him, she pretended that such thoughts were a game he played at, until she should see just how seriously she might be forced to take them.

VII

For the next few days he found himself involved in Eppie’s sleuth-hound pursuit of the transgressing publican, amused, but quite willing,--somewhat, he saw, to her surprise,--to help her in her crusade. Not only did he tramp over the country with her in search of evidence, and expound the Gothenberg system to Sir Alec, to the general, to the rather alarmed quarry himself,--not unwilling to come to terms,--but the application of his extraordinarily practical good-sense to the situation was, she couldn’t help seeing, far more effective than her own not altogether temperate zeal.

She was surprised and she was pleased; and at the same time, throughout all the little drama, she had the suspicion that it meant for him what that playing of dolls with her in childhood had meant--mere kindliness, and a selfless disposition to do what was agreeable to anybody.

It was on the Saturday following the talk in the library that an incident occurred that made her vision of his passivity flame into something more ambiguous--an incident that gave margins for possibilities in him, for whose bare potentiality she had begun to fear.

They were at evening in the gray, bleak village street, and outside one of the public-houses found a small crowd collected, watching, with the apathy of custom, the efforts of Archie MacHendrie’s wife to lead him home. Archie, a large, lurching man, was only slightly drunk, but his head, the massive granite of its Scotch peasant type, had been brutalized by years of hard drinking. It showed, as if the granite were crumbling into earth, sodden depressions and protuberances; his eye was lurid, heavy, yet alert. Mrs. MacHendrie’s face, looking as though scantily molded in tallow as the full glare of the bar-room lights beat upon it, was piteously patient. The group, under the cold evening sky, in the cold, steep street, seemed a little epitome of life’s degradation; the sordid glare of debasing pleasure lit it; the mean monotony of its daily routine surrounded it in the gaunt stone cottages; above it was the blank, hard sky.

Gavan saw all the unpleasing picture, placed it, its past, its future, as he and Eppie approached; saw more, too, than degradation: for the wife’s face, in its patience, symbolized humanity’s heroism. Both heroism and degradation were results as necessary as the changes in a chemical demonstration; neither had value: one was a toadstool growth, the other, a flower; this was the fact to him, though the flower touched him and the toadstool made him shrink.

“There, there, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie was pleading, “come awa hame, do.”

Archie was declaiming on some wrong he had suffered and threatened to do for an enemy.

That these flowers and toadstools were of vital significance to Eppie, Gavan realized as she left him in the middle of the street and strode to the center of the group. It fell aside for her air of facile, friendly authority, and in answer to her decisive, “What’s the matter?” one of the apathetic onlookers explained in his deliberate Scotch: “It’s nobbut Archie, Miss Eppie; he’s swearin’ he’ll na go hame na sleep gin he’s lickit Tam Donel’. He’s a wee bit the waur for the drink and Tam’ll soon be alang, and the dei’ll be in it gar his gudewife gets him ben.”

“Well, she must get him ben,” said Eppie, her eye measuring Archie, who shook a menacing fist in the direction of his expected antagonist.

“We must get him home between us, Mrs. MacHendrie. He’ll think better of it in the morning.”

“Fech, an’ it’s that I’m aye tellin’ him, Miss Eppie; it’s the mornin’ he’ll hae the sair head. Ay, Miss Eppie, he’s an awfu’ chiel when he’s a wee bittie fou.” Mrs. MacHendrie put the fringe of her shawl to her eyes.

Archie’s low thunder had continued during this dialogue without a pause, and Eppie now addressed herself to him in authoritative tones. “Come on, Archie. Go home and get a sleep, at all events, before you fight Tom.”

“It’s that I’m aye tellin’ you, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie wept.

Archie now brought his eye round to the speakers and observed them in an ominous silence, his thoughts turned from more distant grievances. From his wife his eye traveled back to Eppie, who met it with a firm severity.

“Damn ye for an interferin’ fishwife!” suddenly and with startling force he burst out. “Ye’re no but a meddlesome besom. Awa wi’ ye!” and from this broadside he swung round to his wife with uplifted fists. Flinging herself between them, Eppie found herself swept aside. Gavan was in the midst of the sudden uproar. Like a David before Goliath, he confronted Archie with a quelling eye. Mrs. MacHendrie had slipped into the dusk, and the bald, ugly light now fell on Gavan’s contrasting head.

