Yours ever,
G.H.

Comeragh wrote back at once:

420 Brook Street, W.,
March 16th.

Yours ever,
Com.

It was jolly to hear from Comeragh like this, and the letter opened for Guy a prospect of something that, when he came to think about it, appeared very much like a retreat. He realized abruptly that the strain of the last two months had been playing upon his nerves to such an extent that the notion of leaving Wychiford was no longer very distasteful. The realization of his potential apostasy came with rather a shock, and he felt that he ought somehow to atone to Pauline for the disloyalty towards her his attitude seemed to involve. He began to go to church again in a desperate endeavor to pursue the phantom that she called faith, but this very endeavor only made more apparent the vital difference in their relations with life. She always had for his attempts to capture something worth while for himself in religion a kind of questioning anxiety which was faintly irritating; and though he always pushed the problem hastily out of sight, the fact that he could now be irritated by her was dolefully significant.

All through this month of maddening east wind Guy felt that he stood upon the verge of a catastrophe, and the despatch of the poems which at first had done so much to help matters along was now only another source of vexation. Formerly he had always possessed the refuge of work, but in this perpetual uncertainty he could not settle down to anything fresh, and the expectation every morning of his poems being once again rejected was a handicap to the whole day. Partly to plunge himself into a reaction and partly to avoid and even to crush their spiritual divergence, Guy always made love passionately to Pauline during these days. He was aware that she was terribly tried by this, but the knowledge made him more selfishly passionate. A sort of brutality had entered into their relation which Guy hated, but to which in these circumstances that made him feverishly glad to wound her he allowed more liberty every day. The merely physical side of this struggle between them was, of course, accentuated by the gag placed upon discussion. He would not give her the chance of saying why she feared his kisses, and he took an unfair advantage of the conviction that Pauline would never declare a reason until he demanded one. He was horribly conscious of abusing her love for him, and the more he was aware of that the more brutal he showed himself until sometimes he used to wonder in dismay if at the back of his mind the impulse to destroy his love altogether had not been born.

Easter was approaching, and Pauline went to Oxford for a week to get Summer clothes. When she came back, Guy found her attitude changed. She was remote, almost evasive, and at the back of her tenderest glance was now a wistful appeal that perplexed his ardor.

"I feel you don't want me to kiss you," he said, reproachfully. "What has happened? Why have you come back from Oxford so cold? What has happened to you, Pauline?"

Her eyes took fire, melted into tenderness, flamed once more, and then were quenched in rising tears.

The voice in which she answered him seemed to come from another world.

"Guy, I am not cold.... I'm not cold enough...."

She flung herself away from his gesture of endearment and buried her cheeks in the cushion of the faded old settee. A wild calm had fallen upon the room, as if like the atmosphere before a thunder-storm it could register a warning of the emotional tempest at hand. The books, the furniture, the very pattern of birds and daisies upon the wall stood out sharply, almost luridly it seemed; the cuckoo from the passage called the hour in notes of alarm, as if a storm-cock were sweeping up to cover from dangerous open country.

"What do you mean?" Guy asked. He knew that he was carrying the situation between Pauline and himself farther along than he had ever taken it since the night they met. Yet nothing could have stopped his course at this moment and, if the end should ruin his life, he would persist.

"What do you mean?" he repeated.

"Don't ask me," she sobbed. "It's cruel to ask me."

"You mean your mother...." he began.

"No, no, it's myself, myself."

"My dearest, if it's only yourself, you need not be afraid. Why, you're so adorable...."

Pauline seemed to cry out at the wound he had given her, and Guy started back, afraid for an instant of what he was provoking.

"Don't treat me like a stupid little girl that petting can cure. I'm not adorable, I'm bad.... I'm ... oh, Guy, I am so unhappy!"

"What do you mean by 'bad'?" he asked. "You talk as if we were.... Really, darling, you don't grasp life at all."

"Guy," she said, turning to him with fierce earnestness, "don't persuade me I've done nothing. I have. I ought not. I've known that all the time. If you don't want me to be miserable for the rest of my life, you mustn't persuade me. I've been so weak...."

He was annoyed at the exaggeration in her words and perplexed by her violence.

"Anybody would think, you know," he told her, "that we have behaved terribly."

"We have. We have."

Her mouth was drawn with pain; her eyes were wild.

