Years of Plenty Part 30

Ecstasy to know her gladness, to see her quick smile of confidence because he was confident! How could he have feared and doubted? He could not let her draw away: his arms must have her.

"I'm never going to be afraid again," he said. "I know what was wrong now."

"Well?"

"I didn't care about anything. I didn't know what I wanted, while everything lay in front of me. I didn't feel, though I had all the world to feel about. I didn't love, though I had all the world to love. I just drifted. Now I have what I want."

She was silent. Across the tumult of his soul stole things of the senses, the pulsing of her blood, the scent of that brown witchery of hair, the touch of her tired hand, the vision of a glistening bow of silk on a poised foot: above all, the divine sense of his own grasping possession, her clinging weakness.

"I know now what I want," he went on rapidly. "I want the same thing to go on that has just begun, the thing that has brushed all the hardness and ugliness out of the world and made the future easy.

You've done all that. I want you."

He crushed her to him roughly, almost hurting her: and he knew by her stillness that it pleased her so to be hurt.

"You're not going back now," he whispered fiercely. "You're not going to knock to pieces the thing you've built. India is a cool heaven now; don't make it a fiery h.e.l.l. Work is all doing and creating. Don't make it all drudgery. Oh, I'm selfish. You're so perfect, and I can only talk of my own work, my own troubles. Freda, I'm sorry. I----"

Still she was silent.

"Oh, say something," he begged. "Forgive me for being selfish."

"There's nothing to forgive."

"Then say--you've said you cared for me--say you love me."

In a moment he had forgotten his remorse and again was claiming, insisting. And she, knowing that love can be, even must be, selfish and imperious, was glad that he should claim her and obeyed his command.

Of course Martin stayed in London over Christmas and into the New Year, living with a fullness he had never known, seeing the purpose and fineness of things which he had despised and neglected. How strange it was that all the world should be changed by that one weak figure, seemingly so ineffectual! how strange that one mortal should carry for another the keys of heaven! How trivial seemed all his philosophy with its objectivity of this and that when he discovered how subjective all his outlook was, how the presence or the absence of a loved one could make or mar the colour-medley of a sunset or the beauty of a tree against the sky.

One thing was certain: he gloried in possession. All his loneliness was forgotten now and, as he paced the streets, he could look upon the other couples without the pang of jealousy that once had stung him.

There would be no more glances thrown furtively at pa.s.sing women, no turning of an eager eye for bygone faces, no more emptiness and yearning. Deep magic lay in the thought that Freda, with her smile, and her quick mind, and her infinite grace of movement, was his to possess, to own. He was not ashamed to glory in these proprietary relations nor was she ashamed to accept them. She even welcomed them, yielding to Martin with an utter abandonment of self. She wanted only to be his, to be his loved possession, to help him and to share humbly in his triumphs and successes.

One night indeed he repented, not of his love, but of his manner of love. He felt the indignity of ownership.

They had gone, in a fit of intellectual enthusiasm, to see a play called _Drift_. At a small outlying theatre two young men of ideas were completing the n.o.ble task of self-imposed bankruptcy by giving the British public a season of "good drama." And the public naturally helped on the work by the easy method of staying away. The house was barely half full when, after the hammerings customary in these circles, the curtain went up.

_Drift_, a play in four acts by Villiers Wentworth, turned out to be a fair specimen of that now antiquated genre, The New Drama. It had the monosyllabic t.i.tle, the insistent realism, the contempt for form and dramatic convention, the arid conversation with lapses of brilliance, the admirable acting, and, above all, the Great Gloom. It was naturally a play with a point, showing, justly and forcibly, the hopeless inadequacy of modern life to provide the average man and woman with anything like a Unity of Interest. The characters drifted from home which they dreaded to work which they loathed and in the evening they made the return journey. Nothing held their lives together, nothing remained as a permanent, unifying interest. There was love, but, as Mr Villiers Wentworth pointed out, the young man is barred socially and economically from indulging in anything but hole-and-corner affairs just when he most needs real sympathy.

"Not a good play," said Martin as they walked out into the flaring streets and joined the joyous welter of confusion at Piccadilly. "The man's got no sense of humour and he thinks that everyone is miserable who hasn't got two hundred a year. The poor are just as happy as the rich. Of course they oughtn't to be, but they are."

"But there was a point," said Freda, "about unity of interest. It may be obvious, but it's true. Didn't you drift? Haven't I drifted?"

They turned into a restaurant.

As they supped they forgot about the play. But later Martin's mind returned to the subject.

"Come back," said Freda suddenly. "Penny."

"Hand over," he answered, smiling as he started.

"Well, what is it?"

"You, of course."

"I'm sorry for that. You looked so sad."

"I'm feeling ashamed," he confessed.

"What of?"

"Of the way I've thought of you. I've been so selfish. I only cared for my own escape from drifting. It's been my work, my life, my love.

I have been thinking of you as the person who would make my life perfect. It's been all me, me, me. When we first met I thought of you and your work. Now it's only me and my work."

"That's as it should be."

"No, no, it isn't. A year ago I should have hated myself for thinking like this."

"Perhaps you have learned as well as lived."

"I've been a brute and there's an end of it." He was deriving a secret pleasure from his self-depreciation. There was bliss in humiliating himself before her, in grovelling at the feet of her whom he adored.

If he could not get the conventional thrill from the confession of past affairs and failings, he would achieve the ecstasy of self-torture by laying bare a loftier mistake.

But she laughed at him. "Silly Billy," she said. "Pay the waiter and I'll tell you."

She told him as they drove back together in their taxi.

"After all," she began, "compare my work with yours. Mine is drudgery.

Yours is big and important. It doesn't matter what becomes of mine, but it matters a lot what becomes of yours, I hate mine and I love yours. I want to give myself up to yours, to make it easier and better. Can't you see, Martin dear, that isn't selfishness or unselfishness. Those words don't count in such a case. If we love, then I'm you and you're me, and one person can't give to himself or take away from himself surely."

"It sounds so specious," he said. "And yet I still feel greedy, as though I were denying your right to be yourself."

"I don't want to be myself. I want to be different. I'm as greedy as you are and more so, only differently. As it is, the word isn't real.

We're both giving and both taking and there's an end of it."

He was silent for a moment. "It's no use my trying to say how perfect you are," he said at last.

"Dear, delightful, serious, conscience-stricken gloomkins," she laughed at him. "What does all this matter ... how we share things, I mean?

The only real thing is enthusiasm, wanting and feeling and loving. You were at a loose end until you began to feel; you couldn't work, you couldn't do anything. Nor could I. And now work is all changed and seems better and easier. The office is a palace for me, India a pleasure garden for you. Do stop worrying and be sensible."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll try and be good. You're always right.

This taxi goes far too fast. We're in your street."

"Bother," she said.

"Let's tell him to drive on somewhere else and come back in another one."

"No. You've spent far too much and we've done that often enough. I'm going to be a good girl to-night."

"Tyrant."