“_Un sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes_,” flashed in Eppie’s mind. But on this occasion, the sage had to do more than pass--was forced, indeed, to provide the drama. He was speaking in a voice so dispassionately firm that had Archie been a little less drunk or a little less sober it must have exerted an almost hypnotic effect upon him. But the command to go home reached a brain inflamed and hardly dazed. Goliath fell upon David, and Eppie, with a curious mingling of exultation and panic, saw the two men locked in an animal struggle. For a moment Gavan’s cool alertness and scientific resource were overborne by sheer brute force; in another he had recovered himself, and Archie’s face streamed suddenly with blood. Another blow, couched like a lance, it seemed, was in readiness, wary and direct, when Mrs. MacHendrie, from behind, seized Gavan around the neck and, with a shrill scream, hung to him and dragged him back. Helpless and enmeshed, he received a savage blow from her husband, and, still held in the wife’s strangling clutch, he and she reeled back together. At this flagrant violation of fair play the onlookers interposed. Archie was dragged off, and Eppie, catching Gavan as he staggered free of his encumbrance, turned, while she held him by the shoulders, fiercely on Mrs. MacHendrie. “You well deserve every thrashing you get,” she said, her voice stilled by the very force of its intense anger.

Mrs. MacHendrie had covered her face with her shawl. “My mon was a’ bluid,” she sobbed. “I couldna stan’ an’ see him done to death.”

“Of course you couldn’t; it was most natural of you,” said Gavan. The blood trickled over his brow and cheek as, gently freeing himself from Eppie, he straightened his collar and looked at Mrs. MacHendrie with sympathetic curiosity.

“Natural!” said Eppie. “It was dastardly. You deserve every thrashing you get. I hope no one will interfere for you next time.”

“My dear Eppie!” Gavan murmured, while Mrs. MacHendrie continued to weep humbly.

“Why shouldn’t I say it? I am disgusted with her.” Eppie turned almost as fierce a stillness of look and tone upon him as upon Mrs. MacHendrie. “Let me tie up your head, Gavan. Yes, indeed, you are covered with blood. I suppose you never thought, Mrs. MacHendrie, that your husband might kill Mr. Palairet.” She passed her handkerchief around Gavan’s forehead as she spoke, knotting it with fingers at once tender and vindictive.

“I canna say, Miss Eppie,” came Mrs. MacHendrie’s muffled voice from the shawl. “The wan’s my ain mon. It juist cam’ ower me, seein’ him a’ bluid.”

“Well, you have the satisfaction now of seeing Mr. Palairet a’ bluid.” Eppie tied her knots, and Gavan, submitting a bowed head to her ministrations, still kept his look of cogitating pity upon Mrs. MacHendrie. “You see how your husband has wounded him,” Eppie went on; “the handkerchief is red already. Come on, Gavan; lean on me, please. Let her get her husband home now as best she can.”

But Gavan ignored his angry champion. Mrs. MacHendrie’s sorrow, most evidently, interested him more than Eppie’s indignation. He went to her, putting down the hand that held the shawl to the poor, disfigured, tallow face, and made her look at him, while he said with a gentle reasonableness: “Don’t mind what Miss Gifford says; she is angry on my account and doesn’t really mean to be so hard on you. I’m not at all badly hurt,--I can perfectly stand alone, Eppie,--and I’m sorry I had to hurt your husband. It was perfectly natural, what you did. Don’t cry; please don’t cry.” He smiled at her, comforted her, encouraged her. “They are taking your husband home, you see; he is going quite quietly. And now we will take you home. Take my arm. You are the worst off of us all, Mrs. MacHendrie.”

Eppie, in silence, stalked beside him while he led Mrs. MacHendrie, dazed and submissive, up the village street. A neighbor’s wife was in kindly waiting and Archie already slumbering heavily on his bed. Eppie suspected, as they went, that she saw a gold piece slipped from Gavan’s hand to Mrs. MacHendrie’s.

“Poor thing,” he said, when they were once more climbing the steep street, “I ‘m afraid I only made things worse for her”; and laughing a little, irrepressibly, he looked round at Eppie from under his oddly becoming bandage. “My dear Eppie, what a perfect brute you were to her!”