"But we've not," Guy contradicted, mustering desperately all the forces of normality to allay Pauline's over-strained ideas. "We've not," he repeated. "You don't understand, darling Pauline, that when you talk like that you give the impression of something that is unimaginable of you. It's dreadful to have to talk about this, but it's better that we should discuss it than that you should torture yourself needlessly like this."

"It's not what we've done so much," she said. "It's what you've made me think about you."

Guy laughed rather miserably.

"That seems a very trifling reason for so much ... well, you know, it's very nearly hysteria."

"To you, perhaps," she retorted, bitterly. "To me it's like madness."

"I can't understand these morbid fancies of yours. What have you been doing in Oxford? Ah, I know," he shouted, in a rage of sudden divination. "You've been talking to a priest.... Oh, if I could burn every interfering scoundrel who...." The scene swept over him, choking the words in his throat with indignant impotent jealousy. "You've been to Confession. And what good have you got from it, but lies, lies?"

"I've always been to Confession," Pauline answered, coldly.

In a flash Guy visualized her religious life as one long creeping towards a gloomy Confessional, where lurked a smooth-faced priest who poured his poison into her ears.

"You shall go no more," he vowed. "What right have you to drag the holiness of love in the mud of a priest's mind?"

"You don't know how stupidly you're talking," said Pauline. "You say I exaggerate. You don't know how much you are exaggerating. You don't understand."

"I thought you wanted me to have faith! How can I have faith when I hear of priests degrading our love? What right had you to go to a priest? What does he know of you or me? What has he suffered? What does he understand? Why do you listen to him and pay no heed to me? What did you say?"

Pauline looked at him in silence.

"What did you say?" he repeated, angrily. He was caring for nothing at that moment but to tear from her the history of the scene that made a furnace of his brain. "He must have tried to put the idea into your head that you've been doing wrong. I say you have done nothing wrong. I suppose you told him you came out at night with me on the river, and I suppose he concluded from that.... Oh, Pauline, I cannot let you be a prey to the mind of a priest. You don't realize what it means to me. You don't realise the raging jealousy it rouses."

"Guy," she moaned, "love is too much for me. I can't bear the uncertainty. Your debts ... the sending back of your poems ... the fear that we shall never be married ... the doubts ... the thought that I've deceived my family ... the misery I bring to you because I can't think everything is right...."

"I don't want you always to agree with me. I've promised never to ask you again to come out with me at night. I'll even promise never to kiss you again until we are married. But you must promise me never again to go to Confession."

"I can't give up what I believe is right," she said.

"Then I won't give up what I believe is right."

He strained her to him and kissed her lips so closely that they were white instead of red. Then he went from her in an impulse to let her, if she would, break off the engagement. If he had stayed he must have blasphemed the religion which was soiling with its murk their love. He must have hurt her so deeply that he would have compelled her to bid him never come back. It was for her now, the responsibility of going on, and she should find what religion would do for her when she was left alone to battle with the infamous suggestions the fiction was giving to her mind. She should find that beside his love religion was nothing, that the folly would topple down and betray her at this very moment. When next he saw her, she would have forgotten her priests and their mummery; she would think only of him and live only for him.

"Blow, you damned wind," he shouted to the brilliant and tranquil March day. "Blow, blow, can't you? You've blown all these days, and now when I want you in my face you lie still."

But the weather stayed serene, and Guy had to run in order to tire the fury in his mind. He did not stop until he realized by the scampering of the March hares to right and left of his path how very absurd he must appear even to the blind heavens.

"Why," he exclaimed, suddenly standing still and addressing a thorn-tree on the green down. "Why, of course, now I realize the Reformation!"

This sudden apprehension of a tremendous historical fact was rather disconcerting in the way it brought home to him the uselessness of all the information that he had for years absorbed without any real response of recognition. It brought home to him how much he would have to discover for himself and appalled him with the mockery it made of his confidence hitherto. How if all those poems he had written were merely external emotion like his conception of religion until this moment? He really hoped the manuscript would come back this evening from whatever publisher had last eyed it disdainfully, so that in the light of this revelation of his youthfulness he could judge his life's achievement afresh. It was indeed frightening that in one moment all his comfortable standards could be struck away from beneath his feet, for if an outburst of jealousy on account of a priest's interference could suddenly reshape his conception of history, what fundamental changes in his conception of art might not be waiting for him a little way ahead?

