Literary Love

by Gabrielle Vigot

  “I — I had to.”

  “Why, Miss Honeychurch, why?”

  Terror came over her, and she lied again. She made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. He heard her in silence, and then said: “My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me” — dreamily; she was not alarmed — “that you are in a muddle.”

  She shook her head.

  “Take an old man’s word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror — on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle. Do you remember in that church, when you pretended to be annoyed with me and weren’t? Do you remember before, when you refused the room with the view? She flushed at his mention of taking their rooms. Did he have knowledge of the hidden passageway? Could George have revealed their secret passions to his father? She felt almost dizzy, as if her view of the world was spinning away. Those were muddles — little, but ominous — and I am fearing that you are in one now.” She was silent. “Don’t trust me, Miss Honeychurch. Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.” She was still silent. “‘Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’ I think he puts it well. Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along — especially the function of Love.” Then he burst out excitedly; “That’s it; that’s what I mean. You love George!” And after his long preamble, the three words burst against Lucy like waves from the open sea, tearing asunder the compartments she had so carefully constructed within, so that passion mixed with her conscious mind.

  “But you do,” he went on, not waiting for contradiction. “You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it. You won’t marry the other man for his sake.”

  “How dare you!” gasped Lucy, with the roaring of waters in her ears. “Oh, how like a man! — I mean, to suppose that a woman is always thinking about a man.”

  “But you are.”

  She summoned physical disgust.

  “You’re shocked, but I mean to shock you. It’s the only hope at times. I can reach you no other way. You must marry, or your life will be wasted. You have gone too far to retreat. I have no time for the tenderness, and the comradeship, and the poetry, and the things that really matter, and for which you marry. I know that, with George, you will find them, and that you love him. Then be his wife. He is already part of you. Though you fly to Greece, and never see him again, or forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

  Lucy began to cry with anger, and though her anger passed away soon, her tears remained.

  “I only wish poets would say this, too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul! Your soul, dear Lucy! I hate the word now, because of all the cant with which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls. I cannot say how they came nor whither they go, but we have them, and I see you ruining yours. I cannot bear it. It is again the darkness creeping in; it is hell.” Then he checked himself. “What nonsense I have talked — how abstract and remote! And I have made you cry! Dear girl, forgive my prosiness; marry my boy. When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love — Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

  She could not understand him; the words were indeed remote. Yet as he spoke the darkness was withdrawn, veil after veil, and she saw to the bottom of her soul.

  “Then, Lucy — ”

  “You’ve frightened me,” she moaned. “Cecil — Mr. Beebe — the ticket’s bought — everything.” She fell sobbing into the chair. “I’m caught in the tangle. I must suffer and grow old away from him. I cannot break the whole of life for his sake. They trusted me.”

  A carriage drew up at the front-door.

  “Give George my love — once only. Tell him ‘muddle.’” Then she arranged her veil, while the tears poured over her cheeks inside.

  “Lucy — ”

  “No — they are in the hall — oh, please not, Mr. Emerson — they trust me — ”

  “But why should they, when you have deceived them?”

  Mr. Beebe opened the door, saying: “Here’s my mother.”

  “You’re not worthy of their trust.”

  “What’s that?” said Mr. Beebe sharply.

  “I was saying, why should you trust her when she deceived you?”

  “One minute, mother.” He came in and shut the door.

  “I don’t follow you, Mr. Emerson. To whom do you refer? Trust whom?”

  “I mean she has pretended to you that she did not love George. They have loved one another all along.”

  Mr. Beebe looked at the sobbing girl. He was very quiet, and his white face, with its ruddy whiskers, seemed suddenly inhuman. A long black column, he stood and awaited her reply.

  “I shall never marry him,” quavered Lucy.

  A look of contempt came over him, and he said, “Why not?”

  “Mr. Beebe — I have misled you — I have misled myself — ”

  “Oh, rubbish, Miss Honeychurch!”

  “It is not rubbish!” said the old man hotly. “It’s the part of people that you don’t understand.”

  Mr. Beebe laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder pleasantly.

  “Lucy! Lucy!” called voices from the carriage.

  “Mr. Beebe, could you help me?”

  He looked amazed at the request, and said in a low, stern voice: “I am more grieved than I can possibly express. It is lamentable, lamentable — incredible.”

  “What’s wrong with the boy?” fired up the other again.

  “Nothing, Mr. Emerson, except that he no longer interests me. Marry George, Miss Honeychurch. He will do admirably.”