“My dear Gavan, I can’t feel pity for such a fool. Oh, yes I can, but I don’t want to. Please remember that I, too, have impulses, and that I saw you ‘a’ bluid.’”

“Well, then, I’m the brute for scolding you, and you are another poor thing.”

“Are you incapable of righteous indignation, Gavan?”

“Surely I showed enough to please you in my treatment of Archie.”

“You showed none. You looked supremely indifferent as to whether he killed you or you him.”

“Oh, I think I was quite anxious to do for him.”

They were past the village now and upon the country road, and in the darkness their contrasting voices rang oddly--hers deep with its resentful affection, his light with its amusement. It was as if the little drama, that he had made instead of interrupting, struck his sense of the ridiculous. Yet, angry with him as she was, a thrill of exultation remained, for Eppie, in the thought of his calm, deliberate face, beautiful before its foe, and with blood upon it.

VIII

Gavan’s hurt soon healed, though it made him languid for a day or two--days of semi-invalidism, the unemphatic hours, seemingly so colorless, when she read to him or merely sat silently at hand occupied with her letters or a book, drawing still closer their odd intimacy; it could hardly be called sudden, for it had merely skipped intervening years, and it couldn’t be called a proved intimacy, the intervening years were too full, too many for that. But they were very near in their almost solitude--a solitude surrounded by gentle reminders of the closer past, reminders, in the case of living personalities, who seemed to find the intimacy altogether natural and needing no comment. What the general and Miss Barbara might really be thinking was a wonder that at moments occupied both Gavan and Eppie’s ruminations; but it wasn’t a wonder that needed to go far or deep. What they thought, the dear old people, made very little difference--not even the difference of awkwardness or self-consciousness under too cogitating eyes. Even if they thought the crude and obvious thing it didn’t matter, they would so peacefully relapse from their false inference once time had set it straight for them. Eppie couldn’t quite have told herself why its obviousness was so crude; in all her former experience such obviousness had never been so almost funnily out of the question. But Gavan made so many things almost funnily out of the question.

It was this quality in him, of difference from usual things, that drew intimacy so near. To talk to him with a wonderful openness, to tell him about herself, about her troubles, was like sinking down in a pale, peaceful church and sighing out everything that lay heavily on one’s heart--the things that lay lightly, too, for little things as well as great, were understood by that compassionate, musing presence--to the downlooking face of an imaged saint.

No claim upon one remained after it; one was freed of the load of silence and one hadn’t in the least been shackled by retributory penances. And if one felt some strange lack in the saint, if his sacerdotal quality was more than his humanity, it was just because of that that one was able to say anything one liked.

At moments, it is true, she had an odd, fetish-worshiper’s impulse to smash her saint, and perhaps the reason why she never yielded to it was because, under all the seeing him as image, was the deep hoping that he was more. If he was more, much more, it might be unwise to smash him, for then she would have no pale church in which to take refuge, and, above all, if he were more he mustn’t find it out--and she mustn’t--through any act of her own. The saint himself must breathe into life and himself step down from his high pedestal. That he cared to listen, that he listened lovingly,--just as he had listened lovingly to Mrs. MacHendrie,--she knew.

One day when he was again able to be out and when they were again upon the hilltop, walking in a mist that enshrouded them, she told him all about the wretched drama of her love-affair.

She had never spoken of it to a human being.

It was as if she led him into an empty room, dusty and dark and still, with dreary cobwebs stretching over its once festal furniture, and there pointed out to him faded blood-stains on the floor. No eyes but his had ever seen them.

She told him all, analyzing the man, herself, unflinchingly, putting before him her distracted heart, distorted in its distraction. She had appalled herself. Her part had not been mere piteous nobility. She would have dragged herself through any humiliation to have had him back, the man she had helplessly adored. She would have taken him back on almost any terms. Only the semblance of pride had been left to her; beneath it, with all her scorn of him, was a craving that had been base in its despair.