The spectacle of Pauline's simple creed had hitherto pleasantly affected his senses; and she had taken her place with the heroines of romantic poets and painters. It had been pleasant to murmur:

Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars:

and to compare himself with the lover of The Blessed Damozel had been a luxurious melancholy. Pauline and he had worshiped together in chapels of Lyonesse, where, if he had knelt beside her with a rather tender condescension towards her prayers, he had always been moved sincerely by the decorative appeal they made to him. He had felt a sentimental awe of her hushed approach to the altar, and he had derived a kind of sentimental satisfaction from the perfection of her attitude, perhaps, even more, he had placed upon it a sentimental reliance. Her faith had been the decorative adjunct of a great deal of his verse, and he flushed hotly to remember lines that now appeared as damnable insincerities with which he had allowed his pen to play. All that piety of hers he had sung so prettily was real and possessed an intrinsic power to injure him, so that what he had patronized and encouraged could rise up and pit itself deliberately against him. Pauline actually believed in her religion, believed in it to the extent of dishonoring their love to appease the mumbo-jumbo. That something so monstrously inexistent could have any such power was barely comprehensible, and yet here he was faced with what easily might prove to be a force powerful enough to annihilate their love. He remembered how in reading of Christina Rossetti's renunciation of a lover who did not believe as she believed, he had thought of the incident as a poet's exaggeration. And it might well have happened. Now, indeed, he could see why she was so much the greatest poetess of them all; her faith had been real. Lines from that Sonnet of sonnets came back to him, broken lines but full of dread:

I love ... God the most;
Would lose not Him but you, must one be lost:

And if Pauline should speak so to him, if Pauline should disown him at the bidding of her phantom gods? How the thought swept into oblivion all his pitiful achievement, all his fretful emotions set down in rhyme. Either he must convince her that she was affrighted by vain fancies or he must bow before this reality of belief and seek humbly the truth where she discovered it. Yet if he took that course it held no pledge of faith for him. Shamefacedly and scarcely able to bear even the thorn-tree's presence, Guy knelt down and prayed that he might be given Pauline's single heart. The song of the innumerable larks rose into the crystalline, but all the prayers tumbled down from that stuffy pavilion of sky. The moment that the first emotional aspiration was thus defeated Guy was only conscious of his lapse into superstition, and, furious with the surrender, he went walking over the downs in a determination to shake Pauline's faith at whatever the cost temporarily to the beautiful appearance of their love.

He wrote that evening in a fine frenzy of declamation against God, affirming in his verse the rights of man; but on reading the lines through next morning they seemed like the first vapors of adolescence; and when he turned for consolation to Shelley he found that even a great poet's rage on behalf of man against God was often turgid enough. It was, however, a hopeful sign that he could still perceive what puddles these aerial fountains of song often left behind them, and he was glad to find that not all the value of critical experience had been destroyed by the imperative need to readjust his values of reality.

Birdwood brought a note from Pauline just when Guy had burned his effusion of the night before and come to the conclusion that as a polemical and atheistic rhymester he was of the very poorest quality.

The gardener was inclined to be chatty, and when the weather and the dowers in season had been discussed at length, he observed that Miss Pauline was not looking so well as she ought to look.

"You'll have to speak to her about it, Mr. Hazlenut."

Birdwood had never learned to give Guy his proper name, and there had been many jokes between him and Pauline about this, and many vows by Guy that one day he would address the gardener as Birdseed. How far away such foolish little jokes were seeming now.

"It's been a tiring Spring," said Guy. "The east wind...."

"Her cheeks isn't nothing like so rosy as they was," said the gardener. "You'll excuse the liberty I'm taking in mentioning them, but having known Miss Pauline since she couldn't walk.... Why I happen to mention it is that there was a certain somebody up in the town who passed the remark to me and, I having to give him a piece of my mind pretty sharp on account of him talking so free, it sort of stuck in my memory and.... You don't think she's middling?"

"Oh no, I think she's quite well," said Guy.

"Well, as long as you aren't worrited, I don't suppose I've got any call to be worrited; only any one can't help it a bit when they see witches' cheeks on a young lady. She certainly does look middling, but maybe, as you say, it is this unnatural east wind."

Birdwood touched his cap and retired, but his words had struck at Guy remorsefully while he walked away to a corner of the orchard reading Pauline's letter. The starlings were piping a sweet monotony of Spring, and daffodils, that he and she had planted last Summer when they came back from Ladingford, haunted his path.