  He walked out and left them. They heard him guiding his mother upstairs.

  “Lucy!” the voices called.

  She turned to Mr. Emerson in despair. But his face revived her. It was the face of a saint who understood.

  “Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view. Ah, dear, if I were George, and gave you one kiss, it would make you brave. You have to go cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle that you have made yourself; and your mother and all your friends will despise you, oh, my darling, and rightly, if it is ever right to despise. George still dark, all the tussle and the misery without a word from him. Am I justified?” Into his own eyes tears came. “Yes, for we fight for more than Love or Pleasure; there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.”

  Lucy thought of the first kiss from George and the many kisses and passionate couplings that followed, clandestine, hidden, and all tucked away to be nothing more than a secret. But why? Why did she hide from her heart? His gentle touch was so loving and kind. Why would she run from his lovemaking when that was all she desired? What possessed her to deceive all that was good and right in life, causing such a muddle for her and others? Of course, she loved George, she loved him with her body and with her soul.

  “You kiss me,” said the girl. “You kiss me. I will try.”

  He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world. Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive — she spoke at once — his salutation remained. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world
’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She “never exactly understood,” she would say in after years, “how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.”

  Chapter XX: The End of the Middle Ages

  The Miss Alans did go to Greece, but they went by themselves. They alone of this little company will double Malea and plough the waters of the Saronic gulf. They alone will visit Athens and Delphi, and either shrine of intellectual song — that upon the Acropolis, encircled by blue seas; that under Parnassus, where the eagles build and the bronze charioteer drives undismayed towards infinity. Trembling, anxious, cumbered with much digestive bread, they did proceed to Constantinople, they did go round the world. The rest of us must be contented with a fair, but a less arduous, goal. Italiam petimus: we return to the Pension Bertolini.

  George said it was his old room.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Lucy; “because it is the room I had, and I had your father’s room. I forget why; Charlotte made me, for some reason.”

  He knelt on the tiled floor, and laid his face in her lap.

  “George, you baby, get up.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be a baby?” murmured George.

  Unable to answer this question, she put down his sock, which she was trying to mend, and gazed out through the window. It was evening and again the spring.

  “Oh, bother Charlotte,” she said thoughtfully. “What can such people be made of?”

  “Same stuff as parsons are made of.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Quite right. It is nonsense.”

  “Now you get up off the cold floor, or you’ll be starting rheumatism next, and you stop laughing and being so silly.”

  “Why shouldn’t I laugh?” he asked, pinning her with his elbows, and advancing his face to hers. “What’s there to cry at? Kiss me here.” He indicated the spot where a kiss would be welcome.

  He was a boy after all. When it came to the point, it was she who remembered the past, she into whose soul the iron had entered, she who knew whose room this had been last year. It endeared him to her strangely that he should be sometimes wrong.

  “Any letters?” he asked.

  “Just a line from Freddy.”

  “Now kiss me here; then here.”

  Then, threatened again with rheumatism, he strolled to the window, opened it (as the English will), and leant out. There was the parapet, there the river, there to the left the beginnings of the hills. The cab-driver, who at once saluted him with the hiss of a serpent, might be that very Phaethon who had set this happiness in motion twelve months ago. A passion of gratitude — all feelings grow to passions in the South — came over the husband, and he blessed the people and the things who had taken so much trouble about a young fool. He had helped himself, it is true, but how stupidly!

  All the fighting that mattered had been done by others — by Italy, by his father, by his wife.

  “Lucy, you come and look at the cypresses; and the church, whatever its name is, still shows.”

  “San Miniato. I’ll just finish your sock.”

  “Signorino, domani faremo uno giro,” called the cabman, with engaging certainty.

  George told him that he was mistaken; they had no money to throw away on driving.

  And the people who had not meant to help — the Miss Lavishes, the Cecils, the Miss Bartletts! Ever prone to magnify Fate, George counted up the forces that had swept him into this contentment.

  “Anything good in Freddy’s letter?”

  “Not yet.”

  His own content was absolute, but hers held bitterness: the Honeychurches had not forgiven them; they were disgusted at her past hypocrisy; she had alienated Windy Corner, perhaps for ever.

  “What does he say?”

  “Silly boy! He thinks he’s being dignified. He knew we should go off in the spring — he has known it for six months — that if mother wouldn’t give her consent we should take the thing into our own hands. They had fair warning, and now he calls it an elopement. Ridiculous boy — ”

  “Signorino, domani faremo uno giro — ”

  “But it will all come right in the end. He has to build us both up from the beginning again. I wish, though, that Cecil had not turned so cynical about women. He has, for the second time, quite altered. Why will men have theories about women? I haven’t any about men. I wish, too, that Mr. Beebe — ”

  “You may well wish that.”