“But that wasn’t the worst,” said Eppie; “that very baseness had its pathos. Worst of all were my mean regrets. I had sacrificed my ambitions for him; I had refused a man who would have given me the life I wanted, a high place in the world, a great name, power, wide issues,--and I love high places, Gavan, I love power. When I refused him, he too married some one else, and it was after that that my crash came. Love and faith were thrown back at me, and I hadn’t in it all even my dignity. I was torn by mingled despairs. I loathed myself. Oh, it was too horrible!”

His utter lack of sympathetic emotion, even when she spoke with the indignant tears on her cheeks, made it all the easier to say these fundamental things, and more than ever like the saint of ebony and ivory in the pale church was his head against the great wash of mist about them.

“And now it has all dropped from you,” he said.

“Yes, all--the love, the regret certainly, even the shame. The ambition, certainly not; but in that ugly form of a loveless marriage it’s no longer a possible temptation for me. My disappointment hasn’t driven me to worldly materialism. It’s a sane thing in nature, that outgrowing of griefs, though it’s bad for one’s pride to see them fade and one’s heart mend, solidly mend, once more.”

“They do go, when one really sees them.”

“Some do.”

“All, when one really sees them,” he repeated unemphatically. “I know all about it, Eppie. I’ve been through the fire, too. Now that it’s gone, you see that it’s only a dream, that love, don’t you?”

Eppie gazed before her into the mist, narrowing her eyes as though she concentrated her thoughts upon his exact meaning, and she received his casual confidence with some moments of silence.

“That would imply that seeing destroyed feeling, wouldn’t it?” she said at last. “I see that _such_ love is a dream, if you will; but dreams may be mirrors of life, not delusions; hints of an awakened reality.”

He showed only his unmoved face. This talk, so impersonal, with all its revealment of human pathos and weakness, so much a picture that they both looked at it together,--a picture of outlived woe,--claimed no more than his contemplation; but when her voice seemed to grope toward him, questioning in its very clearness of declaration, he felt again the flitting fear that he had already recognized, not as danger, but as discomfort. It flitted only, hardly stirred the calm he showed her, as the wings of a flying bird just skim and ruffle the surface of still, deep waters. That restless bird, always hovering, circling near, its shadow passing, repassing over the limpid water--he saw and knew it as the water might reflect in its stillness the bird’s flight. Life; the will to live, the will to want, and to strive, and to suffer in striving. All the waters of Eppie’s soul were broken by the flight of this bird of life; its wings, cruel and beautiful, furrowed and cut; its plumage, darkly bright, was reflected in every wave.

He said nothing after her last words.

“You think all feelings delusions, Gavan?”

“Not that, perhaps, but very transitory; and to be tied to the transitory is to suffer.”

“On that plan one ends with nothingness.”

“Do you think so?”

“Do _you_ think so?” She turned his question on him and her eyes, with the question, fixed hard on his face.

He felt suddenly that after all the parrying and thrusting she had struck up his foil and faced him with no mask of gaiety--in deadly earnest. There was the click of steel in the question.

He did not know whether he were the more irritated, for her sake, by her persistency, or the more fearful that, unwillingly, he should do her faith some injury.

“I think,” he said, “more or less as Tolstoi thinks. You understood all that very well the other evening; so why go into it?”

“You think that our human identity is unreal--an appearance?”

“Most certainly.”

“And that the separation between us is the illusion that makes hatred and evil, and that with the recognition of the illusion, love would come and all selfish effort cease?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you see that what that results in is the Hindoo thing, the abolishing of consciousness, the abolishing of life--of individual life?”

“Yes, I see that,” Gavan smiled, “but I’m a little surprised to see that you do. So many people are like Aunt Barbara.”

But Eppie was pushing, pushing against the closed doors and would not be lured away by lightness. “Above all, Gavan, do you see that he is merely an illogical Hindoo when he tries to bridge his abyss with ethics? On his own premises he is utterly fatalistic, so that the very turning from the evil illusion, the very breaking down of the barrier of self, is never, with him, the result of an effort of the will, never a conscious choice, but something deep and rudimentary, subconscious, an influx of revelation, a vision that sets one free, perhaps, but that can only leave one with emptiness.”

Above all, as she had said, he saw it; and now he was silent, seeking words that might rid him of pursuit, yet not infect her.

She had stopped short before his silence. Smiling, now, on the background of mist, her eyes, her lips, her poise challenged him, incredulous, actually amused. “Don’t you think that _I_ have an identity?” she asked.

