II
THE Val d'Iliez seemed to Teresa a cool heaven, as they came to it after a trying journey. The quiet of that cleft in the brilliantly green hills, all one flowery meadow, with the misty wastes of rock and snow above, promised her at last the chance to rest and find herself. For this solitude was necessary. She could not help it if Nina found her rather unsocial, after so many years of separation, and resented her long walks alone.
Many hours of solitude each day she must have. Besides, Ronald wanted her. He was a shy child and did not make friends easily with his noisy Italian cousins. He was generally with her when she worked—for she had brought some clay with her and had begun with it immediately on her arrival, doing some little groups from drawings she had made long ago, and often using Ronald as a model for the child-figures she liked. Nina was busy all day long, organising her household and wresting supplies from the reluctant Swiss peasantry; finding out just where real milk and cream were to be got; telephoning for chickens to come by post; stemming the discontent of the servants; laying out a régime for the delicate Elaine and the refractory Ernestine. But she wanted Teresa to come and be talked to, in the intervals of these occupations. It was Nina's impulse to pour out all her troubles to a bosom which ought from ties of blood to be sympathetic; it was Teresa's to keep hers to herself. Nina did not mind this, if she suspected it; but the deep melancholy which Teresa could not help showing, and which inclined her at present to a certain fatalistic view of all troubles, was not pleasing to Nina. Nina was an active person, who believed that all unsatisfactory conditions could be remedied, if only people had good will; and she spent her life in a constant struggle against the natures of the people about her. In this idealistic warfare she reaped the usual reward of militant virtue: one success for a hundred failures, and the consciousness of being the apparent cause of nearly all the unpleasantness in the family life.
"I know I have a bad temper," she admitted to Teresa, "but, heavens, what I have to try it! My only idea is to bring up the children properly and make them strong, and live within our income, so that they shan't be absolute beggars. But I know there are always debts that I know nothing about—always something going on behind my back, or under my very nose, that I can't make out. Of course that makes me suspicious and irritable. Ernesto never interferes with my management, and yet he does work against me. The children see him always pleasant, always gay, making an amusement of life, and I am always the taskmaster. It's unfair—but I wouldn't change with him. I'm the important person in the house, and they all know it, and have to do as I say. And I do enjoy the children—only Ernestine is trying. She is all her father, but the others are more like me—except they are not strong. They are beautiful children, aren't they? If I can only see them well launched in the world I shall be content."
"Content? … And for yourself, Nina? You're young—you aren't much more than thirty! For yourself—what do you want?"
"What should I want? I've had my love-affair. You know how much Ernesto was in love with me. After the first year, when the children came, of course it had to be different."
"You mean you were not in love with one another any longer?"
"In love—no! How can one be in love after the first? Life is too prosaic—it burns out. He's fond of me—that's all."
"And you're resigned to being prosaic for the rest of your life?"
"My dear child, what is marriage? It's an affair of family, it isn't two people in love with one another. You don't see it when you go into it, but later you have to see it. You have to realise that your life is the family, and that the man has his life away from you."
"I think you're wrong!" said Teresa quickly. "You gave yourself too much to the children. Sometimes I think it would be better if one hadn't children."
"Teresa! You don't think so! A marriage without children—you might as well be simply a man's mistress. … It's more you want, not less. It was a great, great pity about the baby, poor darling. You wouldn't give up Ronald, would you?"
"I wonder," said Teresa, "if a man one loved couldn't make up?"
"No! They're a woman's real life, children. Man's only an accident in comparison."
"I think it's the other way round."
"Then if you really think that, Teresa, you're more of a mistress than a wife. But I don't believe you do."
Teresa was silent again, for some moments. Then she asked reflectively:
"Could you have ever cared for anyone else—since you were married, I mean?"
Nina flushed deeply.
"That would be committing a mortal sin," she said, and her blue eyes shone with a cold light. Teresa looked at her, estimating the depth of the gulf that lay between them. She could conceive a mortal sin, but it was not love
"Is it a sin for a man, too, if he is married?" she asked curiously.
"Yes, it is a sin. But it's worse for a woman. A woman must be faithful, no matter what the man is. She must hold fast to her duty—she must not even think a sinful thought—for women are terribly weak, Teresa."
"Not so weak as men."
