第53章 THE EIGHTH(2)

"But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a perfect love, my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy, its ruthless criticism? Has the world ever seen a perfect lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection that brings us together in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all, likely to get a more perfect love in all her life than this poor love of mine? And isn't it good for her that she should love?""Perfect love cherishes.Perfect love foregoes."Sir Richmond found his mind wandering far away from the immediate question."Perfect love," the phrase was his point of departure.Was it true that he could not love passionately and completely? Was that fundamentally what was the matter with him? Was that perhaps what was the matter with the whole world of mankind? It had not yet come to that power of loving which makes action full and simple and direct and unhesitating.Man upon his planet has not grown up to love, is still an eager, egotistical and fluctuating adolescent.He lacks the courage to love and the wisdom to love.Love is here.But it comes and goes, it is mixed with greeds and jealousies and cowardice and cowardly reservations.One hears it only in snatches and single notes.It is like something tuning up before the Music begins....The metaphor altogether ran away with Sir Richmond's half dreaming mind.

Some day perhaps all life would go to music.

Love was music and power.If he had loved.enough he need never have drifted away from his wife.Love would have created love, would have tolerated and taught and inspired.

Where there is perfect love there is neither greed nor impatience.He would have done his work calmly.He would have won his way with his Committee instead of fighting and quarrelling with it perpetually....

"Flimsy creatures," he whispered."Uncertain health.

Uncertain strength.A will that comes and goes.Moods of baseness.Moods of utter beastliness....Love like April sunshine.April?..."He dozed and dreamt for a time of spring passing into a high summer sunshine, into a continuing music, of love.He thought of a world like some great playhouse in which players and orchestra and audience all co-operate in a noble production without dissent or conflict.He thought he was the savage of thirty thousand years ago dreaming of the great world that is still perhaps thirty thousand years ahead.His effort to see more of that coming world than indistinct and cloudy pinnacles and to hear more than a vague music, dissolved his dream and left him awake again and wrestling with the problem of Miss Grammont.

Section 2

The shadow of Martin stood over him, inexorable.He had to release Miss Grammont from the adventure into which he had drawn her.This decision stood out stern-and inevitable in his mind with no conceivable alternative.

As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its difficulty.He was profoundly in love with her, he was still only learning how deeply, and she was not going to play a merely passive part in this affair.She was perhaps as deeply in love with him....

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals.He could not bear to think of her disillusionment.He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion."To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me....It would be like playing a practical joke upon her.

It would be like taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her....It would scar her with a second humiliation...."Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow and contrive by some sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to go from her suddenly? But a mere sudden parting would not end things between them now unless he went off abruptly without explanations or any arrangements for further communications.

At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit but evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her father at Falmouth.It was with an effect of discovery that Sir Richmond realized that now it could not end in that fashion, that with the whisper of love and the touching of lips, something had been started that would go on, that would develop.To break off now and go away without a word would leave a raw and torn end, would leave her perplexed and perhaps even more humiliated with an aching mystery to distress her."Why did he go? Was it something I said?--something he found out or imagined? "

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this problem.She and he had got into each other's lives to stay:

the real problem was the terms upon which they were to stay in each other's lives.Close association had brought them to the point of being, in the completest sense, lovers; that could not be; and the real problem was the transmutation of their relationship to some form compatible with his honour and her happiness.A word, an idea, from some recent reading floated into Sir Richmond's head."Sublimate," he whispered.

"We have to sublimate this affair.We have to put this relationship upon a Higher Plane.

His mind stopped short at that.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart.

"God! How I loathe the Higher Plane!....

"God has put me into this Higher Plane business like some poor little kid who has to wear irons on its legs.

"I WANT her....Do you hear, Martin? I want her."As if by a lightning flash he saw his car with himself and Miss Grammont--Miss Seyffert had probably fallen out--traversing Europe and Asia in headlong flight.To a sunlit beach in the South Seas....

His thoughts presently resumed as though these unmannerly and fantastic interruptions had not occurred.

"We have to carry the whole affair on to a Higher Plane--and keep it there.We two love one another--that has to be admitted now.(I ought never to have touched her.I ought never to have thought of touching her.) But we two are too high, our aims and work and obligations are too high for any ordinary love making.That sort of thing would embarrass us, would spoil everything.