He was willing at that to face her, for he saw suddenly and clearly,--it seemed to radiate from her in the smile, the look,--that he, apparently, couldn’t hurt her. She was too full of life to be in any danger from him, and perhaps the only way of ending pursuit was to fling wide the doors and, since she had said the word, show her the emptiness within.

“You force me to talk cheap metaphysics to you, Eppie, but I’ll try to say what I do think,” he said. “I believe that the illusion of a separate identity, self-directing and permanent, is the deepest and most tenacious of all illusions--the illusion that makes the wheels go round, the common illusion that makes the common mirage. The abolishing of the identity, of the self, is the final word of science, and of philosophy, and of religion, too. The determinism of science, the ecstatic immediacy of the mystic consciousness, the monistic systems of the Absolutists, all tend toward the final discovery that,--now I’m going to be very glib indeed,--but one must use the technical jargon,--that under all the transitory appearance is a unity in which, for which, diversity vanishes.”

Eppie no longer smiled. She had walked on while he spoke, her eyes on him, no longer amused or incredulous, with an air now of almost stern security.

“Odd,” she said presently, “that such a perverse and meaningless Whole should be made up of such significant fragments.”

“Ah, but I didn’t say that Reality was meaningless. It has all possible meaning for itself, no doubt; it’s our meaning for it that is so unpleasantly ambiguous. We are in it and for it, as if we were the kaleidoscope it turned, the picture it looked at; and we are and must be what it thinks or sees. Your musical simile expressed it very nicely: Reality an eternal symphony and our personalities the notes in it--discords to our own limited consciousness, but to Reality necessary parts of the perfect whole. Reality is just that will to contemplate, to think, the infinite variety of life, and it usually thinks us as wanting to live. All ethics, all religions, are merely records of the ceasing of this want. A man comes to see himself as discord, and with the seeing the discord is resolved to silence. One comes to see as the Reality sees, and since it is perfectly satisfied, although it is perhaps quite unconscious,--or so some people who think a great deal about it say,--we, in partaking of its vision, find in unconsciousness the goal, and are satisfied.”

“You are satisfied with such a death in life?” Eppie asked in her steady voice.

“What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”

“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real than that nothingness--for to us such a reality would be nothingness. And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since, for us, there is no other.”

“How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie.

“Care for it? I’ve hated it at times, the bits that came to me.”

“Yet you want it, always.”

“Always,” she repeated. “Always. I have passed a great part of my life in being very unhappy--that is to say, in wanting badly something I’ve not got. Yet I am more glad than I can say to have lived.”

“Probably because you still expect to get what you want.”

“Of course.” She smiled a little now, though a veiled, ambiguous smile. And as they began the steep descent, the mist infolding them more closely, even the semblance of the smile faded, leaving a new sadness.

“Poor Gavan,” she said.

He just hesitated. “Why?”

“Your religion is a hatred, a distrust of life; mine is trust in it, love of it. You see it as a sort of murderous uncle, beckoning to the babes in the wood; I own that I wouldn’t stir a step to follow it if I suspected it of such a character. And I see life--“ She paused here, looking down, musing, it seemed, on what she saw, and the pause grew long. In it, suddenly, Gavan knew again the invasion of emotion. Her downcast, musing face pervaded his consciousness with that sense of trembling. “You see life as what?” he asked her, not because he wanted to know, but because her words were always less to him than her silences.

Eppie, unconscious, was finding words.

“As something mysterious, beautiful. Something strange, yet near, like the thought of a mother about her unborn child, but, more still, like the thought of an unborn child about its unknown mother. We are such unborn children. And this something mysterious and beautiful says: Come; through thorns, over chasms, past terrors, and in darkness. So, one goes.”

Gavan was silent. Looking up at him, her eyes full of her own vision, she saw tears in his.

For a moment the full benignity, sweet, austere, of a maternal thing in her rested on him, so that it might have been she who said “Come.” Then, looking away from him again, knowing that she had seen more than he had meant to show, she said, “Own that if it’s all illusion, mine’s the best to live with.”

