And the morning after this conversation, he woke up to an ordered mind — thoughts and emotions in their proper places where he could see and lay his hand upon them. The strength and weakness of his temperament betrayed themselves plainly here, for the security that pedantic order brought precluded the perspective of a larger vision. This careful labelling enclosed him within somewhat rigid fences. To insist upon this precise ticketing had its perilous corollary; the entire view — perspective, proportion, vision — was lost sight of.
‘I’m in love: she’s beautiful, body, mind and soul. She’s high above me, but I’ll climb up to where she is.’ This was his morning thought, and the thought that accompanied him all day long and every day until the moment came to separate again.… ‘She’s a married woman, but her husband has no claim on her.’ Somehow he was positive of that; the husband had forfeited all claim to her; details he did not know; but she was free; she did no wrong.
In imagination he furnished plausible details from sensational experiences life had shown him. These may have been right or wrong; possibly the husband had ill-treated, then deserted her; they were separated possibly, though — she had told him this — there were no children to complicate the situation. He made his guesses.… There was a duty, however, that she would not, did not neglect: in fulfilment of its claim she went to Warsaw every year. What it was, of course, he did not know; but this thought and the emotions caused by it, he put away into their proper places; he asked no questions of her; the matter did not concern him really. The shock experienced the day before was the shock of realising that — he loved. Those two significant words had suddenly shown it to him. The order of his life was changed. ‘She is essential to me; I am essential to her.’ But ‘She’s all the world to me,’ involved equally ‘I’m all the world to her.’ The sense of his own importance was enormously increased. The Wave surged upwards with a sudden leap.…
There was one thing lacking in this love, perhaps, though he hardly noticed it — the element of surprise. Ever since childhood he had suspected this would happen. The love was predestined, and in so far seemed a deliberate affair, pedestrian, almost calm. This sense of the inevitable robbed it of that amazing unearthly glamour which steals upon those who love for the first time, taking them deliciously by surprise. He saw her beautiful, and probably she was, but her beauty was familiar to him. He had come up with the childhood dream, and in coming up with it he recognised it. It seemed thus somewhat.… But her mind and soul were beautiful too, only these were more beautiful than he had dreamed. In that lay surprise and wonder too. There was genuine magic here, discovery and exhilarating novelty. He had not caught up with that. The love as a whole, however, was expected, natural. It was inevitable. The familiarity alone remained strange, a flavour of the uncanny about it almost — yet certainly real.
And these things also he tried to face and label, though with less success. To bring order into them was beyond his powers. She had outstripped him somehow in her soul, but had come back to fetch him — also to get something for herself she lacked. The rest was oddly familiar: it had happened before. It was about to happen now again, but on a higher level; only before it could happen completely he must overtake her. The spiral idea lay in it somewhere. But the Wave contained and drove it.… His mind was not supple; analogy, that spiritual solvent, did not help him. Yet the fact remained that he somehow visualised the thing in picture form; a rising wave bore them charging up the spiral curve to a point whence they both looked down upon a passage they had made before. She was always a little in front of him, beyond him. But when the Wave finally broke they would rush together — become one… there would be pain, but joy would follow.
And during all their subsequent happy days of companionship this one thing alone marred his supreme contentment — this sense of elusiveness, that while he held her she yet slipped between his fingers and escaped. He loved; but whereas to most men love brings a feeling of finality and rest, as of a search divinely ended, to Tom came the feeling that his search was merely resumed, or, indeed, had only just begun. He had not come into full possession of this woman: he had only found her.… She was deep; her deceptive simplicity hid surprises from him; much — and it was the greater part — he could not understand. Only when he came up with that would possession be complete. Not that she said or did a single thing that suggested this; she was not elusive of set purpose; she was entirely guiltless of any desire to hold back a fraction of herself, and to conceal was as foreign to her nature as to play with him; but that some part of her hung high above his reach, and that he, knowing this, admitted a subtle pain behind the joy. ‘I can’t get at her — quite,’ he put it to himself. ‘Some part of her is not mine yet — doesn’t belong to me.’
He thought chiefly, that is, of his own possible disabilities rather than of hers.
‘I often wonder why we’ve come together like this,’ he said once, as they lay in the shade of a larch wood above Corvaux and looked towards the snowy summits of Savoy. ‘What brought us together, I mean? There’s something mysterious about it to me — —’
‘God,’ she said quietly. ‘You needed me. You’ve been lonely. But you’ll never be lonely again.’
Her introduction of the Deity into a conversation did not displease. Fate, or any similar word, could have taken its place; she merely conveyed her sense that their coming together was right and inevitable. Moreover, now that she said it, he recognised the fact of loneliness — that he always had been lonely, but that it was no longer possible. He felt like a boy and spoke like a boy. She had come to look after, care for him. She asked nothing for herself. The thought gave him a sharp and sudden pang.
‘But my love means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’ he asked tenderly. ‘I mean, you need me too?’
‘Everything, Tom,’ she told him softly. He was conscious of the mother in her, as though the mother overshadowed the woman. But while he loved it, the tinge of resentment still remained.
