however, by mentioning her name, and this he found
it impossible to do. He persuaded himself that he could
make an honest statement without speaking her name;
he persuaded himself that his feeling had very little to
do with her.
“Unhappiness is a state of mind,” he said, “by which I
mean that it is not necessarily the result of any particular
cause.”
This rather stilted beginning did not please him, and it
became more and more obvious to him that, whatever he
might say, his unhappiness had been directly caused by
Katharine.
“I began to find my life unsatisfactory,” he started
afresh. “It seemed to me meaningless.” He paused again,
but felt that this, at any rate, was true, and that on these
lines he could go on.
“All this money-making and working ten hours a day in
an office, what’s it for? When one’s a boy, you see, one’s
head is so full of dreams that it doesn’t seem to matter
what one does. And if you’re ambitious, you’re all right;
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you’ve got a reason for going on. Now my reasons ceased
to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That’s very likely
now I come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything,
though?) Still, it’s impossible, after a certain age,
to take oneself in satisfactorily. And I know what carried
me on”—for a good reason now occurred to him—”I
wanted to be the savior of my family and all that kind of
thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a
lie, of course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most
people, I suppose, I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions,
and now I’m at the awkward stage of finding it
out. I want another delusion to go on with. That’s what
my unhappiness amounts to, Mary.”
There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during
this speech, and drew curiously straight lines upon
her face. In the first place, Ralph made no mention of
marriage; in the second, he was not speaking the truth.
“I don’t think it will be difficult to find a cottage,” she said,
with cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement.
“You’ve got a little money, haven’t you? Yes,” she concluded,
“I don’t see why it shouldn’t be a very good plan.”
They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was
surprised by her remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the
whole, rather pleased. He had convinced himself that it
was impossible to lay his case truthfully before Mary,
and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he had not
parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always
found her, the sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted;
whose sympathy he could count upon, provided he kept
within certain limits. He was not displeased to find that
those limits were very clearly marked. When they had
crossed the next hedge she said to him:
“Yes, Ralph, it’s time you made a break. I’ve come to
the same conclusion myself. Only it won’t be a country
cottage in my case; it’ll be America. America!” she cried.
“That’s the place for me! They’ll teach me something about
organizing a movement there, and I’ll come back and show
you how to do it.”
If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle
the seclusion and security of a country cottage, she did
not succeed; for Ralph’s determination was genuine. But
she made him visualize her in her own character, so that
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he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in front of
him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning
he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation
with Katharine. He seemed to see her marching ahead,
a rather clumsy but powerful and independent figure, for
whose courage he felt the greatest respect.
“Don’t go away, Mary!” he exclaimed, and stopped.
“That’s what you said before, Ralph,” she returned, without
looking at him. “You want to go away yourself and you
don’t want me to go away. That’s not very sensible, is it?”
“Mary,” he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting
and dictatorial ways with her, “what a brute I’ve
been to you!”
It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing,
and to thrust back her assurance that she would
forgive him till Doomsday if he chose. She was preserved
from doing so only by a stubborn kind of respect for herself
which lay at the root of her nature and forbade surrender,
even in moments of almost overwhelming passion.
Now, when all was tempest and high-running waves,
she knew of a land where the sun shone clear upon Ital
ian grammars and files of docketed papers. Nevertheless,
from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that
broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be
harsh and lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked
steadily a little in front of him across the plowed field.
Their way took them round the verge of a wood of thin
trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land.
Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on
the perfectly flat and richly green meadow at the bottom
of the hill a small gray manor-house, with ponds, terraces,
and clipped hedges in front of it, a farm building
or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising behind,
all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house
the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit
stood upright against the sky, which appeared of a more
intense blue between their trunks. His mind at once was
filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katharine;
the gray house and the intense blue sky gave him the
feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree,
forming her name beneath his breath:
“Katharine, Katharine,” he said aloud, and then, look
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ing round, saw Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing
a long spray of ivy from the trees as she passed them.
She seemed so definitely opposed to the vision he held
in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of impatience.
“Katharine, Katharine,” he repeated, and seemed to himself
to be with her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded
him; all substantial things—the hour of the day,
what we have done and are about to do, the presence of
other people and the support we derive from seeing their
belief in a common reality—all this slipped from him. So
he might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet,
and the empty blue had hung all round him, and the air
had been steeped in the presence of one woman. The
chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened
him, and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh.
Here was the world in which he had lived; here the plowed
field, the high road yonder, and Mary, stripping ivy from
the trees. When he came up with her he linked his arm
through hers and said:
“Now, Mary, what’s all this about America?”
There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed
to her magnanimous, when she reflected that she had
cut short his explanations and shown little interest in his
change of plan. She gave him her reasons for thinking
that she might profit by such a journey, omitting the one
reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened
attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth,
he found himself curiously eager to make certain of her
good sense, and accepted each fresh proof of it with satisfaction,
as though it helped him to make up his mind
about something. She forgot the pain he had caused her,
and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide
of well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp
of their feet upon the dry road and the support of his
arm. The comfort was the more glowing in that it seemed
to be the reward of her determination to behave to him
simply and without attempting to be other than she was.
