The Incomplete Amorist Part 39

"My good chap, that's the situation in which our emotions are always landing us--our confounded emotions and the conventions of Society."

"And how are you to know whether the thing's love--or--all those other things?"

"You don't know: you can't know till it's too late for your knowing to matter. Marriage is like spinach. You can't tell that you hate it till you've tried it. Only--"

"Well?"

"I think I've heard it said," Vernon voiced his own sudden conviction, very carelessly, "that love wants to give and pa.s.sion wants to take.

Love wants to possess the beloved object--and to make her happy.

Desire wants possession too--but the happiness is to be for oneself; and if there's not enough happiness for both so much the worse. If I'm talking like a Sunday School book you've brought it on yourself."

"I like it," said Temple.

"Well, since the Dissenting surplice has fallen on me, I'll give you a test. I believe that the more you love a woman the less your thoughts will dwell on the physical side of the business. You want to take care of her."

"Yes," said Temple.

"And then often," Vernon went on, surprised to find that he wanted to help the other in his soul-searchings, "if a chap's not had much to do with women--the women of our cla.s.s, I mean--he gets a bit dazed with them. They're all so nice, confound them. If a man felt he was falling in love with two women at once, and he had the tiresome temperament that takes these things seriously, it wouldn't be a bad thing for him to go away into the country, and moon about for a few weeks, and see which was the one that bothered his brain most. Then he'd know where he was, and not be led like a lamb to the slaughter by the wrong one.

They can't both get him, you know, unless his intentions are strictly dishonourable."

"I wasn't putting the case that either of them wished to get him,"

said Temple carefully.

Vernon nodded.

"Of course not. The thing simplifies itself wonderfully if neither of them wants to get him. Even if they both do, matters are less complicated. It's when only one of them wants him that it's the very devil for a man not to be sure what _he_ wants. That's very clumsily put--what I mean is--"

"I see what you mean," said Temple impatiently.

"--It's the devil for him because then he lets himself drift and the one who wants him collars him and then of course she always turns out to be the one he didn't want. My observations are as full of wants as an advertis.e.m.e.nt column. But the thing to do in all relations of life is to make up your mind what it is that you _do_ want, and then to jolly well see that you get it. What I want is a pipe."

He filled and lighted one.

"You talk," said Temple slowly, "as though a man could get anyone--I mean anything, he wanted."

"So he can, my dear chap, if he only wants her badly enough."

"Badly enough?"

"Badly enough to make the supreme sacrifice to get her."

"?" Temple enquired.

"Marriage," Vernon answered; "there's only one excuse for marriage."

"Excuse?"

"Excuse. And that excuse is that one couldn't help it. The only excuse one will have to offer, some day, to the recording angel, for all one's other faults and follies. A man who _can_ help getting married, and doesn't, deserves all he gets."

"I don't agree with you in the least," said Temple,--"about marriage, I mean. A man _ought_ to want to get married--"

"To anybody? Without its being anybody in particular?"

"Yes," said Temple stoutly. "If he gets to thirty without wanting to marry any one in particular, he ought to look about till he finds some one he does want. It's the right and proper thing to marry and have kiddies."

"Oh, if you're going to be Patriarchal," said Vernon. "What a symbolic dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There's the tragedy of romance, in a nut-sh.e.l.l. Yes, life's a beastly rotten show, and the light won't last more than another two hours."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness"]

"Your hints are always as delicate as gossamer," said Temple. "Don't throw anything at me. I'm going."

He went, leaving his secret in Vernon's hands.

"Poor old Temple! That's the worst of walking carefully all your days: you do come such an awful cropper when you do come one. Two women. The Jasmine lady must have been practising on his poor little heart.

Heigh-ho, I wish she could do as much for me! And the other one?

_Her_--I suppose."

The use of the p.r.o.noun, the disuse of the grammar pulled him up short.

"By Jove," he said, "that's what people say when--But I'm not in love--with anybody. I want to work."

But he didn't work. He seldom did now. And when he did the work was not good. His easel held most often the portrait of Betty that had been begun at Long Barton--unfinished, but a disquieting likeness. He walked up and down his room not thinking, but dreaming. His dreams took him to the warren, in the pure morning light; he saw Betty; he told himself what he had said, what she had said.

"And it was I who advised her to come to Paris. If only I'd known then--"

He stopped and asked himself what he knew now that he had not known then, refused himself the answer, and went to call on Lady St. Craye.

Christmas came and went; the black winds of January swept the Boulevards, and snow lay white on the walls of court and garden.

Betty's life was full now.

The empty cage that had opened its door to love at Long Barton had now other occupants. Ambition was beginning to grow its wing feathers. She could draw--at least some day she would be able to draw. Already she had won a prize with a charcoal study of a bare back. But she did not dare to name this to her father, and when he wrote to ask what was the subject of her prize drawing she replied with misleading truth that it was a study from nature. His imagination pictured a rustic cottage, a water-wheel, a castle and mountains in the distance and cows and a peasant in the foreground.

But though her life was now crowded with new interests that first-comer was not ousted. Only he had changed his plumage and she called him Friendship. She blushed sometimes and stamped her foot when she remembered those meetings in the summer mornings, her tremors, her heart-beats. And oh, the "drivel" she had written in her diary!

"Girls ought never to be allowed to lead that 'sheltered home life,'"

she said to Miss Voscoe, "with nothing real in it. It makes your mind all swept and garnished and then you hurry to fill it up with rubbish."

"That's so," said her friend.

"If ever _I_ have a daughter," said Betty, "she shall set to work at _something_ definite the very instant she leaves school--if it's only Hebrew or algebra. Not just Parish duties that she didn't begin, and doesn't want to go on with. But something that's her _own_ work."

"You're beginning to see straight. I surmised you would by and by. But don't you go to the other end of the see-saw, Miss Daisy-Face!"

"What do you mean?" asked Betty. It was the morning interval when students eat patisserie out of folded papers. The two were on the window ledge of the Atelier, looking down on the convent garden where already the buds were breaking to green leaf.

"Why, there's room for the devil even if your flat ain't swept and garnished. He folds up mighty small, and gets into less s.p.a.ce than a poppy-seed."

"What do you mean?" asked Betty again.