Guy and Pauline Part 33

Mr. Hazlewood sniffed.

"Destiny is the weak man's canonization of his own vices."

"Well, then I _will_ succeed," retorted Guy. "Moreover I will succeed in my own way. It seems a pity that we should argue acrimoniously. I shall say no more. I accept the responsibility. For what you've done for me I'm very much obliged. Would you care for a hand at piquet?"

"Oh, certainly," said his father.

Guy hugged himself with another minor triumph. At least it was he who had determined when the discussion should be closed.

The next day, as Guy stood on the s.h.i.+pcot platform and watched the slow train puffing away into the unadventurous country, he had a brief sentiment of regret for the failure of his father's visit and made up his mind to write to him a letter to-morrow, which would sweeten a little of the bitterness between them. The bees buzzing round the wine-dark dahlias along the platform were once again audible: and close at hand was the hum of a reaper-and-binder. But as he drove back to Wychford his father pa.s.sed from his mind, and mostly Guy thought of walking with Pauline under the pale and ardent blue of this September sky that was reflected in the chicory flowers along the spa.r.s.e and dusty hedgerow.

_October_

"MY dears, he frightened me to death," Pauline declared to her family when Mr. Hazlewood had left the Rectory. "Only I expect, you know, that really he's rather sweet."

"I don't think he approved of us very much," said Margaret.

"I didn't approve of him very much," said Monica.

"And where was Francis?" asked Mrs. Grey.

"Francis was a naughty boy," said Pauline.

Since they were sitting in the nursery, her mother allowed the Christian name to pa.s.s without reproof.

"He was so exactly like Guy," said Margaret.

"Like Guy?" Pauline echoed incredulously.

"Yes, of course, didn't you notice that?" Margaret laughed.

"You're quite right, Margaret," said Mrs. Grey. "How clever of you to see. Now of course I realize how much alike they were ... how clever you are!"

"Without Pauline," Margaret went on, "Guy might easily become his father all over again."

"But, my dears," said Pauline, "that would be terrible. I remember how frightened I was of Guy the first day he came to the Rectory, and if he grows more like his father, I don't think I shall ever be anything else but frightened of him, even if we live for ever. For, though I'm sure he's really very sweet, I don't believe one would ever get quite used to Mr. Hazlewood."

Yet when Pauline was alone and had an opportunity to look back upon the visit, its effect was rather encouraging than otherwise. For one thing it curiously made Guy more actual, because until the personality of his father projected itself upon the scene of their love he had always possessed for Pauline a kind of romantic unreality. In the Spring days and Summer days which had seemed to dedicate themselves to the service of intimacy, Guy had talked a great deal of his life before they met, but the more he had told her, the more was she in the state of being unable to realize that the central figure of these old tales was not a dream. When he was with her, she was often in a daze of wonder at the credibility of being loved like this; and there was never an occasion of seeing him even after the briefest absence that did not hold in the heart of its pleasure a surprize at his return. The appearance of Mr.

Hazlewood was a phenomenon that gave the pledge of prosaic authority to her love, like a statement in print that however absurd or uncomfortable has a value so far beyond mere talk. She had often been made rather miserable by Guy's tales of the ladies he had loved with airy heedlessness, but these heroines had all faded out in the unreality of his life apart from her, and they took their place with days of adventure described in Macedonia or with the old diversions of Oxford.

The visit of Mr. Hazlewood with the chilly disapproval it had shed was more authentic than, for instance, the idea of Guy's dark-eyed mother, who had seemed in his narrations almost to threaten Pauline with her son's fairy ancestry, as if from the grave she might at any moment summon him away. Mr. Hazlewood had carried with him a wonderful a.s.surance of ordinariness. The merely external resemblance between him and his son proved that Guy could grow old; and the sense of his opposition was a trifling discomfort in comparison with the a.s.surance he offered of an imaginable future. She remembered that her first idea of Guy had been that of someone dry and cynical; and no doubt this first impression of his father was equally wrong. She who had been so shy and speechless was no doubt much to blame, and the family had done nothing to help out the situation. It had been unkind of her father to hide himself, since to Mr. Hazlewood, who could not have understood that it was the sort of thing her father would be sure to do, such behaviour must have presented itself very oddly.

The Rector on Pauline's remonstrating with him was not at all penitent.

"When your marriage, my dear, comes on the horizon--I don't mind how faint a horizon--of the probable, then it will be time to discuss matters in the practical way I suppose Mr. Hazlewood would like them to be discussed. Moreover in any case I forgot that the worthy gentleman was coming."

Pauline was anxious to make excuses for the Rector to Guy, but Guy when he came round next day was only apologetic for his own father's behaviour; and he and she came to a conclusion in the end that parents must be forgiven on account of their age.

"At the same time," Guy added, "I blame my father for his conventional outlook. He doesn't seem able to realize the extraordinary help that you are to my work. In fact he doesn't realize that my work _is_ work. He's been teaching for so many years that now he can no longer learn anything. Your father's behaviour is reasonable. He doesn't take us quite seriously, but he leaves the situation to our disentanglement.

Well, we shall convince him that nothing in the world is so simple as a love like ours; but the worst of my father is that even if he were convinced he would be more annoying than ever."

"You must make allowances, Guy. For one thing how few people, even when they're young, understand about love. Besides, he's anxious about your career."

"What right has he to be anxious?" Guy burst out. "If I fail, I pay the penalty, not he."

"But he would be so hurt if you failed," she urged.

"Pauline, if you can say that, you can imagine that I will fail. Even you are beginning to have doubts."

"I haven't any doubts," she whispered. "I know you will be famous. And yet I have doubts of another sort. I sometimes wonder if I shall be enough when you are famous."

The question she had raised launched Guy upon a sea of eloquence. He worried no more about his father, but only protested his dependence upon Pauline's love for everything that he would ever have accomplished.

"Yes, but I think I shall seem dull one day," she persisted with a shake of the head.

"No, no. How could you seem dull to me?"

"But I'm not clever...."

"Avoid that wretched word," he cried. "It can only be applied to thieves, politicians and lawyers. I have told you a thousand times what you are to me, and I will not tell you again because I don't want to be an egotist. I don't want to represent you to myself as a creature that exists _for_ me. You are a being to whom I aspire. If we live for ever I shall have still to aspire to you and never be nearer than the hope of deserving you."

"But your poetry, Guy, are you sure I appreciate it? Are you sure I'm not just a silly little thing lost in admiration of whatever you do?"

Guy brushed her doubts aside.

"Poetry is life trembling on the edge of human expression," he declared.

"You are my life, and my poor verse faints in its powerlessness to say so. I always must be alone to blame if the treasure that you are is not proved to the world."

How was she to convince him of her unworthiness, how was she to persuade this lover of hers that she was too simple a creature for his splendid enthronement? Suddenly one day he would see her in all her dulness and ordinariness, and turning from her in disillusion, he would hold her culpable for anything in his work that might seem to have betrayed his ambition.

"Guy," she called into the future. "You will always love me?"

"Will there ever be another Pauline?"

"Oh, there might be so easily."

"Never! Never! Every hour, every moment cries 'never!'"

In her heart she told herself that at least none but she could ever love him so well; and in the strange confidence his father's visit had given to her she told him in her turn how every hour and every moment made her more dependent upon his love.

"I want nothing but you, nothing, nothing. I've given up everything for you."

"What have you given up?" he demanded at once, jealously and triumphantly regarding her.

"Oh, nothing really; but all the foolish little interests. Nothing, my dearest; only pigeons and music and working woollen birds and visiting poor people. Such foolish little things ... and yet things that were once upon a time frightfully important."