The Return of the Prodigal Part 59

"And why not?"

"I would have made a great mistake. The same mistake that you are making now."

"Mistake?"

"You mistook the idea for the reality once, if you remember--and now aren't you mistaking the reality for the idea?"

"Frida, you are too subtle; you are the most exasperating woman in the world----"

"There, you see. That's the sort of thing we should always be saying to each other if I let you have your way. But supposing you did have it; if we were married we could not understand each other better than we do; so we should not be one bit better off. By this time we should have got beyond the phase we started with----"

"But we should have _had_ it----"

"Yes; and found ourselves precisely where we are now."

"Where we were yesterday, you mean."

"Yes. We were good enough friends yesterday."

"And what are we to-day? Enemies?"

She smiled sadly. "It looks like it. At any rate, we seem to have some difficulty in understanding each other."

"Good G.o.d! how coolly you talk about it! Understanding! Do you never feel? Has it never even occurred to you that I can feel? Have you any notion what it is to be made of flesh and blood and nerves, and to have to stay here, squeezed up in this confounded boat, where I can't get away from you?"

"You can get away in three-quarters of an hour, and meanwhile, if you like, you can go below."

"If I did go below I should still feel you walking over my head. I should hear you breathe. And now to look at you and touch you, and know all the time that something sticks between us----"

He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had brought them together. Amid the daemonic triumph and jubilation of the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman, had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other's eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and uncertain in nature's tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged them in and hid them from each other.

"As you know, we're the best friends in the world; there's only one thing that sticks between us--the eternal difference in our points of view."

"I was perfectly right. Why couldn't I trust my first impressions? I thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman----"

"Inhuman?"

"Well, not a bit like a woman."

"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."

"There's something about you----"

"Really? What is it, do you think?"

"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that's all. It must be as you say, and as I always thought, that you are incapable of feeling or understanding feeling. I repeat, there's something about you----"

"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there's something about _you_.

I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn't own that it was there. Now I am sure. You've been doing your best to make me sure."

"What have I made you sure of?"

"Sure that you are incapable, not of loving perhaps, but of loving a certain kind of woman the way she wants to be loved. You can't help it. As I said before, it is the difference in the point of view. We should get no nearer if we talked till doomsday."

"My point of view, as you call it, has entirely changed."

"No. It is I who have changed. Your point of view is, and always will be, the same."

He tried hard to understand.

"Does it come to this--that if I had loved you then you would have loved me now?"

"You couldn't have loved me then. You were not that sort."

He understood her meaning and it maddened him. "It wasn't my fault.

How the devil was I to see?"

"Exactly, how were you? There are some things which you can't see.

You can see everything you can paint, and, as you are a very clever artist, I dare say you can paint most things you can see."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"Everything. It's your way all through. You love me because what you see of me is changed. And yet all that time I was the same woman I am now. I am the same woman I was then."

"But I am not the same man!"

"The very same. You have not changed at all."

She meant that he was deficient in that spiritual imagination which was her special power; she meant that she had perceived the implicit baseness of his earlier att.i.tude as a man to her as a woman, a woman who had had no power to touch his senses. It was, as she had said, the difference in their points of view; hers had condemned him forever to the sensual and the seen.

He stood ashamed before her.

Yet, as if she had divined his shame and measured the anguish of it and repented her, she laid her hand on his arm.

"Maurice, it isn't entirely so. I have been horribly unjust."

"Not you! You are justice incarnate. If I had loved you then----"

"You couldn't have loved me then."

"So you have just told me."

"You had good cause. I was not and could not be then--whatever it is that you love now."

"But I might have seen----"

"Seen? Seen? That's it. There was nothing to see."

Her eyes, in her pity for him, filled with tears, tears that in his anger he could not understand.