He had never seen her so beautiful as at this moment when she did not pursue, but looked away, quiet in her strength, and he answered mechanically, conscious only of that beauty, that more than beauty, alluring when it no longer pursued: “No; there are no thorns, nor chasms, nor terrors any longer for me. I am satisfied, Eppie.”

She was walking now, a little ahead of him, down the thread-like path that wound among phantom bracken. The islet of space where they could see seemed like a tiny ship gliding forward with them into a white, boundless ocean. Such, thought Gavan, was human life.

In a long silence he felt that her mood had changed. Over her shoulder she looked round at him at last with her eyes of the spiritual steeplechaser. “It’s war to the knife, Gavan.”

She hurt him in saying it. “You only have the knife,” he answered, and his gentleness might have reproached the sudden challenge.

“You have poison.”

“I never put it to your lips, dear.”

She saw his pain. “Oh, don’t be afraid for me,” she said. “I drink your poison, and it is a tonic, a wine, that fills me with greater ardor for the fight.”

IX

They were on the path that led to the deeply sunken garden gate, and they had not spoken another word while they followed it, while they stooped a little under the tangle of ivy that drooped from the stone lintel, while they went past the summer-house and on between the rows of withered plants and the empty, wintry spaces of the garden; only when they were nearly at the house, under the great pine-tree, did Eppie cheerfully surmise that they would be exactly on time for tea, and by her manner imply that tea was far more present to her thoughts than daggers or poison.

He felt that in some sense matters had been left in the lurch. He didn’t quite know where he stood for her with his disastrous darkness about him--whether she had really taken up a weapon for open warfare or whether she hadn’t wisely fallen back upon the mere pleasantness of friendly intercourse, turning her eyes away from his accompanying gloom.

He was glad to find her alone that evening after dinner when he had left the general in the smoking-room over a review and a cigar. Miss Barbara had gone early to bed, so that Eppie, in her white dress, as on the night of his arrival, had the dark brightness of the firelit room all to herself. He was glad, because the sense of uncertainty needed defining, and uncertainty, since that last moment of trembling, had been so acute that any sort of definition would be a relief.

An evening alone with her, now that they were really on the plane of mutual understanding, would put his vague fears to the test. He would learn whether they must be fled from or whether, as mere superficial tremors, tricks of the emotions, they could not be outfaced smilingly. He really didn’t want to run away, especially not until he clearly knew from what he ran.

Eppie sat before the fire on the low settle, laying down a book as he came in. In her aspect of exquisite worldliness, the white dress displaying her arms and shoulders with fashionable frankness, she struck him anew as being her most perfectly armed and panoplied self. Out on the windy hillside or singing among the woods, nature seemed partially to absorb and possess her, so that she became a part of the winds and woods; but indoors, finished and fine from head to foot, her mastered conventionality made her the more emphatically personal. She embodied civilization in her dress, her smile, her speech, her very being; the loose coils of her hair and the cut of her satin shoe were both significant of choice, of distinctive simplicity; and the very bareness of her shoulders--Gavan gave an amused thought to the ferociously sensitive Tolstoi--symbolized the armor of the world-lover, the world-user. It was she who possessed the charms and weapons of the civilization that crumbled to dust in the hand of the Russian mystic. He could see her confronting the ascetic’s eye with the challenge of her radiant and righteous self-assurance. Her whole aspect rebuilt that shattered world, its pomp and vanity, perhaps, its towering scale of values; each tier narrowing in its elimination of the lower, cruder, less conscious, more usual; each pinnacle a finely fretted flowering of the rare; a dazzling palace of foam. She embodied all that; but, more than all for Gavan, she embodied the deep currents of trust that flowed beneath the foam.

Her look welcomed him, though without a smile, as he drew a deep chair to the fire and sat down near her, and for a little while they said nothing, he watching her and she with gravely downcast eyes.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked at last.

“Of you, of course,” she answered. “About our talk this afternoon; we haven’t finished it yet.”

She, too, then, had felt uncertainty that needed relief.

“Are you sharpening your knife?”

She put aside his lightness. “Gavan, we are friends. May I talk as I like to you?”

“Of course you may. I’ve always shown you that.”

“No, you have tried to prevent me from talking. But now I will. I have been thinking. It seems to me that it is your life that has so twisted your mind; it has been so joyless.”

