mean to be a curse to me," he said, "and you couldn't be if you tried. Whatever you did, and you are going to do a pretty bad thing now in marrying that chap, must be almost insignificant compared to the love which you have made exist in me."
He paused a moment.
"I have thought it all out," he said, "but it is difficult, and you must give me time. I'm not quick like you as you know very well, but sometimes I get there. It is like this."
She was watching him and listening to him, with a curious intentness and nervousness, as a prisoner about to receive sentence may watch the judge. Her hands clasped and unclasped themselves, her breath came short and irregular. It seemed as if she, for once, had failed to understand him whom she had said she knew too fatally well. Just now, at any rate, and on this topic, it was clear she did not know what he was going to propose. Yet it was scarcely a proposal she waited for; she waited for his word, his ultimatum. Till now she had dominated him completely with her quick wit, her far more subtle intelligence, her beauty, her vitality. But for once now, he was her master: she felt she had to bow to his simplicity and his uncomplicated strength, his brute virility. It was but faintly that she recognized it; the recognition came to her consciousness but as an echo. But the voice that made the echo came from within.
"I have received my dismissal from you," he said, "as head of your house, as your possible husband. As I said, I won't take the place of the tame cat instead. God knows I don't want to cut adrift from you, and I can't cut adrift from you. But my aspiration is rendered impossible, and therefore both my mental attitude to you and my conduct must be altered. I daresay Berts and Tommy and Esther and all the rest of them will go lying about on your bed, and smoking in your bedroom just as before. Well, I can't be intimate in that sort of way any longer. You said you never reckoned whether you respected me or not, and that may be so. But without wanting to be heavy about it, I have got to respect myself. I can't help being your lover, but I can help tickling my love, so to speak, making it squirm and wriggle. Whether I am respectable or not, it is, and I shan't—as I said—I shan't tickle it. Also though I would be hurt in any other way for your sake, I won't be hurt like that. Don't misunderstand me. It is because my love for you is not one atom abated, that I won't play tricks with it. But when it says to me, 'I can't bear it,' I shall not ask to bear it. You always found me too easy to understand: I think this is another instance of it."
He paused a moment and Nadine gave a little sobbing sigh.
"Oh, Hughie," she began.
"No, don't interrupt," he said. "I want to go through with it, without discussion. There is no discussion possible. I wouldn't argue with God about it. I should say: 'You made me an ordinary human man, and you've got to take the consequences. In the same way, you have chosen Seymour, and I am telling you what is the effect. Now—you are tired of hearing it—I love you. And therefore I want your happiness without reservation. You have decided it will conduce to your happiness to marry Seymour. Therefore, Nadine—this is quite simple and true—I want you to do so. I may rage and storm on the surface, but essentially I don't. Somewhere behind all I may say and do, there is, as you once said to me, the essential me. Well, that says to you, 'God bless you.' That's all."
He unclasped his hands from round his knees, and stood up.
"I'm going away now," he said. "I thought when I came down it might take a long time to tell you this. But it has taken ten minutes only. I thought perhaps you would have a lot to say about it, and I daresay you have, but I find that it doesn't concern me. Don't think me brutal, any more than I think you brutal. I am made like this, and you are made otherwise. By all means, let us see each other, often I hope, but not just yet. I've got to adjust myself, you see, and you haven't. You never loved me, and so what you have done makes no difference in your feelings towards me. But I've got to get used to it."
She looked up at him, as he stood there in front of her with the green lights through the beech-leaves playing on him.
"You make me utterly miserable, Hugh," she said.
"No, I don't. There is no such thing as misery without love. You don't care for me in the way that you could—could give you the privilege of being miserable."
For one half-second she did not follow him. But immediately the quickness of her mind grasped what came so easily and simply to him.
"Ah, I see," she said, her intelligence leading her away from him by the lure of the pleasure of perception. "When you are like that, it is even a joy to be miserable. Is that so?"
"Yes, I suppose that is it. Your misery is a—a wireless message from your love. Bad news, perhaps, but still a communication."
She got up.
"Ah, my dear," she said, "that must be so. I never thought of it. But I can infer that you are right. Somehow you are quickened, Hughie. You are giving me a series of little shocks. You were never quite like that before."
"I was always exactly like that," he said. "I have told you nothing that I have not always known."
Again her brilliant egoism asserted itself.
"Then it is I who am quickened," she said. "There is nothing that quickens me so much as being hurt. It makes all your nerves awake and active. Yes; you have hurt me, and you are not sorry. I do not mind being hurt, if it makes me more alive. Ah, the only point of life is to be alive. If life was a crown of thorns, how closely I would press it round my head, so that the points wounded and wounded me. It is so shallow just to desire to be happy. I do not care whether I am happy or not, so long as I feel. Give me all the cancers and consumptions and decayed teeth, and gout and indigestion and necrosis of the spine and liver if there is such a thing, so that I may feel. I don't feel: it is that which ails me. I have a sane body and a sane mind, and I am tired of sanity. Kick me, Hughie, strike me, spit at me, make me angry and disgusted, anything, oh, anything! I want to feel, and I want to feel about you most particularly, and I can't, and there is Edith playing on her damned double-bass again. I hear it, I am conscious of it, and it is only the things that don't matter which I am conscious of. I am conscious of your brown eyes, my dear, and your big mouth and your trousers and boots, and the cow that is wagging its tail and looking at us as if it was going to be sick. Its dinner, I remember, goes into its stomach, and then comes up again, and then it becomes milk or a calf or something. It has nine stomachs, or is it a cat that has nine lives, or nine tails? I am sure about nine. Oh, Hughie, I see the outside aspect of things, and I can't get below. I am a flat stone that you send to make—chickens is it?—no, ducks and drakes over a pond: flop, flop, the foolish thing. And somehow you with your stupidity and your simplicity, you go down below, and drown, and stick in the mud, and are so uncomfortable and miserable. And I am sorry for you: I hate you to be uncomfortable and miserable, and oh, I envy you. You suffer and are kind, and don't envy, and are not puffed up, and I envy your misery, and am puffed up because I am so desirable, and I don't really suffer—you are quite right—and I am not kind. Hugh, I can't bear that cow, drive it away, it will eat me and make milk of me. And there, look, are Mama and Papa Jack, coming back from their ride. Papa Jack loves her; his face is like a face in a spoon when he looks at her, and I know she is learning to love him. She no longer thinks when she is talking to him, as to whether he will be pleased. That is a sure sign. She is beginning to be herself, at her age too! She doesn't think about thinking about him any more: it comes naturally. And I am not myself: I am something else: rather, I am nothing else: I am nothing at all, just some intelligence, and some flesh and blood and bones. I am not a real person. It is that which is the matter. I long to be a real person, and I can't. I crawl sideways over other things like a crab: I wave my pincers and pinch. I am lost: I am nothing! And yet I know—how horribly I know it—there is something behind, more than the beastly idol with the wooden eye, which is all I know of my real self. If only I could find it! If only I could crack myself up like a nut and get to a kernel. For God's