"Oh, much weaker! For if their self-control goes, even once, they are never the same again. … Listen, I shall have to tell you about my sister-in-law, Edith, Egisto's English wife, you know. I've had a hysterical letter from her this morning, and she's coming up here. They've had a terrible row, and Egisto turned her out of the house. Once before the same thing happened and she flew to me, and I made things up—I got Egisto to take her back. And now she's done the same thing again, and he threatens to get a separation—of course they can't be divorced—and as nearly all her money is settled on him it will leave her in a terrible position. That's what women come to who don't run straight—even from a worldly point of view it's ruin for them. No … it's better to resign one's self to being—dull, I suppose you call it."
"I do call it dull, to have nothing but your house and your children!"
"Well, what are you going to do? You can't have affairs with men—you can't even have one man to yourself. Your husband won't be faithful to you."
"I could never live as you do," said Teresa. "You've given up too much. … I must have my life—somehow"
Nina studied her sister's brooding, vivid face.
"How like you are to father! You have much more of the Southern in you than I. You're made to be happier and unhappier than I am. I'm not unhappy."
"No—but I must be, if I'm not happy," said Teresa quickly. "What is life worth, if it's only to be got through, a matter of routine and duty, and always sacrificing yourself for other people? They don't thank you for it! I would rather die than live that way! I will be happy, somehow."
"Poor child," said Nina suddenly. "You're not happy now."
"No, but I shall be—I shall be!"
And she got up and moved away, to end the conversation.
She disliked having expressed even so much of her feeling. She disliked seeming unhappy. That was to confess failure, and she was by no means ready to confess it. She had a passionate conviction that things must still come right for her, somehow, and the impossibility of resigning herself, ever, to a grey lot like Nina's, was absolutely clear to her. She walked away now down the path leading to the little Viéze, thinking of these things.
There had been a nominal, a partial and unsatisfactory reconciliation with Basil in the week before her hurried departure from New York. His evident misery had broken down her first stony resistance. She could not resist her own tenderness for him; all they had been to one another spoke too strongly; she could not part from him in unkindness. But the passion that flung them into one another's arms had not healed the breach, had only deepened the wound. Both knew it—both were unhappy. Something was changed, was gone—the old confidence, the old assurance. Joy was gone, and trust; and love, that remained, was bitter, a torment.
Basil had begged her not to leave him just then, to put off her sailing for a month at least.
"It's better we should fight it out together, now—and I need you, I want you with me," he had said again and again. But Teresa had only one idea—to get away somewhere, alone—to get away!
"I must go, I'm ill—I can't bear it," she had repeated. "I must get back my strength, then perhaps it will come right. I can't see anything clear now, I'm just one mass of aching nerves. Can't you see? If I stay here I shall only torment you and myself. … It will come right, if only we have time."
And she consoled him with vague hopes and hurried promises, with only one desire in her heart—to get away and hide herself like a wounded animal. It was a physical blow that he had dealt her, something that left no place for thought, that made her consciousness all pain. Talking only tortured her, she could not reason about it. She could not think, she could only see images and pictures that turned her brain. …
Now, in the solitude she had craved, she was beginning to think. What had happened, then, after all? Had he not, in spite of his passionate denials, been false to the spirit of their compact, to their egoistic, purely personal relation? Had he not shaken the foundations of that relation, and was not its whole structure falling in ruins? If so, somehow she must build up her life anew, without love, the keystone. Love, as she loved, him, meant complete spiritual possession, complete confidence, or unhappiness. She would not resign herself to unhappiness, to taking up their life on a lower plane. She knew what would happen—she foresaw endless suspicion, sordid quarrels, "nagging." No, rather than that, rather than a constant demand for what he could not freely give, she would live somehow without him. But as yet she did not see how that could be done. She had left herself no substitutes. She had put too much into her feeling for him. He represented to her all the charm of the soulless world, of godless nature. Basil frankly recognised no law outside himself, and the calm buoyancy of his egotism had fascinated her more volatile, more impressionable spirit. His tenderness for her had for a long time blinded her to the harsh side of that egotism. Now it had wounded her, so deeply that she could not yet see how she was to get over it.
She had had a number of long letters from him, and had replied briefly, ignoring his protestations. They were sincere, but she would not give them credit. There was only one thing that would convince her, and that was the truth about the other woman; and this Basil apparently would not tell. And it seemed to Teresa that if he would not tell, it must be because he had too much to conceal, even that spiritual infidelity which he had constantly denied. She did not believe that for a mere scruple of conventional honour he would imperil their relation, if he really cared about it. Her eyes narrowed ominously as in her heart she denied to Basil any lofty motive in his silence. Basil was not lofty, neither was he conventional. It was absurd that he should not have sacrificed the other woman; and Teresa recognised in herself a calm determination that he should still do so.