“Does that make it unusual?”

“You must love life before you can know it.”

“You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy, Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.”

“Of all mere thought, yes.”

She rested her head on her hand as she looked at him, seeming to wonder over him and his thought, his mere thought, dispassionately. “Don’t be shy, or afraid, for me. Why should you mind? I’ve given you my story; give me yours. Tell me about your life.”

He felt, suddenly, sunken there in his deep chair, passive and peaceful in the firelight, that it would be very easy to tell her. Why shouldn’t she see it all and understand it all? He couldn’t hurt her; it would be only a strange, a sorrowful picture to her; and to him, yes, there would be a relief in the telling. To speak, for the first time in his life--it would be like the strewing of rosemary on a grave, a commemoration that would have its sweetness and its balm.

But he hesitated, feeling the helplessness of his race before verbal self-expression.

Eppie lent him a hand.

“Begin with when you left me.”

“What was I then? I hardly remember. A tiresome, self-centered boy.”

“No; you weren’t self-centered. You believed in God, then, and you loved your mother. Why have both of them, as personalities, become illusions to you?”

She saw facts clearly and terribly. She was really inside the doors at last, and though it would be all the easier to make her understand the facts she saw, Gavan paled a little before the sudden, swift presence.

For, yes, God was gone, and yes,--worse, far worse, as he knew she felt it,--his mother, too--except as that ghost, that pang of memory.

She saw his pallor and helped him again, to the first and easier avowal.

“How did you lose your faith? What happened to you when you left me?”

“It’s a commonplace enough story, that.”

“Of course it is. But when loss of faith becomes permanent and permanently means a loss of feeling, it’s not so commonplace.”

“Oh, I think it is--more commonplace than people know, in temperaments as unvital and as logical as mine.”

“You are not unvital.”

“My reason isn’t often blurred by my instincts.”

“That is because you are strong--terribly strong. It’s not that your vitality is so little as that your thought is so abnormal.”

“No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.”

But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her as he looked, he contemplated its vista.

It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending listener,--to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes the picture that he saw.

His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that made it possible to tell her all.

The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit them the more deeply into the listening mind.

But, in the days that followed the death,--days ghost-like, yet sharp,--he lingered, so that she paused with him in that pause of stillness in his life, that morning in the spring woods when everything had softly, gently shown an abiding strangeness. He told her all about that: about the look of the day, not knowing why he so wanted her to see it, too, but it seemed to explain more than anything else--the pale, high sky, the gray branches, the shining water and the little bird that hopped to drink. He himself looked ghost-like while he spoke--sunken, long, dark, impalpable, in the deep chair, his thin white fingers lightly interlocked, his face showing only the oddity of its strange yet beautiful oval and its shadowy eyes and lips. All whiteness and shadow, he might have been a projection from the thought of the woman, who, before him, leaned her head on her hand, warm, breathing, vivid with color, her steady eyes seeing phantoms unafraid.

After that there wasn’t much left to explain, it seemed--except Alice, that last convulsive effort of life to seize and keep him; and that didn’t take long--made, as it were, a little allegory, with nameless abstractions to symbolize the old drama of the soul entrameled and finally set free again. The experience of the spring woods had really been the decisive one. He came back to that again, at the end of his story. “It’s really, that experience, what in another kind of temperament is called conversion.”

Her eyes had looked away from him at last. “No,” she said, “conversion is something that gives life.”

“No,” he rejoined, “it’s something that lifts one above it.”

The fundamental contest spoke again, and after that they were both silent. He, too, had looked away from her when the story was over, and he knew, from her deep, slow breathing, that the story had meant a great deal to her. It was not a laboring breath, nor broken by pain to sighs; but it seemed, in its steady rhythm, to accept and then to conquer what he had put before her. That he should so hear it, not looking at her, filled the silence with more than words; and, as in the afternoon, he sought the relief of words.

“So you see,” he said, in his lighter voice, “thorns and precipices and terrors dissolve like dreams.” She had seen everything and he was ushering her out. But his eyes now met hers, looking across the little space at him.

“And I? Do I, too, dissolve like a dream?” she said.

His smile now was lighter than his voice had been. “Absolutely. Though I own that you are a highly colored phantom. Your color is very vivid indeed. Sometimes it almost masters my thought.”

