第49章 THE SEVENTH(10)

All sorts of people know about it....We went very far."She stopped short."Well?" said Sir Richmond.

"He did die...."

Another long pause."They told me Caston had been killed.But someone hinted--or I guessed--that there was more in it than an ordinary casualty.

"Nobody, I think, realizes that I know.This is the first time I have ever confessed that I do know.He was--shot.He was shot for cowardice.""That might happen to any man," said Sir Richmond presently.

"No man is a hero all round the twenty-four hours.Perhaps he was caught by circumstances, unprepared.He may have been taken by surprise.""It was the most calculated, cold-blooded cowardice imaginable.He let three other men go on and get killed...""No.It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know nothing about.It was vile, contemptible cowardice and meanness.It fitted in with a score of ugly little things Iremembered.It explained them all.I know the evidence and the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because they were exactly in character....And that, you see, was my man.That was the lover I had chosen.That was the man to whom I had given myself with both hands."Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed in the same even tones of careful statement."I wasn't disgusted, not even with myself.About him I was chiefly sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a life that suited and protected him, to the war.About myself, I was stunned and perplexed.I had the clearest realization that what you and I have been calling the bright little personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over and done with.I felt as though it was my body they had shot.

And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and nothing particular to do with them.""That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.

"It didn't seem so at the time.I felt I had to got hold of something or go to pieces.I couldn't turn to religion.I had no religion.And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that.Ihad a kind of revelation one night.'Either I find out what all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of something bigger than myself.And becoming that.That's why I have been making a sort of historical pilgrimage....That's my story, Sir Richmond.That's my education....Somehow though your troubles are different, it seems to me that my little muddle makes me understand how it is with you.What you've got, this idea of a scientific ordering of the world, is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been feeling my way towards.I want to join on.I want to got hold of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a still greater economic and educational control of which it is a part.I want to make that idea a part of myself.Rather Iwant to make myself a part of it.When you talk of it Ibelieve in it altogether."

"And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you."Section 9

Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's confidences.His dispute with Dr.Martineau was present in his mind, so that he did not want to make love to her.But he was extremely anxious to express his vivid sense of the value of her friendship.And while he hesitated over this difficult and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself, and in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's thoughts.

"Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself," she said; "now that I have told you so much.I did a thing that still puzzles me.I was filled with a sense of hopeless disaster in France and I suppose I had some sort of desperate idea of saving something out of the situation....Irenewed my correspondence with Gunter Lake.He made the suggestion I knew he would make, and I renewed our engagement.""To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?""Yes."

"But you don't love him?"

"That's always been plain to me.But what I didn't realize, until I had given my promise over again, was that I dislike him acutely.""You hadn't realized that before?"

"I hadn't thought about him sufficiently.But now I had to think about him a lot.The other affair had given me an idea perhaps of what it means to be married to a man.And here Iam drifting back to him.The horrible thing about him is the steady ENVELOPING way in which he has always come at me.

Without fellowship.Without any community of ideas.Ready to make the most extraordinary bargains.So long as he can in any way fix me and get me.What does it mean? What is there behind those watching, soliciting eyes of his? I don't in the least love him, and this desire and service and all the rest of it he offers me--it's not love.It's not even such love as Caston gave me.It's a game he plays with his imagination."She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond's mind.

"This is illuminating," he said."You dislike Lake acutely.

You always have disliked him."

"I suppose I have.But it's only now I admit it to myself.""Yes.And you might, for example, have married him in New York before the war.""It came very near to that."

"And then probably you wouldn't have discovered you disliked him.You wouldn't have admitted it to yourself.""I suppose I shouldn't.I suppose I should have tried to believe I loved him.""Women do this sort of thing.Odd! I never realized it before.And there are endless wives suppressing an acute dislike.My wife does.I see now quite clearly that she detests me.Reasonably enough.From her angle I'm entirely detestable.But she won't admit it, won't know of it.She never will.To the end of my life, always, she will keep that detestation unconfessed.She puts a face on the matter.We both do.And this affair of yours....Have you thought how unjust it is to Lake?""Not nearly so much as I might have done.""It is unfair to him.Atrociously unfair.He's not my sort of man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the peculiar laws of his being.He seems to me a crawling sort of lover with an immense self-conceit at the back of his crawlingness.""He has," she endorsed.