‘You couldn’t do without me, could you?’ He took the hand she placed upon his knee and looked up into her quiet eyes. ‘You’d be lonely too if — I went?’
For a moment she gazed down at him and did not answer; he was aware of both the pain and sweetness in her face; an interval of thoughtfulness again descended on them both: then a great tenderness came welling up into her eyes as she answered slowly: ‘You couldn’t go, Tom. You couldn’t leave me ever.’
Her hand was on his shoulder, almost about his neck as she said it, and he came in closer, and before he knew what he was doing his face was buried in her lap. Her hand stroked his hair. Twenty-five years dropped from him — he was a child again, a little boy, and she, in some divine, half-impersonal sense he could not understand, was mothering him. No foolish feeling of shame came with it; the mood was too sudden for analysis, it passed away swiftly too; but he knew, for a brief second, all the sensations of a restless and dissatisfied boy who needed above all else — comfort: the comfort that only an inexhaustible mother-love could give.… And this love poured from her in a flood. Till now he had never known it, nor known the need of it. And because it had been curiously lacking he suddenly wondered how he had done without it. A strange sense of tears rose in his heart. He felt pain and tragedy somewhere. For there was another thing he wanted from her too.… Through the sparkle of his joy peeped out that familiar, strange, rich pain, but so swiftly he hardly recognised it. It withdrew again. It vanished.
‘But you couldn’t leave me either, could you?’ he asked, sitting erect again. He made a movement as though to draw her head down upon his shoulder in the protective way of a man who loves, but — he could not do it. It was curious. She did nothing to prevent, only somehow the position would be a false one. She did not need him in that way. He was not yet big enough to protect. It was she who protected him. And when she answered the same second, the familiar sentence flashed across his mind again: ‘She has come back to fetch me.’
‘I shall never, never leave you, Tom. We�
��re together for always. I know it absolutely.’ The girl of seventeen, the unawakened woman who was desired, the mother who thought not of herself, — all three spoke in those quiet words; but with them, too, he was aware of this elusive other thing he could not name. Perhaps her eyes conveyed it, perhaps the pain and sweetness in the little face so close above his own. She was bending over him. He looked up. And over his heart rushed again that intolerable yearning — the yearning to stand where she stood, far, far beyond him, yet with it the certainty that pain must attend the effort. Until that pain, that effort were accomplished, she could not entirely belong to him. He had to win her yet. Yet also he had to teach her something.… Meanwhile, in the act of protecting, mothering him she must use pain, as to a learning child. Their love would gain completeness only thus.
Yet in words he could not approach it; he knew not how to.
‘It’s a strange relationship,’ he stammered, concealing, as he thought, the deep emotions that perplexed him. ‘The world would misunderstand it utterly.’ She smiled, nodding her head. ‘I wish — —’ he added, ‘I mean it comes to me sometimes — that you don’t need me quite as I need you. You’re my whole life, you know — now.’
‘You’re growing imaginative, Tom,’ she teased him smilingly. Then, catching the earnest expression in his face, she added: ‘My life has been very full, you see, and I’ve always had to stand alone. There’s been so much for me to do that I’ve had no time to feel loneliness perhaps.’
‘Rescuing the other floating faces!’
A slight tinge of a new emotion slipped through his mind, something he had never felt before, yet so faint he could not even recapture it, much less wonder whether it were jealousy or envy. It rose from the depths; it vanished into him again.… Besides, he saw that she was smiling; the teasing mood that so often baffled him was upon her; he heard her give that passing laugh that almost ‘kept him guessing,’ as the Americans say, whether she was in play or earnest.
‘It’s worth doing, anyhow — rescuing the floating faces,’ she said: ‘worth living for.’ And she half closed her eyes so that he saw her as a girl again. He saw her as she had been even before he knew her, as he used to see her in his dream. It was the dream-eyes that peered at him through long, thick lashes. They looked down at him. He felt caught away to some remote, strange place and time. He was aware of gold, of colour, of a hotter blood, a fiercer sunlight.…
And the sense of familiarity became suddenly very real; he knew what she was going to say, how he would answer, why they had come together. It all flashed near, yet still just beyond his reach. He almost understood. They had been side by side like this before, not in this actual place, but somewhere — somewhere that he knew intimately. Her eyes had looked down into his own precisely so, long, long ago, yet at the same time strangely near. There was a perfume, a little ghostly perfume — it was the Whiff. It was gone instantly, but he had tasted it.… A veil drew up.… He saw, he knew, he remembered — almost.… Another second and he would capture the meaning of it all. Another moment and it would reveal itself — then, suddenly, the whole sensation vanished. He had missed it by the minutest fraction in the world, yet missed it utterly. It left him confused and baffled.
The veil was down again, and he was talking with Madame Jaretzka, the Lettice Aylmer of his boyhood days. Such moments of the déjà-vu leave bewilderment behind them, like the effect of sudden change of focus in the eye; and with the bewilderment a sense of insecurity as well.
‘Yes,’ he said half dreamily, ‘and you’ve rescued a lot already, haven’t you?’ as though he still followed in speech the direction of the vanished emotion.
‘You know that, Tom?’ she enquired, raising her eyelids, thus finally restoring the normal.
