I’ve exhausted the need, and we’ll have a little place of our own and forget the world, really. I know I can do it. I could almost do it now: and here in Australia. The country appeals to me that way: to lose oneself and have done with this side of life. But wait a bit longer.”
“Ah, I suppose I shall have to,” she said recklessly. “You’ll have to go on making a fool of yourself till you’re tired. Wives are SUPPOSED to have to take their husbands back a little damaged and repentant from their LOVE AFFAIRS with other women. And I’m hanged if it wouldn’t be more fun than this business of seeing you come back once more fooled from your attempts with MEN— the world of men, as you call it. If they WERE real men I wouldn’t mind. But look at your Jack Callcott. Really, and you’re supposed to have had some experience of life. ‘Clip in, old man!’” She imitated Jack’s voice and manner. “And you stand it all and think it’s wonderful! Nay, men are too foolish for me to understand them; I give them up.”
He laughed, realizing that most of what she said was true.
“You see,” he said, “I have the roots of my life with you. But I want if possible to send out a new shoot in the life of mankind — the effort man makes forever, to grow into new forms.”
She looked at him. And somehow she wanted to cry, because he was so silly in refusing to be finally disappointed in his efforts with mankind, and yet his silliness was pathetic, in a way beautiful. But then it WAS so silly — she wanted to shake him.
“Send out a new shoot then. Send it out. You do it in your writing already!” she cried. “But getting yourself mixed up with these impudent people won’t send any shoots, don’t you think it. They’ll nip you in the bud again, as they always do.”
He pondered this also, stubbornly, and knew it was true. But he had set his will on something, and wasn’t going to give way.
“I want to do something with living people, somewhere, somehow, while I live on the earth. I write, but I write alone. And I live alone. Without any connection whatever with the rest of men.”
“Don’t swank, you don’t live alone. You’ve got ME there safe enough, to support you. Don’t swank to me about being alone, because it insults me, you see. I know how much alone you are, with me always there keeping you together.”
And again he sulked and swallowed it, and obstinately held out.
“None the less,” he retorted, “I do want to do something along with men. I AM alone and cut off. As a man among men, I just have no place. I have my life with you, I know: et praeterea nihil.”
“Et praeterea nihil! And what more do you want? Besides, you liar, haven’t you your writing? Isn’t that all you want, isn’t that DOING all there is to be done? Men! Much MEN there is about them! Bah, when it comes to that, I have to be even the only man as well as the only woman.”
“That’s the whole trouble,” said he bitingly.
“Bah, you creature, you ought to be grateful,” cried Harriet.
William James arrived one morning when the Callcotts were both out, and brought a little basket of persimmons and passion fruits for Harriet. As it happened, Somers also was out.
“I remember you said you like these date-plums, Mrs. Somers. Over at our place we don’t care for them, so if you like to have them you’re welcome. And these are about the last of the passion fruit, seemingly.”
The persimmons were good big ones, of that lovely suave orange-red colour which is perhaps their chief attraction, and they were just beginning to go soft. Harriet of course was enchanted. William James came in and sat down for a few minutes, wondering what had become of Victoria. He looked round the room curiously. Harriet had, of course, arranged it to her own liking, taken away all the pictures and ornaments, hung a Tunis curtain behind the couch, stood two tall red lacquer candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and altogether given the room that air of pleasant distinction which a woman who knows how to do it finds so easy, especially if she has a few shawls and cushion-covers and bits of interesting brass or china. Harriet insisted on travelling with a few such things. She was prepared to camp in a furnished bungalow or cottage on any continent, but a few of her own things she must have about her. Also she wore a dress of Bavarian peasant stuff, very thin black woollen material, sprinkled all over with tiny pink roses with green leaves. And on her feet she had heelless sandals of plaited strips of leather, from Colombo. William James noticed every one of these things. They had a glamour like magic for him.
“This is quite a pleasant room you have here,” he said in his Cornish voice, with the alert, subtle, faintly smiling look of wonder on his face.
“It isn’t bad,” said Harriet. “But a bit poky.”
“Poky you call it? Do you remember the little stone holes they have for rooms in those old stone Cornish cottages?”
“Yes — but we had a lovely one. And the great thick granite walls and the low ceilings.”
“Walls always letting the damp in, can’t keep it out, because all the chinks and spaces are just stuffed with plain earth, and a bit of mortar smeared over the outside like butter scraped on bread. Don’t I remember it! I should think I do.”
“Cornwall had a great charm for me.”
“Well, I don’t know where you found it, I’m sure. But I suppose you’ve got a way of your own with a place, let it be Cornwall or where it may, to make it look well. It all depends where you’re born and where you come from.”
“Perhaps,” said Harriet.
“I’ve never seen an Australian cottage looking like this, now. And yet it isn’t the number of things you’ve put into it.”
“The number I’ve taken out,” laughed Harriet.
William James sat there with his quiet slumberous-seeming body, watching her: watching the quick radiance of her fair face, and the charm of her bearing. There was something quick and sure and, as it were, beyond the ordinary clay, about her, that exercised a spell over him. She was his real Cornish idea of a lady: simple, living among people as if one of themselves, and yet not one of themselves: a sort of magic about her. He could almost see a glow in the air around her. And he could see that for her he was just a nice fellow who lived in another world and on another plane than herself, and that he could never come up or she come down. She was the queen that slumbers somewhere in every Cornish imagination, the queen ungrudged. And perhaps, in the true Celtic imagination slumbers the glamorous king as well. The Celt needs the mystic glow of real kingliness. Hence his loneliness in the democratic world of industry, and his social perversity.
“I don’t suppose Rose could ever learn to do this with a room, could she now?” he asked, making a slight gesture with his hand. He sat with his clear, queer, light grey eyes fixed on Harriet’s face.
“I think so,” cried Harriet; then she met the watchful eyes. “In her own way she could. Every woman has her own way, you know.”
“Yes, I do know,” he answered.
“And you see,” said Harriet, “we’re more or less lazy people who have no regular work in the world. If we had, perhaps we should live in a different way.”
William James shook his head.
“It’s what’s bred into you,” he said, “that comes