She sat on a rock beside the rushing, green, foamy stream, and contemplated herself as she really was in spirit. She quite admitted that her own attitude was not a noble one. It would have been much finer to have taken Basil at his word, to have risen superior to this whole episode; it would also have been more sensible and more worldly—only it would have been quite false! Teresa had longings to be sensible and worldly, and longings to be noble. But more deeply than anything else, instinctively, she desired to be perfectly true to her own feeling; or rather she could not help being so. And her feeling was that Basil had carelessly broken something beautiful and beyond all price. It might not be beautiful from a high moral point of view; but it had been aesthetically beautiful. … Perhaps the barque of their happiness ought to have been capable of riding out such a storm calmly; perhaps it would have been better to have embarked in a craft of the ordinary pattern, with a thick, solid, institutional bottom. Only they had not done so. Their boat had been a racer, slender, carrying a press of sail free to all the winds of fate; and now, in the storm, one could not know how much damage had been done. … Teresa had a momentary vision of a derelict—mast and sails all gone by the board—rolling helplessly in the wash of the waves. …
She watched the green water leaping and foaming over the rocks, fresh from the snows above, which lay shining, new-fallen, within a few hundred feet of the valley. The current of air carried down by the stream was inexpressibly pure and vital. The whole scene—the dark fir-woods, the bright green meadows, the great desert of rock above—had a wildness, a formless majesty, a primitive freshness, that soothed and quieted her mood. The rush of the water half-hypnotised her. Her thoughts became blurred. Her face, coloured by the keen air, was dreamy, and once her delicate expressive lips parted in a smile.
She was conscious that she smiled, though she hardly knew why. It was perhaps a mere sensation of physical well-being, for long strange to her. Already, after a week of mountain air, the weight of her winter's illness was lifted. She looked even vigorous, and there was still about her the suggestion of softness and luxuriance due to her recent maternity, unhappy as that had been.
She sighed, got up, looked vaguely about her, and walked, on along the water-side to find Ronald. A shout announced that he had seen her, and he came scrambling up from a cove—a small, sturdy figure, straight as a dart, with a mass of bronze-coloured hair and vivid, intelligent eyes. He was a beautiful child, and Teresa's heart swelled with pride in him. She sailed his boat for him till lunch-time, the stolid Swiss nurse sitting on the bank like a meditative cow. Ronald had his own ideas about the sailing of the boat, as about most other things in his life, and he infinitely preferred his mother's society to any other, because she was capable of grasping those ideas. He was not a clinging baby, but an an oddly independent one. He had never shown much interest in other children, not even in the smallest Pepoli, who was about his own age. He was obviously happier alone, when he was not with Teresa; and they were very happy together. … Ronald at the worst represented a certain amount of salvage from the wreck.
Yet Teresa had often thought of late that she and Basil might have been happier without children. Their troubles had begun with the coming of Ronald, and as she looked back to the first year of their marriage, it seemed to her to have an extraordinary quality of freedom and joy. It might be true that they could not have gone on like that, that life would have taken its revenge on them somehow for shirking the ordinary lot of care and responsibility. Possibly that sort of happiness, as everyone said, was not meant to last. Perhaps there was something trivial in it, unless one took it simply as a quality of youth, and let it pass, as others did, taking up in their turn the burdens of maturity. There was something in Teresa that echoed to this deeper and more serious note; but there was also a passionate longing after that vanishing springtime, the efflorescence of all that was light and bright and gay. She was not yet ready to be serious like the middle-aged world, grey and sober, resigned to its losses. Nor did the alternative of frivolity attract her. She was not frivolous; she wanted what was real to her, what was deeply valuable, and she would have that or nothing. Basil had in him an element of frivolity, something that tended to dissipate what she regarded as her own peculiar possession. And she recognised now that what she wanted instinctively was to rule him, to impose her own more passionate will upon him, just because she was emotionally at his mercy. … As for the ideal of perfect freedom, that youthful dream, it was gone, swept away by harsh contact with the facts of life. Neither of them could be free. She was bound in spirit, and Basil henceforth should be bound by her will. …