IV
THE next day Teresa did not go to the chalet, but worked hard at her clay modelling. The desire for work was strong in her, pleasure in it had waked again, and besides she had a keen desire to make some money, to relieve Basil at least of part of his material burden. Her things had always sold, and she resolved now that she would if possible pay her own expenses and Ronald's. She blamed herself for not having done more the past two years. Her own small income had gone largely in dress for herself and the child; but now, with a little help, it would pay for this Swiss summer. Poor Basil, working in the heat of the summer city! But he had many friends—too many perhaps—who would take him out of it. Yet she knew that he was never as comfortable away from home. She had not been a model housewife, but Basil had liked his home. And he missed Ronald. His letters were full of inquiries and suggestions about the child—melancholy letters, sometimes short and brusque, sometimes long and argumentative. The first few had been love-letters, but as she did not respond in kind, Basil had become less expressive. Twice Teresa had written warmly, begging him to come as soon as possible—but she had not sent the letters. The face of Isabel Perry had risen between her and the ardent page, and she had torn to scraps all she had written. …
In the afternoon she went out for a long walk alone. The day was clouding over. Mist hid the mountain-crags and trailed lower and lower into the valley. She walked up into the sombre pine-forest to a cascade that came plunging down in huge leaps from an invisible height. Beside the basin that received the final dash of the fall, in foam and roar, she sat for some time, the phrases of a letter to Basil shaping themselves in her mind. She was longing for him; a sudden piercing sense of loneliness made her weep. What did it matter after all that she was angry with him, that he had been unkind? Nothing mattered, except that they should not waste the days of their youth, apart from one another. It was far better to be together and quarrel.
Basil had been right—she should not have gone away from him. She should have answered his appeal. She had been wrong toward him in many ways. She had never of her own will sacrificed anything to their love—had given nothing but what she wanted to give. She had yielded too much to her grief that last year; she had not thought enough of Basil. What he had done was only what all men did. Men were cursed with a perpetual need of action. They could not be quiet any more than vigorous children. The thing was to direct their insensate energising into the least harmful channels. She had never tried very much to direct Basil. She thought of him now as a small boy shut up in the house on a rainy day, and told to make no noise. Yes, that had been her attitude toward him all that last winter—and she had paid for it. She had given the other woman her chance. A sudden flood of rage against Isabel welled up in her and dried her tears. She considered ways and means of being revenged upon her. The blood beating in her temples told her how it was possible to stab, to poison, to choke a rival. Something wild rose in her, as a thousand times before, at the thought of their caresses, and all the softness of her mood was gone. The tender letter to Basil, like so many others she had imagined or even begun, was never written.
••••••
Crayven arrived in a pouring rain, which continued for a week, turning the one street of the little town into a gutter of mud, and veiling all its surroundings. Teresa was perfectly aware that he came to see her, and she was inwardly grateful for his caprice. It was difficult for her to live without some society, and that of Nina, Edith, and Ernesto presented too many complications, while the few acquaintances that she had .made through them did not interest her. Crayven did interest her, largely because of his interest in herself. They fell at once into easy companionship, spending all the afternoons together, and the evenings generally at Nina's house, where Crayven made the fourth, instead of Nina, at bridge, which he played by turns very well and very badly. Ernesto, though greatly bored by the bad weather and the place in general, and threatening each day to depart, stayed on for a fortnight; by the end of which time the skies had cleared into delicious warmth, and all the charms of the valley were in full display.
Teresa's mood also had lightened progressively. With Ernesto no real companionship had been possible; he was at once too sentimental and too frivolous. Crayven was neither. Their talk was generally grave, but it stimulated Teresa, and she talked more than Crayven. She found his point of view, as she came to know it better, what she called appallingly middle-aged. Crayven frankly said that work was the only thing in the world that was decently worth while, and that work was only good for its own sake and without regard to results, about the value of which, in any case, he showed a profound scepticism. This was his attitude toward his own occupation, about which, however, he talked with interest to Teresa. He described to her in detail the place which had been for years—for at least three-fourths of each year—his abode, and where he seemed perfectly willing to spend the rest of his life: the primitive old fort, buried in the desert, three days by camel from Suez. He told her about his daily work there—generally settling Arab quarrels about camels, with an occasional murderer to be tried, with an incessant effort to better a little the material condition of the natives, with a periodical Turkish invasion to stir things up. He was building a dam now, he said, which would for the first time give a decent supply of water to the settlement, and in which he was much more interested than the natives themselves. He had some fear of being transferred to another post of more technical importance, in which case the work that he had begun would go for nothing.
"The shiftless beggars would never think of going on with it for themselves," he said. "They'd let it go to ruin, and be perfectly content with the discomforts of their grandfathers."
"Then why trouble yourself to give them something they don't really want?" asked Teresa.
"Because I'm like all reformers, cursed with a certain amount of surplus energy which I don't know how to direct in a more reasonable way. It would be better to spend it on myself—except that there's nothing I want."
"And you're content to live out there, out of the world, indefinitely? "
"I only hope they'll leave me there in peace. It's world enough for me."
"But you do come.out of it occasionally."
"Mainly because of the climate. In winter it's delightful. Then there are people one likes to look up now and then."
Teresa wondered if Crayven's wife was included in this category. He never spoke of her.