Your
Pauline.

Gently the daffodils swayed in this light breeze of dying March, and the grass was already tall enough to sigh forth its transitory Summer tune. Guy, in a flood of penitence, hastened at once to the Rectory to accuse himself to Pauline, and when he saw her watching for him at the nursery window he had no regrets that could stab to wound him as deeply as he deserved to be wounded. She was very tender and still that afternoon, and as he held her in his arms there seemed to him nothing more worth while in life than her cherishing. For them sitting in that nursery the hours swung lazily to and fro in felicity, and all the time there was nobody to disturb the reconciliation. They talked only of the future and allowed recent despairs and foreboding agitations to slink away disgraced. Janet, coming to take away the tea-things, beamed at their happiness and through a filigree of bare jasmine twigs the slanting sun touched with new life the faded wall-paper, opening wider, it seemed, the daisies' eyes, mellowing the berries, and tinting the birds with brighter plumes for their immutable and immemorial courtship.

Plunged deep in such a peace, Guy, prompted by damnable discord, asked idly what had been that dream of which Pauline had spoken in her letter. She was unwilling for a long while to tell him, but he, spurred on by mischief itself, persuaded her in the end, and she recounted that experience of waking to find herself prone upon the floor of her room.

"No wonder you're looking pale," he exclaimed. "Now you see the result of exciting yourself unnecessarily."

"But it was so vivid," she protested, "and really the light was blinding, and it thought so terribly all the time."

"I shall think very terribly that you've been reading some spiritualistic rot in a novel," said Guy, "if you talk like that. Your religion may be true, but I'm quite sure these conjuring tricks of your fancy are a sign of hysteria. And this poor speck that was me? How did you know it was me if it was a speck? Did that think, too? My foolish Pauline, you encouraged your morbid ideas when you were awake, and when you were asleep you paid the penalty."

She had gone away from him and was standing by the window.

"Guy, if you talk like that, it means you don't really love me. It means you have no sympathy, that you're cold and cruel and cynical."

He sighed with elaborate compassion for her state of mind.

"And what else? I wonder how you ever managed to fall in love with me."

"Sometimes I wonder, too," she said, slowly.

He turned quickly and went out of the room.

Guy regretted before he was half-way down the passage what he had done, but he steeled himself against going back by persuading himself that Pauline's hysteria must be remorselessly checked. All the way back to Plashers Mead he had excuses for his behavior, and all the way he was wondering if he had done right. Supposing that she were to persist in this exaggeration of everything, who could say into what extravagance of attitude she might not find herself driven? Rage seized him against this malady that was sapping the foundations of their love, and all his affection for her was obscured in the contemplation of that overwrought Pauline who sacrificed herself to baseless doubts and alarms. If he once admitted her right to dream ridiculously about him, he would be encouraging her upon the road to madness. Had she not already fondled the notion of going mad, just as she would often fondle the picture of himself as the heroine of an unhappy love-affair? If he were severe now, she would surely come to see the absurdity of these religious fears, this heart-searching and morbid sensitiveness. It was curious that he was able to keep his idea of Pauline herself quite apart from Pauline as the subject of nervous depression. He was practically ascribing to her a double personality, so distinct were this two views of her in his mind. When he got home he found the manuscript had been sent back by a seventh publisher, and on top of the packet lay a letter from his friend Comeragh.

420 Brook Street, W.

Yours ever,
Comeragh.

At first the letter only presented itself to his imagination as an easy way of punishing Pauline's hysteria. It seemed to him the very weapon that was wanted to "give her a lesson," and after dinner he went across to the Rectory and announced his news in front of everybody, asking everybody if they did not think he ought to go, and talking enthusiastically of Oriental adventure until quite late. He sternly refused to allow himself a moment alone with Pauline in which to talk over the plan; and, even when they were left alone together in the hall, he kissed her good night hurriedly and silently and rather guiltily.

When Guy was back at home and thought about his behavior, he began to wonder if he had committed himself to Persia too finally. The prospect, except so far as it would affect Pauline, had not really sunk into his mind yet, but now as he read the letter over he began to think that he really would like to go. It might mean a separation of two years, but it would reconcile him to his father, and it would assure his marriage at the end of the time. Persia might easily be almost as interesting as it sounded, and how remote from debts looked Bagdad. If last year he had been able practically to settle to be a schoolmaster, how much more easily could this resolution be taken. Dreamily he let his imagination play round the notion of Persia, dreamily and rather pleasantly it would solve so many difficulties, and it held the promise of so much active romance.