Instead of making out an interest in the poets, she avoided
them instinctively, and dwelt rather insistently upon the
practical nature of her gifts.
In a practical way she asked for particulars of his cot
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tage, which hardly existed in his mind, and corrected his
vagueness.
“You must see that there’s water,” she insisted, with an
exaggeration of interest. She avoided asking him what
he meant to do in this cottage, and, at last, when all the
practical details had been thrashed out as much as possible,
he rewarded her by a more intimate statement.
“One of the rooms,” he said, “must be my study, for,
you see, Mary, I’m going to write a book.” Here he withdrew
his arm from hers, lit his pipe, and they tramped on
in a sagacious kind of comradeship, the most complete
they had attained in all their friendship.
“And what’s your book to be about?” she said, as boldly
as if she had never come to grief with Ralph in talking
about books. He told her unhesitatingly that he meant to
write the history of the English village from Saxon days
to the present time. Some such plan had lain as a seed in
his mind for many years; and now that he had decided, in
a flash, to give up his profession, the seed grew in the
space of twenty minutes both tall and lusty. He was surprised
himself at the positive way in which he spoke. It
was the same with the question of his cottage. That had
come into existence, too, in an unromantic shape —a
square white house standing just off the high road, no
doubt, with a neighbor who kept a pig and a dozen squalling
children; for these plans were shorn of all romance in
his mind, and the pleasure he derived from thinking of
them was checked directly it passed a very sober limit.
So a sensible man who has lost his chance of some beautiful
inheritance might tread out the narrow bounds of
his actual dwelling-place, and assure himself that life is
supportable within its demesne, only one must grow turnips
and cabbages, not melons and pomegranates. Certainly
Ralph took some pride in the resources of his mind,
and was insensibly helped to right himself by Mary’s trust
in him. She wound her ivy spray round her ash-plant, and
for the first time for many days, when alone with Ralph,
set no spies upon her motives, sayings, and feelings, but
surrendered herself to complete happiness.
Thus talking, with easy silences and some pauses to
look at the view over the hedge and to decide upon the
species of a little gray-brown bird slipping among the
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twigs, they walked into Lincoln, and after strolling up
and down the main street, decided upon an inn where
the rounded window suggested substantial fare, nor were
they mistaken. For over a hundred and fifty years hot
joints, potatoes, greens, and apple puddings had been
served to generations of country gentlemen, and now,
sitting at a table in the hollow of the bow window, Ralph
and Mary took their share of this perennial feast. Looking
across the joint, half-way through the meal, Mary
wondered whether Ralph would ever come to look quite
like the other people in the room. Would he be absorbed
among the round pink faces, pricked with little white
bristles, the calves fitted in shiny brown leather, the blackand-
white check suits, which were sprinkled about in the
same room with them? She half hoped so; she thought
that it was only in his mind that he was different. She
did not wish him to be too different from other people.
The walk had given him a ruddy color, too, and his eyes
were lit up by a steady, honest light, which could not
make the simplest farmer feel ill at ease, or suggest to
the most devout of clergymen a disposition to sneer at
his faith. She loved the steep cliff of his forehead, and
compared it to the brow of a young Greek horseman, who
reins his horse back so sharply that it half falls on its
haunches. He always seemed to her like a rider on a spirited
horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being
with him, because there was a risk that he would not be
able to keep to the right pace among other people. Sitting
opposite him at the little table in the window, she
came back to that state of careless exaltation which had
overcome her when they halted by the gate, but now it
was accompanied by a sense of sanity and security, for
she felt that they had a feeling in common which scarcely
needed embodiment in words. How silent he was! leaning
his forehead on his hand, now and then, and again
looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men
at the next table, with so little self-consciousness that
she could almost watch his mind placing one thought
solidly upon the top of another; she thought that she
could feel him thinking, through the shade of her fingers,
and she could anticipate the exact moment when
he would put an end to his thought and turn a little in
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his chair and say:
“Well, Mary—?” inviting her to take up the thread of
thought where he had dropped it.
And at that very moment he turned just so, and said:
“Well, Mary?” with the curious touch of diffidence which
she loved in him.
She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur
of the moment by the look of the people in the street
below. There was a motor-car with an old lady swathed in
blue veils, and a lady’s maid on the seat opposite, holding
a King Charles’s spaniel; there was a country-woman
wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle
of the road; there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the
state of the cattle market with a dissenting minister—so
she defined them.
She ran over this list without any fear that her companion
would think her trivial. Indeed, whether it was
due to the warmth of the room or to the good roast beef,
or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is called
making up one’s mind, certainly he had given up testing
the good sense, the independent character, the intelli