"It's a curious life," she said, absently. "But it seems to suit you, somehow. I knew when I first saw you that you had had some unusual experience."
He looked up at her steadily. They had walked far up into the pine forest, and were sitting on the bank of a stream, Teresa on a flat rock, Crayven a little way below. Teresa met his look, with a feeling of strangeness in its meditative intensity. It was familiar to her now, but there was something in it she did not understand. She had seen it first the day they had met in the Louvre, and then, too, had first noticed in his manner toward her the peculiar interest, the touch of emotion which had nothing of gallantry about it, that now she had come to accept as a fact, as yet unexplained. Their relation had leaped the stage of acquaintanceship, and oddly taken on the character of intimacy, but without confidences on either side. Crayven had told her nothing of his life, beyond the active phase of his work, and she had had no impulse to tell him anything that counted in hers, but rather the contrary. He had tried to get through this re- serve of hers, had tried to make her talk about herself, with an interest so marked that it defeated its own end. She asked herself why he should be so much interested, why he should have for her that grave, impersonal tenderness, unaccounted for by anything that she knew. It made her at times uncomfortable; yet on the whole she had a sense of freedom, of confidence, with him, that made his companionship a deep pleasure.
"Unusual experience?" he said musingly, echoing her last words. "No—not that, I think. The ordinary experience—youth and its dreams and ambitions—and middle-age and its acquiescence."
"Middle-age! You are young."
"I'm thirty-six. It isn't altogether a matter of years."
"What is it, then?"
"It's just that—acquiescence. Youth is the feeling of the infinite beyond the horizon of our own infinite possibilities the feeling that we may do anything, get anything we want. …"
"Yes, it is that. But, then?"
"Then we explore our possibilities and find their limits, and the world shrinks, and we see the stone wall instead of the horizon. And we do not beat our brains out against it. We acquiesce."
"And you think it's inevitable? You think it must always be that? We must be shut in by the stone wall? I would never submit to it—I don't believe in it!"
"Ah, you haven't begun to be middle-aged," said Crayven quietly.
"Don't talk in this way! Why do you want to take all the freedom and joy out of life? You enjoy your life—why do you deny the good of it? You're ungrateful."
"No—I'm not ungrateful. I take the pleasures of the day, and the work of the day, for what they are—that's all. I don't ask much of life."
"Why not? Why don't you? Because you haven't imagination enough—or because you asked too much—and didn't get what you wanted?"
Teresa's questions were impetuous, almost angry. They had never before been so personal in their talk, but often Crayven's attitude had irritated her into protest. With him she felt increasingly a passionate desire to assert the value, the joy, of life.
He reflected, looking up at her.
"I suppose I have not much imagination. But it is true that I did not get what I wanted. It's not that I wanted so very much—perhaps—from an abstract point of view. But I wanted what I wanted very much. … And to be beaten, you know, does take it out of one. There's nothing left but a kind of inept cheerfulness, a prosaic, suburban way of living. You're out of it, and you know it."
"How can you talk like that—admit you're beaten! I wouldn't do it, if I were a man. How do you know you can't get what you want? I daresay you didn't half try."
"Oh, I tried," he said, very quietly.
"Perhaps you can still get it."
"No, I can never get it."
"Well—there are other things in the world, surely? You"
"Yes, but there isn't much that I happen to want. … Just now I want nothing except to be allowed to look at you."
"And why look at me, pray?" said Teresa coolly.
"Because—well, because you are beautiful."
She looked away gravely into the depths of the forest. She did not like his last words. They showed suddenly a lighter attitude toward her than before. Her talk with him had been serious; he had not paid her compliments.
There was a change, too, in his manner, a touch of excitement about it. His simple friendliness was gone; gone, too, his quiet matter-of-fact English aspect, which had made her feel so safe. She saw suddenly the man as he had first impressed her—the stranger, of alien blood, the unaccountable. She saw the desert behind him, a world of different laws and customs, of different feeling … and a strange breath seemed to come out of the burning sands. There were palm-trees, cut sharply against the pale horizon. There was a line of laden camels plod- ding through the sand … and then it was a night-encampment, the black tents pitched in the glare of the moonlight, and the camels snarling as they lay down beyond the fires. … Her eyelids drooped with a bored look, and she rose.
"It's getting late—I want to see Ronald before he goes to bed," she said abruptly.
Crayven leaped to his feet.
"Have I—are you—surely you don't mind what I said," he cried quickly, his face alive and keen.
"Mind? No," she answered coldly.
"But you do! Now tell me why you mustn't be offended with me, I can't have it."
He barred the path, eager and determined.
"Oh, nonsense, let us get on home. … Well, then, if you must have what's obvious explained, one doesn't like to be turned off with a banal compliment when one is talking seriously. I know you don't want to talk to me about yourself, but there are other ways of making it clear, aren't there? … I shall be less inquisitive in future."
She walked past him, and heard him murmur to himself, "Child!" The word by no means lessened her feeling. Crayven followed, and on the walk back tried earnestly to make his peace. But it was long since Teresa had had a good opportunity of being unreasonable, and she seized this one instinctively, and with a sense of relief. And—besides—it was only on the surface that she was unreasonable. What Crayven had said was trifling enough, but the change in her feeling was not trifling. A delicate balance had been disturbed.