He had not, in his mere wish for ease, quite known what he meant to say, and now her look did not show him any deepened consciousness; but, suddenly, he felt that under his lightness and her quiet the current ran deeply.

“I master your thought?” she repeated. “Doesn’t that make you distrust thought sometimes?”

“No,” he laughed. “It makes me distrust you, dear Eppie.”

There were all sorts of things before them now. What they were he really didn’t know; perhaps she didn’t, either. At all events he kept his eyes off them, and shaking his crossed foot a little, he still looked at her, smiling.

“Why?” she asked.

He felt that he must now answer her, and himself, in words that wouldn’t imply more than he could face.

“Well, the very force of your craving for life, the very force of your will, might sweep me along for a bit. I might be caught up for a whirl on the wheel of illusion; not that you could ever bind me to it: it would need my own will, blind again, for that.”

Her eyes had met his so steadily that he had imagined only contemplation or perhaps that maternal severity behind the steadiness. But the way in which they received these last tossed pebbles of metaphor showed him unrealized profundities. They deepened, they darkened, they widened on him. They seemed to engulf him in a sudden abyss of pain. And pain in her was indeed a color that could infect him.

“How horrible you are, Gavan,” she said, and her voice went with the words and with the look.

“Eppie!” he exclaimed on a tense, indrawn breath, as if over the sudden stab of a knife. “Have I hurt you?”

Her eyes turned from him. “Not what you say, or do. What you are.”

“You didn’t see, before, what I am?”

“Never--like this.”

He leaned toward her. “Dear Eppie, why do you make me talk? Let me be still. I only ask to be still.”

“You are worse still. Don’t you think I see what stillness means?”

She had pushed her low seat from him,--for he stretched his hands to her with his supplication,--and, rising to her feet, stepping back, she stood before the fire, somberly looking down at him.

Gavan, too, rose. Compunction, supplication, a twist of perplexity and suffering, made him careless of discretion. Face to face, laying his hands on her shoulders, he said: “Don’t let me frighten you. It would be horrible if I could convince you, shatter you.”

Standing erect under his hands, she looked hard into his face.

“You could frighten me, horribly; but you couldn’t shatter me. You are ambiguous, veiled, all in mists. I am as clear, as sharp--.”

Her dauntlessness, the old defiance, were a relief--a really delicious relief. He was able to smile at her, a smile that pled for reassurance. “How can I frighten you, then?”

Her somber gaze did not soften. “Your mists come round me, chill, suffocating. They corrode my clearness.”

“No; no; it’s you who come into them. Don’t. Don’t. Keep away from me.”

“I’m not so afraid of you as that,” she answered.

His hands were still on her shoulders and their eyes on each other--his with their appealing, uncertain smile, and hers unmoved, unsmiling; and suddenly that sense of danger came upon him: as if, in the mist, he felt upon him the breathing, warm, sweet, ominous, of some unseen creature. And in the fear was a strange delight, and like a hand drawn, with slow, deep pressure, across a harp, the nearness drew across his heart, stirring its one sad note--its dumb, its aching note--to a sudden ascending murmur of melody.

He was caught swiftly from this inner tumult by its reflection in her face. She flushed, deeply, painfully. She drew back sharply, pushing his hands from her.

Gavan sought his own equilibrium in an ignoring of that undercurrent.

“Now you are not frightened; but why are you angry?” he asked.

For a moment she did not speak.

“Eppie, I am so sorry. What is it? You are really angry, Eppie!”

Then, after that pause of speechlessness, she found words.

“If I think of you as mist you must not think of me as glamour.” This she gave him straight.

Only after disengaging her train from the settle, from his feet, after wheeling aside his chair to make a clear passage for her departure, did she add: “I have read your priggish Schopenhauer.”

She gave him no time for reply or protestation. Quite mistress of herself, leaving him with all the awkwardness of the situation--if he chose to consider it awkward--upon his hands, very fully the finished mondaine and very beautifully the fearless and assured nymph of the hillside, she went to the piano, turned and rejected, in looking over it, some music, and sitting down, striking a long, full chord, she began to sing, in her voice of frosty dawn, the old Scotch ballad.