Next morning Mrs. Grey sent round to ask if Guy would come to lunch early enough to have a talk with her first.

"Yes ... charming.... I really wanted us to have a little talk together," she said in nervous welcome as she led the way to her own sitting-room, that with its red lacquer and its screen painted with birds-of-paradise hid itself away in a corner of the house. Ordinarily Guy would have accepted it as a sign of the highest favor to be brought to her small room, but this morning it seemed to imprison him.

"Yes ... charming ... a little talk," said Mrs. Grey; and Guy, while he waited for her to begin, watched the mandarins that moved in absurd reduplications all about her arm-chair's faded green pattern.

"Of course it was rather a surprise to us all last night ... yes.... I expect it was a surprise to you. And you really think you ought to go?"

"I'm getting rather discouraged about poetry," Guy confessed. "I'm beginning to think that what I've written isn't much good, and that if I am ever going to write anything worth while it will be because I've learned to be less self-conscious about it. If I went to Persia with Sir George Gascony I should probably be kept fairly busy, and if there was any poetry left in me after that, well, it might be good stuff."

"But you've not seen yet what people think of what you have written ... no ... you see, the poems haven't been published yet, which is very vexing ... and so I thought.... I mean the Rector thought that if there was any difficulty he would like to help you to publish them ... yes ... rather than go away to Persia ... you know ... yes ... poor little Pauline was crying nearly all night, and I don't think you ought to go away suddenly like this ... no ... and we couldn't find an atlas anywhere!"

"You think I ought not to go?" said Guy, and he realized as he spoke that he was disappointed.

"I do think that after all these months of hoping for your poems to be a success you ought at least to try them first, and then afterwards we can talk about Persia. I'm afraid you think I've been too strict about Pauline ... perhaps I have ... yes ... and so I think that now Spring is here you can go out every day ... yes ... charming ... now that the weather is getting better...."

But now every day, thought Guy, bitterly, there would be recriminations between them.

"Of course if you think I ought not to go, I won't," he said. "I'll write to Comeragh and refuse."

"I'm sure you're glad, aren't you?"

"Oh, rather."

"We all understood why you thought you ought to go, and now I've another plan ... yes ... charming.... I'm going to send Pauline away for a month ... with Miss Verney ... yes ... charming, charming plan ... and you must make arrangements at once about your poems ... and then perhaps you could give them to Pauline for her birthday...."

"But I don't think the Rector ought to pay for them," Guy objected.

"The Rector wants to pay for them. But, of course, he won't say anything about it, and you will have to make the arrangements yourself."

"You're all so good to me, and I feel such a fraud," said Guy.

"You'd better make arrangements with the man you sent them to first ... and Pauline needn't know anything about it ... and I sha'n't say I've persuaded you not to go to China ... or else she will be worried ... she's looking rather pale.... I think two or three weeks by the seaside ... Lyme Regis perhaps or Cromer ... Lyme Regis, I think, because the trains to Folkstone have been torn out ... yes ... charming, charming."

After lunch Guy told Pauline in the garden that he had decided not to accept the post he had been offered, and she was so obviously overjoyed at his decision that he no longer had the heart to feel the slightest disappointment.

"Guy, I've been so stupid," she told him. "I've depressed you without any reason, but I will come back from Scarborough quite well."

Guy began to laugh.

"Oh, why are you laughing?"

"Dearest, because I cannot make out where you really are going."

"Scarborough, because Miss Verney has chosen Scarborough."

They talked for a while of the letters that each would write to the other, and of what a Summer should follow that short parting, when every day they would be together and when perhaps even such days as those at Ladingford might come again.

"And you won't worry about anything all this time you're away?" Guy asked.

"I won't, indeed I won't."

Guy went home to find a telegram from Comeragh saying that Sir George Gascony had got appendicitis and would not be going to Persia for a month or two at least. Yet he did not mention this telegram at the Rectory when next day he came to say good-by to Pauline, because he was anxious to preserve the idea of his having vainly attempted to do something, and when he sat alone in his orchard the same afternoon, he had an emotion of something very near to relief that for a while there would be no more heart-searchings and stress, no more misgivings and reproaches and despairs. He was perfectly happy, sitting by himself in the orchard and staring at the blackthorn by the margin of the stream.

---