He laughed. “Your theory is that a man ought to be able to return to the Muse as he comes back to his wife after he’s ceased to interest other women?”
“No; as he comes back to his wife after the day’s work is done.” A new thought came to me as I looked at him. “You ought to have had one,” I added.
He laughed again. “A wife, you mean? So that there’d have been some one waiting for me even if the Muse decamped?” He went on after a pause: “I’ve a notion that the kind of woman worth coming back to wouldn’t be much more patient than the Muse. But as it happens I never tried—because, for fear they’d chuck me, I put them both out of doors together.”
He turned his head and looked past me with a queer expression at the low panelled door at my back. “Out of that very door they went—the two of ‘em, on a rainy night like this: and one stopped and looked back, to see if I wasn’t going to call her—and I didn’t—and so they both went….”
III
“The Muse?” (said Merrick, refilling my glass and stooping to pat the terrier as he went back to his chair)—“well, you’ve met the Muse in the little volume of sonnets you used to like; and you’ve met the woman too, and you used to like her; though you didn’t know her when you saw her the other evening….
“No, I won’t ask you how she struck you when you talked to her: I know. She struck you like that stuff I gave you to read last night She’s conformed—I’ve conformed—the mills have caught us and ground us: ground us, oh, exceedingly small!
“But you remember what she was; and that’s the reason why I’m telling you this now….
“You may recall that after my father’s death I tried to sell the Works. I was impatient to free myself from anything that would keep me tied to New York. I don’t dislike my trade, and I’ve made, in the end, a fairly good thing of it; but industrialism was not, at that time, in the line of my tastes, and I know now that it wasn’t what I was meant for. Above all, I wanted to get away, to see new places and rub up against different ideas. I had reached a time of life—the top of the first hill, so to speak—where the distance draws one, and everything in the foreground seems tame and stale. I was sick to death of the particular set of conformities I had grown up among; sick of being a pleasant popular young man with a long line of dinners on my list, and the dead certainty of meeting the same people, or their prototypes, at all of them.
“Well—I failed to sell the Works, and that increased my discontent. I went through moods of cold unsociability, alternating with sudden flushes of curiosity, when I gloated over stray scraps of talk overheard in railway stations and omnibuses, when strange faces that I passed in the street tantalized me with fugitive promises. I wanted to be among things that were unexpected and unknown; and it seemed to me that nobody about me understood in the least what I felt, but that somewhere just out of reach there was some one who did, and whom I must find or despair….
“It was just then that, one evening, I saw Mrs. Trant for the first time.
“Yes: I know—you wonder what I mean. I’d known her, of course, as a girl; I’d met her several times after her marriage; and I’d lately been thrown with her, quite intimately and continuously, during a succession of country-house visits. But I had never, as it happened, really seen her….
“It was at a dinner at the Cumnors’; and there she was, in front of the very tapestry we saw her against the other evening, with people about her, and her face turned from me, and nothing noticeable or different in her dress or manner; and suddenly she stood out for me against the familiar unimportant background, and for the first time I saw a meaning in the stale phrase of a picture’s walking out of its frame. For, after all, most people are just that to us: pictures, furniture, the inanimate accessories of our little island-area of sensation. And then sometimes one of these graven images moves and throws out live filaments toward us, and the line they make draws us across the world as the moon-track seems to draw a boat across the water….
“There she stood; and as this queer sensation came over me I felt that she was looking steadily at me, that her eyes were voluntarily, consciously resting on me with the weight of the very question I was asking.
“I went over and joined her, and she turned and walked with me into the music-room. Earlier in the evening some one had been singing, and there were low lights there, and a few couples still sitting in those confidential corners of which Mrs. Cumnor has the art; but we were under no illusion as to the nature of these presences. We knew that they were just painted in, and that the whole of life was in us two, flowing back and forward between us. We talked, of course; we had the attitudes, even the words, of the others: I remember her telling me her plans for the spring and asking me politely about mine! As if there were the least sense in plans, now that this thing had happened!
“When we went back into the drawingroom I had said nothing to her that I might not have said to any other woman of the party; but when we shook hands I knew we should meet the next day—and the next….
“That’s the way, I take it, that Nature has arranged the beginning of the great enduring loves; and likewise of the little epidermal flurries. And how is a man to know where he is going?
“From the first my feeling for Paulina Trant seemed to me a grave business; but then the Enemy is given to producing that illusion. Many a man—I’m talking of the kind with imagination—has thought he was seeking a soul when all he wanted was a closer view of its tenement. And I tried—honestly tried—to make myself think I was in the latter case. Because, in the first place, I didn’t, just then, want a big disturbing influence in my life; and because I didn’t want to be a dupe; and because Paulina Trant was not, according to hearsay, the kind of woman for whom it was worth while to bring up the big batteries….
“But my resistance was only half-hearted. What I really felt—_all_ I really felt—was the flood of joy that comes of heightened emotion. She had given me that, and I wanted her to give it to me again. That’s as near as I’ve ever come to analyzing my state in the beginning.
“I knew her story, as no doubt you know it: the current version, I mean. She had been poor and fond of enjoyment, and she had married that pompous stick Philip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for wanting the thing that gives them half their attraction!
“People shook their heads over the marriage, and divided, prematurely, into Philip’s partisans and hers: for no one thought it would work. And they were almost disappointed when, after all, it did. She and her wooden consort seemed to get on well enough. There was a ripple, at one time, over her friendship with young Jim Dalham, who was always with her during a summer at Newport and an autumn in Italy; then the talk died out, and she and Trant were seen together, as before, on terms of apparent good-fellowship.
“This was the more surprising because, from the first, Paulina had never made the least attempt to change her tone or subdue her colours. In the gray Trant atmosphere she flashed with prismatic fires. She smoked, she talked subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they’d been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn husband and his cloud of cousins. I believe her frankness and directness struck them dumb. She moved like a kind of primitive Una through the virtuous rout, and never got a finger-mark on her freshness.