I  
The teacher of the sketching class at the evening school was a man who had no great capacity for enduring affection, but his handsome appearance often inspired in women those emotions which if not enduring are deep and disturbing. His own passions may have been deep but they were undeniably fickle.
The townspeople were proud of their new school for in addition to the daily curriculum evening instruction of an advanced modern kind was given. Of course all schools since the beginning of time have been modern at some period of their existence but this one was modern, so the vicar declared, because it was so blessedly hygienic. It was built upon a high tree-arboured slope overlooking the snug small town and on its western side stared ambiguously at a free upland country that was neither small nor snug. The seventeen young women and the nine young men were definitely, indeed articulately, inartistic, they were as un?sthetic as pork pies, all except Julia Tern, a golden-haired fine-complexioned fawn of a girl whose talent[226] was already beyond the reach of any instruction the teacher could give. He could not understand why she continued to attend his classes.
One evening she brought for his criticism a portrait sketch of himself.
“This is extraordinarily beautiful,” he murmured.
“Yes?” said Julia.
“I mean the execution, the presentation and so on.”
Julia did not reply. He stared at her picture of him, a delicately modelled face with a suggestion of nobility, an air that was kind as it was grave. The gravity and nobility which so pleased him were perhaps the effect of a high brow from which the long brown hair flowed thinly back to curve in a tidy cluster at his neck. Kindness beamed in the eyes and played around the thin mouth, sharp nose, and positive chin. What could have inspired her to make this idealization of himself, for it was idealization in spite of its fidelity and likeness? He knew he had little enough nobility of character—too little to show so finely—and as for that calm gravity of aspect, why gravity simply was not in him. But there it was on paper, deliberate and authentic, inscribed with his name—David Masterman 1910.
“When, how did you come to do it?”
“I just wanted it, you were a nice piece, I watched you a good deal, and there you are!” She said it jauntily but there was a pink flush in her cheeks.
“It’s delicious,” he mused, “I envy you. I can’t touch a decent head—not even yours. But why have[227] you idealized me so?” He twitted her lightly about the gravity and nobility.
“But you are like that, you are. That’s how I see you, at this moment.”
She did not give him the drawing as he hoped she would. He did not care to ask her for it—there was delicious flattery in the thought that she treasured it so much. Masterman was a rather solitary man of about thirty, with a modest income which he supplemented with the fees from these classes. He lived alone in a wooden bungalow away out of the town and painted numbers of landscapes, rather lifeless imitations, as he knew, of other men’s masterpieces. They were frequently sold.
Sometimes on summer afternoons he would go into woods or fields with a few of his pupils to sketch or paint farmhouses, trees, clouds, stacks, and other rural furniture. He was always hoping to sit alone with Julia Tern but there were other loyal pupils who never missed these occasions, among them the two Forrest girls, Ianthe the younger, and Katharine, daughters of a thriving contractor. Julia remained inscrutable, she gave him no opportunities at all; he could never divine her feelings or gather any response to his own, but there could be no doubt of the feelings of the Forrest girls—they quite certainly liked him enormously. Except for that, they too, could have no reason for continuing in his classes for both were as devoid of artistic grace as an inkstand. They brought fruit or chocolate to the classes and shared them with him. Their attentions, their mutual attentions, were manifested in[228] many ways, small but significant and kind. On these occasions Julia’s eyes seemed to rest upon him with an ironical gaze. It was absurd. He liked them well enough and sometimes from his shy wooing of the adorable but enigmatic Julia he would turn for solace to Ianthe. Yet strangely enough it was Kate, the least alluring to him of the three girls, who took him to her melancholy heart.
Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed, dressed in cream coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight, without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But she had an astonishing vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that exacerbated him and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did not linger, she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair, her dusky face, her creamy clothes, and her delightful rotundities. She had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.
One day he suddenly found himself alone with Ianthe in a glade of larch trees which they had all been sketching. They had loitered. He had been naming wild flowers which Ianthe had picked for the purpose and then thrown wantonly away. She spied a single plant of hellebore growing in the dimness under the closely planted saplings.
“Don’t! don’t!” he cried. He kept her from plucking it and they knelt down together to admire the white virginal flower.
[229]
His arm fell round Ianthe’s waist in a light casual way. He scarcely realized its presumption. He had not intended to do it; as far as that went he did not particularly want to do it, but there his arm was. Ianthe took no notice of the embrace and he felt foolish, he could not retreat until they rose to walk on; then Ianthe pressed close to his side until his arm once more stole round her and they kissed.
