第78章

"I began to find my life unsatisfactory," he started afresh. "It seemed to me meaningless." He paused again, but felt that this, at any rate, was true, and that on these lines he could go on.

"All this money-making and working ten hours a day in an office, what's it FOR? When one's a boy, you see, one's head is so full of dreams that it doesn't seem to matter what one does. And if you're ambitious, you're all right; you've got a reason for going on. Now my reasons ceased to satisfy me. Perhaps I never had any. That's very likely now I come to think of it. (What reason is there for anything, though?) Still, it's impossible, after a certain age, to take oneself in satisfactorily. And I know what carried me on"--for a good reason now occurred to him--"I wanted to be the savior of my family and all that kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of course--a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, Isuppose, I've lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I'm at the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That's what my unhappiness amounts to, Mary."There were two reasons that kept Mary very silent during this speech, and drew curiously straight lines upon her face. In the first place, Ralph made no mention of marriage; in the second, he was not speaking the truth.

"I don't think it will be difficult to find a cottage," she said, with cheerful hardness, ignoring the whole of this statement. "You've got a little money, haven't you? Yes," she concluded, "I don't see why it shouldn't be a very good plan."They crossed the field in complete silence. Ralph was surprised by her remark and a little hurt, and yet, on the whole, rather pleased. He had convinced himself that it was impossible to lay his case truthfully before Mary, and, secretly, he was relieved to find that he had not parted with his dream to her. She was, as he had always found her, the sensible, loyal friend, the woman he trusted; whose sympathy he could count upon, provided he kept within certain limits. He was not displeased to find that those limits were very clearly marked.

When they had crossed the next hedge she said to him:

"Yes, Ralph, it's time you made a break. I've come to the same conclusion myself. Only it won't be a country cottage in my case;it'll be America. America!" she cried. "That's the place for me!

They'll teach me something about organizing a movement there, and I'll come back and show you how to do it."If she meant consciously or unconsciously to belittle the seclusion and security of a country cottage, she did not succeed; for Ralph's determination was genuine. But she made him visualize her in her own character, so that he looked quickly at her, as she walked a little in front of him across the plowed field; for the first time that morning he saw her independently of him or of his preoccupation with Katharine. He seemed to see her marching ahead, a rather clumsy but powerful and independent figure, for whose courage he felt the greatest respect.

"Don't go away, Mary!" he exclaimed, and stopped.

"That's what you said before, Ralph," she returned, without looking at him. "You want to go away yourself and you don't want me to go away.

That's not very sensible, is it?"

"Mary," he cried, stung by the remembrance of his exacting and dictatorial ways with her, "what a brute I've been to you!"It took all her strength to keep the tears from springing, and to thrust back her assurance that she would forgive him till Doomsday if he chose. She was preserved from doing so only by a stubborn kind of respect for herself which lay at the root of her nature and forbade surrender, even in moments of almost overwhelming passion. Now, when all was tempest and high-running waves, she knew of a land where the sun shone clear upon Italian grammars and files of docketed papers.

Nevertheless, from the skeleton pallor of that land and the rocks that broke its surface, she knew that her life there would be harsh and lonely almost beyond endurance. She walked steadily a little in front of him across the plowed field. Their way took them round the verge of a wood of thin trees standing at the edge of a steep fold in the land.

Looking between the tree-trunks, Ralph saw laid out on the perfectly flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small gray manor-house, with ponds, terraces, and clipped hedges in front of it, a farm building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their trunks. His mind at once was filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katharine; the gray house and the intense blue sky gave him the feeling of her presence close by. He leant against a tree, forming her name beneath his breath:

"Katharine, Katharine," he said aloud, and then, looking round, saw Mary walking slowly away from him, tearing a long spray of ivy from the trees as she passed them. She seemed so definitely opposed to the vision he held in his mind that he returned to it with a gesture of impatience.

"Katharine, Katharine," he repeated, and seemed to himself to be with her. He lost his sense of all that surrounded him; all substantial things--the hour of the day, what we have done and are about to do, the presence of other people and the support we derive from seeing their belief in a common reality--all this slipped from him. So he might have felt if the earth had dropped from his feet, and the empty blue had hung all round him, and the air had been steeped in the presence of one woman. The chirp of a robin on the bough above his head awakened him, and his awakenment was accompanied by a sigh. Here was the world in which he had lived; here the plowed field, the high road yonder, and Mary, stripping ivy from the trees. When he came up with her he linked his arm through hers and said: