And the thing did not stop even there. For the very lowering of the moral atmosphere of his life produced by his uxoriousness led to a subtle undermining of his resistance to the image of the dancer. The more absorbing did his present voluptuousness become, the less did he expel from his imagination the attraction of the other woman. Both he and Nelly were deliberately seeking to drug their differences by exploiting their attraction to one another.
That this kind of abandonment must eventually lead to satiety and reaction they did not seem to realize. That it was destroying the more exquisite moments of their life they did vaguely feel; but they felt it without understanding what they felt. And by slow degrees there entered into the fabric of their love some black threads of abominable hostility which came very near to hate. They loved and hated because they loved without restraint. They put poison into their love, because they separated love from life.
Had not Richard been twice as old as Nelly this ruining of the delicacy of their relations might never have occurred. What he was really guilty of was the exploitation of her emotions by his sophisticated senses. He was ‘seducing’, so to speak, his own lawful wife and turning her into a more delicate reproduction of his Old irresponsible amours. The worst of it was that while these former excesses had in no way interfered with his old work, his new, more spiritualized purpose was most seriously imperilled by what was occurring now.
The engaging, ingratiating charm of that insidious Sussex landscape lent itself with fatal ease to the process of spiritual deterioration. He bathed himself in the beauty of those rolling hills and those rich pastures. He drank in, through every pore of his skin, that magical air, those blue skies, those soft languorous mists, those warm, fragrant rains. And the girl he loved became for him the material medium through which he worshipped all this, through which he lost himself in all this. In loving Nelly he was loving the trees, the hedges, the lanes, the meadows, and the thyme-scented grass. In embracing Nelly he was embracing the very body of the sweet earth which, just then, was so luxuriously responsive.
It is true that there came to him certain moments when he was seized by a vague uneasiness. These moments were generally connected with Canyot; for, sure as he was of his wife’s material fidelity, he was by no means so sure now of her mental interest, of her spiritual rapport. She seemed to escape him, even while he held her, and that obscure disillusionment at the bottom of her eyes fell away sometimes into a region of thoughts and feelings to which he had no entrance, the clue of it quite lacking and all its ways dark.
Physically she was his without reserve; mentally she had slipped aside into a land of her own; it was at the moments when he suspected that this land of her soul’s escape from him was not barred to his rival, that he was seized with a vague uneasiness and discomfort.
One morning, early in July, Richard intercepted the postman in the outskirts of the village and received from him another letter from Elise Angel.
The fact that he had every intention of reading every word of this communication, and that he put it away in his pocket with a thrill of furtive delight, was an evidence of how far he had drifted from his original purpose, of how he had changed in these brief two months.
He actually took it with him, without any feeling of shame, to the secluded shelter of the overarching hazels of the lane that led to Nelly’s Happy Valley.
Here, sitting under the hedge, he read it with absorbed unrestrained fascination.
It was a characteristic scrawl, written in the dancer’s bold imperious hand; its passionate words, conveying like a far-flung torch a trail of fire into his languid senses, thrilled him with forbidden longings.
She told him that she had accepted an engagement at a New York theatre that would begin sometime in October.
‘I shall be there till Christmas,’ she wrote, ‘couldn’t you possibly come over?’
He tore this letter into the tiniest fragments and poked it with his stick under the dead leaves, into the soft mould.
As he did so there came over him a sense of shame at this concealment, at the furtive cowardice of this action.
‘It’s their fault,’ he said to himself, apostrophizing women in general. ‘If they weren’t so damned jealous, if things were really free — as they will be, perhaps, in two hundred years! — there would be no need for these tricks.’
Then it occurred to him to wonder what he would feel if he caught his wife in the act of kissing Rob Canyot. ‘Hang it all!’ he muttered in the retired honesty of this sudden soliloquy with his soul; ‘I’m cursed if I should like that very much! I don’t think that would be very nice!’
Then he turned his attention to Elise and tried to conjure up a situation in which he surprised her in some amorous colloquy with another person. ‘The devil!’ he confessed to himself. ‘I shouldn’t like that very much either!’
What did he want then? The answer was certainly naïve in its veracity. He wanted to move agreeably and openly, as if it were quite the accustomed thing, between Nelly his wife and Elise his friend! That, and nothing less than that, was precisely what he wanted. Was he no better, then, than an oriental Turk? No! he was no Turk; he was a civilized heathen. He wanted them both; but certainly not together in one house! There, at any rate, he had advanced in refinement upon the devotees of Allah.
But how would he like it if both Nelly and Elise moved ‘agreeably and openly’ between himself and two other men?
‘The devil!’ he muttered. ‘I couldn’t put up with that! I should run away from that.’ ‘But,’ whispered his cynical demon, ‘suppose that were the recognized custom in your two-hundred-years-hence community?’
I should find someone who really satisfied me, he thought, and persuade her to break this confounded custom. She and I would be the only faithful ones. This new line of thought led him to the conclusion that what he really wanted was not Nelly in England and Elise in America, but some wonderful ‘Elise-Nelly’ with whom he would be completely contented on both sides.
Having reached this conclusion he promptly rejected it with disgust. Such a double-natured female would be an odious monstrosity, like a peewit with the hooked beak of a sparrowhawk!
Then where was he, after his rambling meditation? Precisely where the bulk of humanity was, after its experiments of four thousand years!
It seemed, that particular July day, as though the hot sun on the ripening corn and the blazing red poppies had roused a feverish ferment in more than one human cranium. For no sooner had Richard reached the churchyard, where Canyot armed with a billhook was cutting the grass under the wall, while Nelly, perched on the top of the wall, with bare head and swinging legs, was watching him mischievously, than he became aware that their conversation was tense and startling.
At his approach Canyot rose to a perpendicular position, billhook in hand, and surveyed him frowningly and intensely. Nelly fixed upon him a glance of the most mocking and mysterious elfishness.
‘You’ve just arrived at the right moment,’ she remarked. ‘Robert has been proposing to me that we all go off to America together!’
‘Why to America?’ said Richard lightly, leaning back against the wall by her side and giving her skirt a little discreet pull so that it should conceal her ankles.