“Certainly, I never should have thought you such an idealist, such a sensitivist,” said Cecile softly.
“Have I leave to speak to you like this?”
“Why not?” she asked, to escape the necessity of replying directly.
“You might possibly fear lest I should compromise you …”
“I do not fear that for an instant!” she replied, haughtily, as in utter contempt of the world.
They were silent for a moment. That delicate, fragile thing, that might so easily break, still hung between them, thin, like a gossamer between them, lightly joining them together. An atmosphere of embarrassment hovered about them. They felt that the words which had passed between them were full of significance. Cecile waited for him to continue; but as he was silent she boldly took up the conversation:
“On the contrary, I value it highly that you have spoken to me like this. You were right; you have indeed given me much of yourself. I wish to assure you of my sympathy. I believe I understand you better now that I see you better.”
“I want very much to ask you something,” he said, “but I dare not.”
She smiled to encourage him.
“No, really I dare not,” he repeated.
“Shall I guess?” Cecile asked, jestingly.
“Yes; what do you think it is?”
She glanced round the room until her eye rested on the little table covered with books.
“The loan of Emerson’s Essays?” she hazarded.
But Quaerts shook his head and laughed.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I have bought the volume long ago. No, no; it is a much greater favour than the loan of a book.”
“Be bold then, and ask it,” Cecile went on jestingly.
“I dare not,” he said again. “I should not know how to put my request into words.”
She looked at him earnestly, into his eyes gazing steadily upon her, and then she said:
“I know what you want to ask me, but I will not say it. You must do that: so seek your words.”
“If you know, will you permit me then to say it?”
“Yes, for if my surmise is correct, it is nothing that you may not ask.”
“And yet it would be a great favour … But let me warn you beforehand that I look upon myself as someone of a much lower order than you.”
A shadow passed across her face, her mouth had a little contraction of pain, and she pressed him, a little unnerved:
“I beg you, ask. Just ask me simply.”
“It is a wish, then, that sympathy were sealed between you and me. Would you allow me to come to you when I am unhappy? I always feel so happy in your presence, so soothed, so different from the state of ordinary life, for with you I live only my better, my true self – you know what I mean.”
Everything melted again within her into weakness and heaviness; he placed her upon too high a pedestal; she was happy, because of what he asked her, but sad that he felt himself less than she.
“Very well,” she said, nevertheless, with a clear voice. “It is as you wish.”
And she gave him her hand, her beautiful, long, white hand, where on one white finger gleamed the sparks of jewels, white and blue. A moment, very reverently, he pressed her finger-tips between his own.
“Thank you,” he said in a hushed voice, a voice that was a little broken.
“Are you often unhappy?” asked Cecile.
“Always …” he replied, almost humbly, and as though embarrassed at having to confess it. “I do not know what it means, only that it has always been so. And yet from my childhood I have enjoyed much that people call happiness. But yet, yet … I suffer through myself. It is I who do myself the most hurt. And after that the world … and I must always hide myself. To the world I only show the individual who rides and fences and hunts, who goes into society and is dangerous for young married women …”
He laughed with his bad, low laugh, looking aslant into her eyes; she remained calmly gazing at him.
“Beyond that I give them nothing. I hate them; I have nothing in common with them, thank God!”
“You are too proud,” said Cecile. “Each of those people has his own sorrow, just as you have; the one suffers a little more coarsely; but they all suffer. And in that they all resemble yourself.”
“Each taken by himself, perhaps! But that is not how I take them; I take them in the lump, and I hate them. Do not you?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I do not believe I am capable of hating.”
“You are strong within yourself. You are sufficient to yourself.”
“No, no, not that, really not; but you … you are unjust towards the world.”
“Possibly: why does it always give me pain? Alone with you I forget that it exists, the outside world. Do you understand now why I was so sorry to see you at Mrs Hoze’s? You seemed to me to have lowered yourself. And it was because … because of this peculiarity I saw in you that I did not seek your acquaintance earlier. This acquaintance was fatally bound to come, and so I waited …”
Fate, what would it bring her? thought Cecile. But she could not think deeply; she seemed to herself to be dreaming of beautiful and subtle things which did not exist for other people, which only floated between them two.
There was no longer need to look upon them as illusions, it was as if she had overtaken the future! One short moment only did this endure as happiness; then again she felt pain, on account of his reverence.
VI
He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected to ring for the lamp to be lighted, and the twilight of the late afternoon darkened in the room. She sat motionless, and looked out before her at the withered trees.
“Why should I not be happy?” she thought. “He is happy with me; he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why then can I not be happy?”
She felt pain; her soul suffered, it seemed to her for the first time. This, perhaps, was because now for the first time her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to her that another woman must have spoken to him, to Quaerts, just now.
An exalted woman: a woman of illusions – the woman, in fact, he saw in her, and not the woman she was: lowly, a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him: “Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet, and my eyes seek you above me.”
Should she have told him that she deceived him? Should she have asked him: “How is it that I lower myself when I mix with other people? What then do you see in me? I am only a woman, a woman of feebleness and dreams. I have come to love you, I do not know why.”
Should she have opened his eyes and said to him: “Look upon your own soul in a mirror; look upon yourself and see how you are a god walking upon the earth: a god who knows everything because he feels it, feels it because he knows it …” Everything? … No … not everything; for he deceived himself, this god, and thought to find an equal in her, who was but his creature. Should she have declared all this, at the cost of her modesty and his happiness? For this happiness – she felt perfectly assured – lay in seeing her in the way that he saw her.
“With me he is happy!” she thought. “And sympathy is sealed between us … It was not friendship, nor did he speak of love; he called it simply sympathy … With me he feels only his real self, and not that other … the brute that is in him … the brute …”
Then there came drifting over her a gloom as of gathering clouds, and she shuddered before that which suddenly rolled through her: a broad stream of blackness, as though its waters were filled with mud, which bubbled up in troubled rings, growing larger and larger. She took fear before this stream, and tried not to see it; but it sullied all her landscapes – so bright before, with their horizons of light – now with a sky of ink smeared above, like filthy night.