  “He will never forgive us — I mean, he will never be interested in us again. I wish that he did not influence them so much at Windy Corner. I wish he hadn’t — But if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run.”

  “Perhaps.” Then he said more gently: “Well, I acted the truth — the only thing I did do — and you came back to me. So possibly you know.” He turned back into the room. “Nonsense with that sock.” He carried her to the window, so that she, too, saw all the view. They sank upon their knees, invisible from the road, they hoped, and began to whisper one another’s names. Ah! it was worth while; it was the great joy that they had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamt. They were silent.

  “Signorino, domani faremo — ”

  “Oh, bother that man!”

  But Lucy remembered the vendor of photographs and said, “No, don’t be rude to him.” Then with a catching of her breath, she murmured: “Mr. Eager and Charlotte, dreadful frozen Charlotte. How cruel she would be to a man like that!”

  “Look at the lights going over the bridge.”

  “But this room reminds me of Charlotte. How horrible to grow old in Charlotte’s way! To think that evening at the rectory that she shouldn’t have heard your father was in the house. For she would have stopped me going in, and he was the only person alive who could have made me see sense. You couldn’t have made me. When I am very happy” — she kissed him — “I remember on how little it all hangs. If Charlotte had only known, she would have stopped me going in, and I should have gone to silly Greece, and become different for ever.”

  “But she did know,” said George; “she did see my father, surely. He said so.”

  “Oh, no, she didn’t see him. She was upstairs with old Mrs. Beebe, don’t you remember, and then went straight to the church. She said so.”

  George was obstinate again. “My father,” said he, “saw her, and I prefer his word. He was dozing by the study fire, and he opened his eyes, and there was Miss Bartlett. A few minutes before you came in. She was turning to go as he woke up. He didn’t speak to her.”

  Then they spoke of other things — the desultory talk of those who have been fighting to reach one another, and whose reward is to rest quietly in each other’s arms. It was long ere they returned to Miss Bartlett, but when they did her behaviour seemed more interesting. George, who disliked any darkness, said: “It’s clear that she knew. Then, why did she risk the meeting? She knew he was there, and yet she went to church.”

  They tried to piece the thing together.

  As they talked, an incredible solution came into Lucy’s mind. She rejected it, and said: “How like Charlotte to undo her work by a feeble muddle at the last moment.” But something in the dying evening, in the roar of the river, in their very embrace warned them that her words fell short of life, and George whispered: “Or did she mean it?”

  “Mean what?”

  “Signorino, domani faremo uno giro — ”

  Lucy bent forward and said with gentleness: “Lascia, prego, lascia. Siamo sposati.”

  “Scusi tanto, signora,” he replied in tones as gentle and whipped up his horse.

  “Buona sera — e grazie.”

  “Niente.”

  The cabman drove away singing.

  “Mean what, George?”

  He whispered: “Is it this? Is this possible? I’ll put a marvel to you. That your cousin has always hoped. That from the very first moment we met, she hoped, far down
in her mind, that we should be like this — of course, very far down. That she fought us on the surface, and yet she hoped. I can’t explain her any other way. Can you? Look how she kept me alive in you all the summer; how she gave you no peace; how month after month she became more eccentric and unreliable. The sight of us haunted her — or she couldn’t have described us as she did to her friend. There are details — it burnt. I read the book afterwards. She is not frozen, Lucy, she is not withered up all through. She tore us apart twice, but in the rectory that evening she was given one more chance to make us happy. We can never make friends with her or thank her. But I do believe that, far down in her heart, far below all speech and behaviour, she is glad.”

  “It is impossible,” murmured Lucy, and then, remembering the experiences of her own heart, she said: “No — it is just possible.”

  Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean.

  The view was forever perfect.

  “Make love to me, George.”

  They fell to the floor, joined lovingly in each other’s arms. George pressed his lips to hers, found her tongue, and together they swirled their tongues as they smiled and lightly laughed.

  Only the thin veil of her nightgown separated them. George rolled on top of her and squeezed himself between her thighs. She was free from any restraint. He had long ago removed her undergarments, though he did not pocket them this time.

  She wrapped her legs around his waist and with her arms clung to his neck. He rose against her and impressed upon her his ferocity and his urgent desire to satisfy her every need.