“Heavens above!” she said, “you do get away with it quick.”
“Life’s short, there’s no time to lose, I do as I’d be done by.”
“And there are so many of us! But glory,” said the jolly girl, taking him to her bosom, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”
She did not pick any more flowers and soon they were out of the wood decorously joining the others. He imagined that Julia’s gaze was full of irony, and the timid wonder in Kate’s eyes moved him uncomfortably. There was something idiotic in the whole affair.
Until the end of the summer he met Ianthe often enough in the little town or the city three miles off. Her uncouthness still repelled him; sometimes he disliked her completely, but she was always happy to be with him, charmingly fond and gay with all the endearing alertness of a pert bird.
Her sister Kate was not just the mere female that Ianthe was; at once sterner and softer her passions were more strong but their defences stood solid as a rock. In spite of her reserve she was always on the[230] brink of her emotions and they, unhappily for her, were often not transient, but enduring. She was nearly thirty, still unwed. Her dark beauty, for she, too, was fine, seemed to brood in melancholy over his attentions to the other two women. She was quiet, she had little to say, she seemed to stand and wait.
One autumn night at the school after the pupils had gone home he walked into the dim lobby for his hat and coat. Kate Forrest was there. She stood with her back to him adjusting her hat. She did not say a word nor did he address her. They were almost touching each other, there was a pleasant scent about her. In the classroom behind the caretaker was walking about the hollow-sounding floor, humming loudly as he clapped down windows and mounted the six chairs to turn out the six gas lamps. When the last light through the glazed door was gone and the lobby was completely dark Kate all at once turned to him, folded him in her arms and held him to her breast for one startling moment, then let him go, murmuring O ... O.... It made him strangely happy. He pulled her back in the gloom, whispering tender words. They walked out of the hall into the dark road and stopped to confront each other. The road was empty and dark except for a line of gas lamps that gleamed piercingly bright in the sharp air and on the polished surface of the road that led back from the hill down past her father’s villa. There were no lamps in the opposite direction and the road groped its way out into the dark country where he lived, a mile beyond the town. It[231] was windy and some unseen trees behind a wall near them swung and tossed with many pleasant sounds.
“I will come a little way with you,” Kate said.
“Yes, come a little way,” he whispered, pressing her arm, “I’ll come back with you.”
She took his arm and they turned towards the country. He could think of nothing to say, he was utterly subdued by his surprise; Kate was sad, even moody; but at last she said slowly: “I am unlucky, I always fall in love with men who can’t love me.”
“O but I can and do, dear Kate,” he cried lightly. “Love me, Kate, go on loving me, I’m not, well, I’m not very wicked.”
“No, no, you do not.” She shook her head mournfully: after a few moments she added: “It’s Julia Tern.”
He was astounded. How could she have known this, how could any one have known—even Julia herself? It was queer that she did not refer to his friendship with Ianthe; he thought that was much more obvious than his love for Julia. In a mood that he only half understood he began to deny her reproachful charge.
“Why, you must think me very fickle indeed. I really love you, dear Kate, really you.” His arm was around her neck, he smoothed her cheek fondly against his own. She returned his caresses but he could glimpse the melancholy doubt in her averted eyes.
“We often talk of you, we often talk of you at night, in bed, often.”
[232]
“What do you say about me—in bed? Who?”
“Ianthe and me. She likes you.”
“She likes me! What do you say about me—in bed?”
He hoped Ianthe had not been indiscreet but Kate only said: “She doesn’t like you as I do—not like this.”
Soon they began to walk back toward the town. He smiled once when, as their footsteps clattered unregularly upon the hard clean road, she skipped to adjust the fall of her steps to his.
“Do not come any further,” she begged as they neared the street lamps. “It doesn’t matter, not at all, what I’ve said to you. It will be all right. I shall see you again.”
Once more she put her arms around his neck murmuring: “Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.”
He watched her tripping away. When he turned homewards his mind was full of thoughts that were only dubiously pleasant. It was all very sweet, surprisingly sweet, but it left him uneasy. He managed to light a cigarette, but the wind blew smoke into his eyes, tore the charred end into fiery rags and tossed the sparkles across his shoulder. If it had only been Julia Tern!—or even Ianthe!—he would have been wholly happy, but this was disturbing. Kate was good-looking but these quietly passionate advances amazed him. Why had he been so responsive to her? He excused himself, it was quite simple; you could not let a woman down, a loving woman like that, not at once, a man should be kind. But what did she mean[233] when she spoke of always falling in love with men who did not like her? He tossed the cigarette away and turned up the collar of his coat for the faintest fall of warm rain blew against his face like a soft beautiful net. He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked sharply and forgettingly home.