He stammered rather: ‘I have the feeling — that you’re always doing good to some one somewhere. There’s something,’ — he searched for a word— ‘impersonal about you — almost.’ And he knew the word was nearly right, though found by chance. It included ‘un-physical,’ the word he did not like to use. He did not want an angel’s love; the spiritual, to him, rose from the physical, and was not apart from it. He was not in heaven yet, and had no wish to be. He was on earth; and everything of value — love, above all — must spring from earth, or else remain incomplete, insecure, ineffective even.
And again a tiny dart of pain shot through him. Yet he was glad he said it, for it was true. He liked to face what hurt him. To face it was to get it over.…
But she was laughing again gently to herself, though certainly not at him. ‘What were you thinking about so long?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been silent for several minutes and your thoughts were far away.’ And as he did not reply immediately, she went on: ‘If you go to Assouan you mustn’t fall into reveries like that or you’ll leave holes in the dam, or whatever your engineering work is — Tom!’
She spoke the name with a sudden emphasis that startled him. It was a call.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking up at her. He was emerging from a dream.
‘Come back to me. I don’t like your going away in that strange way — forgetting me.’
‘Ah, I like that. Say it again,’ he returned, a deeper note in his voice.
‘You were away — weren’t you?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said slowly. ‘I can’t say quite. I was thinking of you, wherever I was.’ He went on, holding her eyes with a steady gaze: ‘A curious feeling came over me like — like heat and light. You seemed so familiar to me all of a sudden that I felt I had known you ages and ages. I was trying to make out where — it was — —’
She dropped her eyelids again and peered at him, but no longer smiling. There was a sterner expression in her face. The lips curved a moment in a new strange way. The air seemed to waver an instant between them. She peered down at him as through a mist.…
‘There — like that!’ he exclaimed passionately. ‘Only I wish you wouldn’t. There’s something I don’t like about it. It hurts,’ — and the same minute felt ashamed, as though he had said a foolish thing. It had come out in spite of himself.
‘Then I won’t, Tom — if you’ll promise not to go away again. I was thinking of Egypt for a second — I don’t know why.’
But he did not laugh with her; his face kept the graver expression still.
‘It changes you — rather oddly,’ he said quietly, ‘that lowering of the eyelids. I can’t say why exactly, but it makes you look —— Eastern.’ Again he had said a foolish thing. A kind of spell seemed over him.
‘Irish eyes!’ he heard her saying. ‘They sometimes look like that, I’m told. But you promise, don’t you?’
‘Of course I promise,’ he answered bluntly enough, because he meant it. ‘I can never go away from you because,’ — he turned and looked very hard at her a moment— ‘because there’s something in you I need in my very soul,’ he went on earnestly, ‘yet that always escapes me. I can’t get hold of — all of you.’
And though she refused his very earnest mood, she answered with obvious sincerity at once. ‘That’s as it should be, Tom. A man tires of a woman the moment he gets to the end of her.’ She gave her little laugh and touched his hand. ‘Perhaps that’s what I’m meant to teach you. When you know all of me — —’
‘I shall never know all of you,’ said Tom.
‘You never will,’ she replied with meaning, ‘for I don’t even know it all myself.’ And as she said it, he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in all the world before, for the breeze caught her long gauzy veil of blue and tossed it across her face so that the eyes seemed gazing at him from a distance, but a distance that had height in it. He felt her above him, beyond him, on this height, a height he must climb before he could know complete possession.
‘By Jove!’ he thought, ‘isn’t it rising just!’ For the Wave was under them tremendously.
April meanwhile had slipped into May, and their daily companionship had become the most natural thing in the world, when the telegram
arrived that threatened to interrupt the delightful intercourse. But it was not the telegram Tom expected. Neither Greece nor Egypt claimed his talents yet, for the contracts both at Assouan and Salonica were postponed until the autumn, and the routine of a senior partner’s life in London was to be his immediate fate. He brought her the news at once: they discussed it together in all its details and as intimately as though it affected their joint lives similarly. His first thought was to run and talk it over with her; hers, how the change might influence their intercourse, their present and their future. Their relationship was now established in this solid, natural way. He told her everything as a son might tell his mother: she asked questions, counselled, made suggestions as a woman whose loving care considered his welfare and his happiness before all else.
However, it brought no threatened interruption after all — involved, indeed, less of separation than if he had been called away as they expected: for though he must go to London that same week, she would shortly follow him. ‘And if you go to Egypt in the autumn, Tom,’ — she smiled at the way they influenced the future nearer to the heart’s desire— ‘I may go with you. I could make my arrangements accordingly — take my holiday out there earlier instead of here as usual in the spring.’
The days passed quickly. Her first duty was to return to Warsaw; she would then follow him to London and help him with his flat. No man could choose furniture and carpets and curtains properly. They discussed the details with the enthusiasm of children: she would come up several times a week from her bungalow in Kent and make sure that his wall-papers did not clash with the general scheme. Brown was his colour, he told her, and always had been. It was the dominant shade of her eyes as well. He made her promise to stand in the rooms with her eyes opened very wide so that there could be no mistake, and they laughed over the picture happily.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 170