The Sea Lady Part 29

"Very."

"And yet----?"

"Well?"

He seemed to hesitate at a dangerous topic. "The other," he said.

Melville's silence bade him go on.

He plunged from his prepared att.i.tude. "What is it? Why should--this being--come into my life, as she has done, if it _is_ so simple? What is there about her, or me, that has pulled me so astray? She has, you know.

Here we are at sixes and sevens! It's not the situation, it's the mental conflict. Why am I pulled about? She has got into my imagination. How? I haven't the remotest idea."

"She's beautiful," meditated Melville.

"She's beautiful certainly. But so is Miss Glendower."

"She's very beautiful. I'm not blind, Chatteris. She's beautiful in a different way."

"Yes, but that's only the name for the effect. _Why_ is she very beautiful?"

Melville shrugged his shoulders.

"She's not beautiful to every one."

"You mean?"

"Bunting keeps calm."

"Oh--_he_----!"

"And other people don't seem to see it--as I do."

"Some people seem to see no beauty at all, as we do. With emotion, that is."

"Why do we?"

"We see--finer."

"Do we? Is it finer? Why should it be finer to see beauty where it is fatal to us to see it? Why? Unless we are to believe there is no reason in things, why should this--impossibility, be beautiful to any one anyhow? Put it as a matter of reason, Melville. Why should _her_ smile be so sweet to me, why should _her_ voice move me! Why her's and not Adeline's? Adeline has straight eyes and clear eyes and fine eyes, and all the difference there can be, what is it? An infinitesimal curving of the lid, an infinitesimal difference in the lashes--and it shatters everything--in this way. Who could measure the difference, who could tell the quality that makes me _swim_ in the sound of her voice.... The difference? After all, it's a visible thing, it's a material thing! It's in my eyes. By Jove!" he laughed abruptly. "Imagine old Helmholtz trying to gauge it with a battery of resonators, or Spencer in the light of Evolution and the Environment explaining it away!"

"These things are beyond measurement," said Melville.

"Not if you measure them by their effect," said Chatteris. "And anyhow, why do they take us? That is the question I can't get away from just now."

My cousin meditated, no doubt with his hands deep in his trousers'

pockets. "It is illusion," he said. "It is a sort of glamour. After all, look at it squarely. What is she? What can she give you? She promises you vague somethings.... She is a snare, she is deception. She is the beautiful mask of death."

"Yes," said Chatteris. "I know."

And then again, "I know.

"There is nothing for me to learn about that," he said. "But why--why should the mask of death be beautiful? After all-- We get our duty by good hard reasoning. Why should reason and justice carry everything?

Perhaps after all there are things beyond our reason, perhaps after all desire has a claim on us?"

He stopped interrogatively and Melville was profound. "I think," said my cousin at last, "Desire _has_ a claim on us. Beauty, at any rate----

"I mean," he explained, "we are human beings. We are matter with minds growing out of ourselves. We reach downward into the beautiful wonderland of matter, and upward to something--" He stopped, from sheer dissatisfaction with the image. "In another direction, anyhow," he tried feebly. He jumped at something that was not quite his meaning. "Man is a sort of half-way house--he must compromise."

"As you do?"

"Well. Yes. I try to strike a balance."

"A few old engravings--good, I suppose--a little luxury in furniture and flowers, a few things that come within your means. Art--in moderation, and a few kindly acts of the pleasanter sort, a certain respect for truth; duty--also in moderation. Eh? It's just that even balance that I cannot contrive. I cannot sit down to the oatmeal of this daily life and wash it down with a temperate draught of beauty and water. Art!... I suppose I'm voracious, I'm one of the unfit--for the civilised stage.

I've sat down once, I've sat down twice, to perfectly sane, secure, and reasonable things.... It's not my way."

He repeated, "It's not my way."

Melville, I think, said nothing to that. He was distracted from the immediate topic by the discussion of his own way of living. He was lost in egotistical comparisons. No doubt he was on the verge of saying, as most of us would have been under the circ.u.mstances: "I don't think you quite understand my position."

"But, after all, what is the good of talking in this way?" exclaimed Chatteris abruptly. "I am simply trying to elevate the whole business by dragging in these wider questions. It's justification, when I didn't mean to justify. I have to choose between life with Adeline and this woman out of the sea."

"Who is Death."

"How do I know she is Death?"

"But you said you had made your choice!"

"I have."

He seemed to recollect.

"I have," he corroborated. "I told you. I am going back to see Miss Glendower to-morrow.

"Yes." He recalled further portions of what I believe was some prepared and ready-phrased decision--some decision from which the conversation had drifted. "The need of my life is discipline, the habit of persistence, of ignoring side issues and wandering thoughts. Discipline!"

"And work."

"Work, if you like to put it so; it's the same thing. The trouble so far has been I haven't worked hard enough. I've stopped to speak to the woman by the wayside. I've paltered with compromise, and the other thing has caught me.... I've got to renounce it, that is all."

"It isn't that your work is contemptible."

"By Jove! No. It's--arduous. It has its dusty moments. There are places to climb that are not only steep but muddy----"

"The world wants leaders. It gives a man of your cla.s.s a great deal.

Leisure. Honour. Training and high traditions----"

"And it expects something back. I know. I am wrong--have been wrong anyhow. This dream has taken me wonderfully. And I must renounce it.

After all it is not so much--to renounce a dream. It's no more than deciding to live. There are big things in the world for men to do."