II
 
Two miles away from the little town was the big city with tramways, electric light, factories, canals, and tens of thousands of people, where a few nights later he met Ianthe. Walking around and away from the happy lighted streets they came out upon the bank of a canal where darkness and loneliness were intensified by the silent passage of black water whose current they could divine but could not see. As they stepped warily along the unguarded bank he embraced her. Even as he did so he cursed himself for a fool to be so fond of this wretched imp of a girl. In his heart he believed he disliked her, but he was not sure. She was childish, artful, luscious, stupid—this was no gesture for a man with any standards. Silently clutching each other they approached an iron bridge with lamps upon it and a lighted factory beyond it. The softly-moving water could now be seen—the lamps on the bridge let down thick rods of light into its quiet depths and beyond the arch the windows of the factory, inverted in the stream, bloomed like baskets of fire with flaming fringes among the eddies caused by the black pillars. A boy shuffled across the bridge whistling a tune; there was the rumble[234] and trot of a cab. Then all sounds melted into a quiet without one wave of air. The unseen couple had kissed, Ianthe was replying to him:
“No, no, I like it, I like you.” She put her brow against his breast. “I like you, I like you.”
His embracing hand could feel the emotion streaming within the girl.
“Do you like me better than her?”
“Than whom?” he asked.
Ianthe was coy. “You know, you know.”
Masterman’s feelings were a mixture of perturbation and delight, delight at this manifestation of jealousy of her sister which was an agreeable thing, anyway, for it implied a real depth of regard for him; but he was perturbed for he did not know what Kate had told this sister of their last strange meeting. He saluted her again exclaiming: “Never mind her. This is our outing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like her,” Ianthe added na?vely, “she is so awfully fond of you.”
“O confound her,” he cried, and then, “you mustn’t mind me saying that so, so sharply, you don’t mind, do you?”
Ianthe’s lips were soft and sweet. Sisters were quite unscrupulous, Masterman had heard of such cases before, but he had tenderness and a reluctance to wound anybody’s susceptibility, let alone the feelings of a woman who loved. He was an artist not only in paint, but in sentiment, and it is possible that he excelled in the less tangible medium.
“It’s a little awkward,” he ventured. Ianthe didn’t[235] understand, she didn’t understand that at all.
“The difficulty, you see,” he said with the air of one handling whimsically a question of perplexity that yet yielded its amusement, “is ... is Kate.”
“Kate?” said Ianthe.
“She is so—so gone, so absolutely gone.”
“Gone?”
“Well, she’s really really in love, deeply, deeply,” he said looking away anywhere but at her sister’s eyes.
“With Chris Halton, do you mean?”
“Ho, ho!” he laughed, “Halton! Lord, no, with me, with me, isn’t she?”
“With you!”
But Ianthe was quite positive even a little ironical about that. “She is not, she rather dislikes you, Mr. Prince Charming, so there. We speak of you sometimes at night in bed—we sleep together. She knows what I think of you but she’s quite, well she doesn’t like you at all—she acts the heavy sister.”
“O,” said Masterman, groping as it were for some light in his darkness.
“She—what do you think—she warns me against you,” Ianthe continued.
“Against me?”
“As if I care. Do you?”
“No, no. I don’t care.”
They left the dark bank where they had been standing and walked along to the bridge. Halfway up its steps to the road he paused and asked: “Then who is it that is so fond of me?”
[236]
“O you know, you know.” Ianthe nestled blissfully in his arm again.
“No, but who is it, I may be making another howler. I thought you meant Kate, what did she warn you of, I mean against me?”
They were now in the streets again, walking towards the tram centre. The shops were darkened and closed, but the cinemas lavished their unwanted illuminations on the street. There were no hurrying people, there was just strolling ease; the policemen at corners were chatting to other policemen now in private clothes. The brilliant trams rumbled and clanged and stopped, the saloons were full and musical.
“What did she warn you against?” he repeated.
“You,” chuckled Ianthe.
“But what about? What has she got against me?”
“Everything. You know, you know you do.” The archness of Ianthe was objectively baffling but under it all he read its significance, its invitation.
He waited beside her for a tram but when it came he pleaded a further engagement in the city. He had no other engagement, he only wanted to be alone, to sort out the things she had dangled before his mind, so he boarded the next car and walked from the Tutsan terminus to his cottage. Both girls were fond of him, then—Ianthe’s candour left him no room for doubt—and they were both lying to each other about him. Well, he didn’t mind that, lies were a kind of protective colouring, he lied himself whenever it was necessary, or suited him. Not often, but truth was not always possible to sensitive minded men. Why, after all,[237] should sympathetic mendacity be a monopoly of polite society? “But it’s also the trick of thieves and seducers, David Masterman,” he muttered to himself. “I’m not a thief, no, I’m not a thief. As for the other thing, well, what is there against me—nothing, nothing at all.” But a strange voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark road, “Not as yet, not as yet.”
He walked on more rapidly.
Three women! There was no doubt about the third, Ianthe had thought of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist! He felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had an invincible prejudice against marriage not as an institution but because he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His emotions were deep but unprolonged. Love was love, but marriage turned love into the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of the marriage bell—a passing bell—earth at his feet would burst into flame and the sky above would pour upon him an unquenching profusion of tears. Love was a fine and ennobling thing, but though he had the will to love he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that his own capacity for love was a meandering strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia Tern—and that had the strongest flavour of any emotion that had ever beset him, no matter how brief its term—even that was a deviating zigzag loyalty. For he wanted to go on being jolly and friendly with Ianthe if only Julia did not get to know. With Kate, too, that tender melancholy woman; she would be vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher whom Ianthe fondly imagined her[238] sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor devil, he would not thank D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop all this; however had he, of all men, come to be plunged so suddenly into a state of things for which he had shown so little fancy in the past? Julia would despise him, she would be sure to despise him, sure to; and yet if he could only believe she would not it would be pleasant to go on being friendly with Ianthe pending ... pending what?
Masterman was a very pliant man, but as things shaped themselves for him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia at all that he made love.
III
 
The amour, if it may be described as such, of David Masterman and Kate Forrest took a course that was devoid of ecstasy, whatever other qualities may have illuminated their desires. It was an affair in which the human intentions, which are intellectual, were on both sides strong enough to subdue the efforts of passion, which are instinctive, to rid itself of the customary curbs; and to turn the clash of inhibitions wherein the man proposes and the woman rejects into a conflict not of ideal but of mere propriety. They were like two negative atoms swinging in a medium from which the positive flux was withdrawn; for them the nebul? did not “cohere into an orb.”
Kate’s fine figure was not so fine as Julia Tern’s; her dusky charms were excelled by those of Ianthe; but her melancholy immobility, superficial as it was,[239] had a suggestive emotional appeal that won Masterman away from her rivals. Those sad eyes had but to rest on his and their depths submerged him. Her black hair had no special luxuriance, her stature no unusual grace; the eyes were almost blue and the thin oval face had always the flush of fine weather in it; but her strong hands, though not as white as snow, were paler than milk, their pallor was unnatural. Almost without an effort she drew him away from the entangling Ianthe, and even the image of Julia became but a fair cloud seen in moonlight, delicate and desirable but very far away; it would never return. Julia had observed the relations between them—no discerning eye could misread Kate’s passion—and she gave up his class, a secession that had a deep significance for him, and a grief that he could not conceal from Kate though she was too wise to speak of it.
But in spite of her poignant aspect—for it was in that appearance she made such a powerful appeal to Masterman; the way she would wait silently for him on the outside of a crowd of the laughing chattering students was touching—she was an egotist of extraordinary type. She believed in herself and in her virtue more strongly than she believed in him or their mutual love. By midsummer, after months of wooing, she knew that the man who so passionately moved her and whose own love she no less powerfully engaged was a man who would never marry, who had a morbid preposterous horror of the domesticity and devotion that was her conception of living bliss. “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world,” he said. He, too,[240] knew that the adored woman, for her part, could not dream of a concession beyond the limits her virginal modesty prescribed. He had argued and stormed and swore that baffled love turns irrevocably to hatred. She did not believe him, she even smiled. But he had behaved grossly towards her, terrified her, and they had parted in anger.
He did not see her for many weeks. He was surprised and dismayed that his misery was so profound. He knew he had loved her, he had not doubted its sincerity but he had doubted its depth. Then one September evening she had come back to the class and afterwards she had walked along the road with him towards his home.
“Come to my house,” he said, “you have never been to see it.”
She shook her head, it was getting dark, and they walked on past his home further into the country. The eve was late but it had come suddenly without the deliberation of sunset or the tenuity of dusk. Each tree was a hatful of the arriving blackness. They stood by a white gate under an elm, but they had little to say to each other.
“Come to my house,” he urged again and again; she shook her head. He was indignant at her distrust of him. Perhaps she was right but he would never forgive her. The sky was now darker than the road; the sighing air was warm, with drifting spots of rain.
“Tell me,” she suddenly said taking his arm, “has anybody else ever loved you like that.”
[241]
He prevaricated: “Like what?” He waited a long time for her answer. She gave it steadily.
“Like you want me to love you.”
He, too, hesitated. He kissed her. He wanted to tell her that it was not wise to pry.
“Tell me,” she urged, “tell me.”
“Yes,” he replied. He could not see her plainly in the darkness, but he knew of the tears that fell from her eyes.
“How unreasonable,” he thought, “how stupid!” He tried to tell the truth to her—the truth as he conceived it—about his feelings towards her, and towards those others, and about themselves as he perceived it.
She was almost alarmed, certainly shocked.
“But you don’t believe such things,” she almost shivered, “I’m sure you don’t, it isn’t right, it is not true.”
“It may not be true,” he declared implacably, “but I believe it. The real warrant for holding a belief is not that it is true but that it satisfies you.” She did not seem to understand that; she only answered irrelevantly. “I’ll make it all up to you some day. I shall not change, David, toward you. We have got all our lives before us. I shan’t alter—will you?”
“Not alter!” he began angrily but then subduedly added with a grim irony that she did not gather in: “No, I shall not alter.”
She flung herself upon his breast murmuring: “I’ll make it all up to you, some day.”
He felt like a sick-minded man and was glad when they parted. He went back to his cottage grumbling[242] audibly to himself. Why could he not take this woman with the loving and constant heart and wed her? He did not know why, but he knew he never would do that. She was fine to look upon but she had ideas (if you could call them ideas) which he disliked. Her instincts and propensities were all wrong, they were antagonistic to him, just, as he felt, his were antagonistic to her. What was true, though, was her sorrow at what she called their misunderstandings and what was profound, what was almost convincing, was her assumption (which but measured her own love for him) that he could not cease to love her. How vain that was. He had not loved any woman in the form she thought all love must take. These were not misunderstandings, they were just simply at opposite ends of a tilted beam; he the sophisticated, and she the innocent beyond the reach of his sophistries. But Good Lord, what did it all matter? what did anything matter? He would not see her again. He undressed, got into bed. He thought of Julia, of Ianthe, of Kate. He had a dream in which he lay in a shroud upon a white board and was interrogated by a saint who carried a reporter’s notebook and a fountain pen.
“What is your desire, sick-minded man?” the saint interrogated him, “what consummation would exalt your languid eyes?”
“I want the present not to be. It is neither grave nor noble.”
“Then that is your sickness. That mere negation is at once your hope and end.”
[243]
“I do not know.”
“If the present so derides the dignified past surely your desire lies in a future incarnating beautiful old historic dreams?”
“I do not know.”
“Ideals are not in the past. They do not exist in any future. They rush on, and away, beyond your immediate activities, beyond the horizons that are for ever fixed, for ever charging down upon us.”
“I do not know.”
“What is it you do know?” asked the exasperated saint, jerking his fountain pen to loosen its flow, and Masterman replied like a lunatic:
“I know that sealing wax is a pure and beautiful material and you get such a lot of it for a penny.”
He woke and slept no more. He cursed Kate, he sneered at Julia, he anathematized Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild once more their broken images.
IV
 
Between the sisters there grew a feud; Ianthe behaved evilly when she discovered their mutual infatuation for their one lover. The echoes of that feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him, touched him and moved him on Kate’s behalf: all his loyalty belonged to her. What did it matter if he could not fathom his own desire, that Ianthe was still his for a word, that Kate’s implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?
[244]
They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremors of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of her; but all her qualms were lulled. He did not appear in any of the half-expected negligee, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.
“My dear!” he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: “Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously, irresistibly lovely. How do you do it—or how do I fail so?”
She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a she............