Watersprings, Arthur Christopher Benson [free novels .txt] 📗

to county business if he could, and clear his mind of all foolish regrets. Love and marriage--he was ten years too late! He had dawdled on, taking the line of least resistance, and he was now revealed to himself in a true and unsparing light. He paced swiftly on, and presently entered the wood. His feet fell soft on the grassy road among the coverts.

Suddenly, as he turned a corner, he saw a little open glade to the right. A short way up the glade stood two figures--Guthrie and Maud--engaged in conversation. They were standing facing each other. She seemed to be expostulating with him in a laughing way; he stood bareheaded, holding his hat in his hand, eagerly defending himself. The pose of the two seemed to show an easy sort of comradeship. Maud was holding a stick in both hands behind her, and half resting upon it. They seemed entirely absorbed in what they were saying. Howard could not bear to intrude upon the scene. He fell back among the trees, retraced his steps, and then sat down on a grassy bank, a little off the path, and waited. It was the last confirmation of his fears. It was not quite a lover-like scene, but they evidently understood each other, and were wholly at their ease together, while Guthrie's admiring and passionate look did not escape him. He rested his head in his hands, and bore the truth as he might have borne a physical pain. The summer woods, the green thickets, the sunlight on the turf, the white clouds, the rich plain just visible through the falling tree-trunks, all seemed to him like a vision seen by a spirit in torment, something horribly unreal and torturing. The two streams of beauty and misery appeared to run side by side, so distinct, so unblending; but the horrible fact was that though sorrow was able not only to assert its own fiery power, like the sting of some malignant insect, it could also obliterate and efface joy; it could even press joy into its service, to accentuate its torment; while the joy and beauty of life seemed wholly unable to soothe or help him, but were brushed aside, just as a stern soldier, armed and mailed, could brush aside the onslaught of some delicate and frenzied boy. Was pain the stronger power, was it the ultimate power? In that dark moment, Howard felt that it was. Joy seemed to him like a little pool of crystalline water, charming enough if tended and sheltered, but a thing that could be soiled and scattered in a moment by the onrush of some foul and violent beast.

He came at last to the rendezvous. Miss Merry sat at her post transferring to a little block of paper a smeared and streaky picture of the chalk-pit, which seemed equally unintelligible at whatever angle it might be held. Jack was couched at a little distance in the heather, smoking a pipe. Howard went and sat down moodily beside him. "An odd thing, a picnic," said Jack musingly; "I am not sure it is not an invention of the devil. Is anything the matter, Howard? You look as if things had gone wrong. You don't mind that nonsense of Guthrie's, do you? I was an ass to get him to do it; I hate doing a stupid thing, and he is simply wild with me. It's no good saying it is not like, because it is in a way, but of course it's only a rag. It isn't absurd when you do it, only when someone else does."

"Oh no, I don't mind about that," said Howard; "do make that plain to Guthrie. I am out of sorts, I think; one gets bothered, you know--what is called the blues."

"Oh, I know," said Jack sympathetically; "I don't suffer from them myself as a rule, but I have got a touch of them to-day. I can't understand what everyone is up to. Fred Guthrie has got the jumps. It looks to me," he went on sagely, "as if he was what is commonly called in love: but when the other person is one's sister, it seems strange. Maud isn't a bad girl, as they go, but she isn't an angel, and still less a saint; but Fred has no eyes for anyone else; I can't screw a sensible word out of him. These young people!" said Jack with a sour grimace; "you and I know better. One ought to leave the women alone; there's something queer about them; you never know where you are with them."

Howard regarded him in silence for a moment: it did not seem worth while to argue; nothing seemed worth while. "Where are they?" he said drearily.

"Oh, goodness knows!" said Jack; "when I last saw them he was beating down the ferns with a stick for Maud to go through. He's absolutely demented, and she is at one of her games. I think I shall sheer off, and go to visit some sick people, like the governor; that's about all I feel up to."

At this moment, however, the truants appeared, walking silently out of a glade. Howard had an obscure feeling that something serious had happened--he did not know what. Guthrie looked dejected, and Maud was evidently preoccupied. "Oh, damn the whole show!" said Jack, getting up. "Let's get out of this!"

"We lost our way," said Maud, rather hurriedly, "and couldn't find our way back."

Maud went up to Miss Merry, asked to see her sketch, and indulged in some very intemperate praise. Guthrie came up to Howard, and stammered through an apology for his rudeness.

"Oh, don't say anything more," said Howard. "Of course I didn't mind! It really doesn't matter at all."

The day was beginning to decline; and in an awkward silence, only broken by inconsequent remarks, the party descended the hill, regained the carriages, and drove off in mournful silence. As the Vicarage party drove away, Jack glanced at Howard, raised his eyes in mock despair, and gave a solemn shake of his head.

Howard followed with Miss Merry, and talked wildly about the future of English poetry, till they drove in under the archway of the Manor and his penance was at an end.


XIX


DESPONDENCY

Howard spent some very unhappy days after that, mostly alone. They were very active at the Vicarage making expeditions, fishing, playing lawn-tennis, and once or twice pressed him to join them. But he excused himself on the ground that he must work at his book; he could not bear to carry his despondency and his dolorous air into so blithe a company; and he was, moreover, consumed by a jealousy which humiliated him. If Guthrie was destined to win Maud's love he should have a fair field; and yet Howard's imagination played him many fevered tricks in those days, and the thought of what might be happening used to sting him into desperation. His own mood alternated between misery and languor. He used to sit staring at his book, unable to write a word, and became gradually aware that he had never been unhappy in his life before. That, then, was what unhappiness meant, not a mood of refined and romantic melancholy, but a raging fire of depression that seemed to burn his life away, both physically and mentally, with intervals of drowsy listlessness.

He would have liked to talk to his aunt, but could not bring himself to do so. She, on the other hand, seemed to notice nothing, and it was a great relief to him that she never commented upon his melancholy and obvious fatigue, but went on in her accustomed serene way, which evoked his courtesy and sense of decorum, and made him behave decently in spite of himself. Miss Merry seemed much more inclined to sympathise, and Howard used to intercept her gaze bent upon him in deep concern.

One afternoon, returning from a lonely walk, he met Maud going out of the Manor gate. She looked happy, he thought. He stopped and made a few commonplace remarks. She looked at him rather strangely, he felt, and seemed to be searching his face for some sign of the old goodwill; but he hardened his heart, though he would have given worlds to tell her what was in his mind; but he felt that any reconstruction of friendship must be left till a later date, when he might again be able to conciliate her sisterly regard. She seemed to him to have passed through an awakening of some kind, and to have bloomed both in mind and body, with her feet on the threshold of vital experience, and the thought that it was Guthrie who could evoke this upspringing of life within her was very bitter to him.

He trod the valley of humiliation hour by hour, in these lonely days, and found it a very dreary place. It was wretched to him to feel that he had suddenly discovered his limitations. Not only could he not have his will, could not taste the fruit of love which had seemed to hang almost within his reach, but the old contented life seemed to have faded and collapsed about him.

That night his aunt asked him about his book, and he said he was not getting on well with it. She asked why, and he said that he had been feeling that it was altogether too intellectual a conception; that he had approached it from the side of REASON, as if people argued themselves into faith, and had treated religion as a thesis which could be successfully defended; whereas the vital part of it all, he now thought, was an instinct, perhaps refined by inherited thought, but in its practical manifestations a kind of choice, determined by a natural liking for what was attractive, and a dislike of what was morally ugly.

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "that is true, I am sure. But it can be analysed for all that, though I agree with you that no amount of analysis will make one act rightly. But I believe," she went on, "that clearness of view helps one, though not perhaps at the time. It is a great thing to see what motives are merely conventional and convenient, and to find out what one really regards as principles. To look a conventional motive in the face deprives it of its power; and one can gradually disencumber oneself of all sorts of complicated impulses, which have their roots in no emotion. It is only the motives which are rooted in emotion that are vital."

Then, after a pause, she said, "Of course I have seen of late that you have been dissatisfied with something. I have not liked to ask you about it; but if it would help you to talk about it, I hope you will. It is wonderful how talking about things makes one's mind clear. It isn't anything that others say or advise that helps one, yet one gains in clearness. But you must do as you like about this, Howard. I don't want to press you in any way."

"Thank you very much," said Howard. "I know that you would hear me with patience, and might perhaps advise me if anyone could; but it isn't that. I have got myself into a strange difficulty; and what I need is not clearness, but simply courage to face what I know and perceive. My great lack hitherto is that I have gone through things without feeling them, like a swallow dipping in a lake; now I have got to sink and drown. No," he added, smiling, "not to drown, I hope, but to find a new life in the ruins of the old. I have been on the