Chapter XV

Wer nie sein Brod mit Thraenen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der Kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlische Maechte!
GOETHE.

There was a little set of shelves in Judith’s bedroom which contained the whole of her modest library, some twenty books in all--_Lorna Doone_; Carlyle’s _Sterling_; Macaulay’s _Essays_; _Hypatia_; _The Life of Palmerston_; the _Life of Lord Beaconsfield_: these were among her favourites, and they had all been given to her by Reuben Sachs.

Like many wholly unliterary people, she preferred the mildly instructive even in her fiction. It was a matter of surprise to her that clever creatures, like Leo and Esther for instance, should pass whole days when the fit was on in the perusal of such works as _Cometh Up as a Flower_, and _Molly Bawn_.

But it was not novels, even the less frivolous ones, that Judith cared for.

Rose, whose own literary tastes inclined towards the society papers, varied by an occasional French novel, had said of her with some truth, that the drier a book was, the better she liked it. Reuben had long ago discovered Judith’s power of following out a train of thought in her clear, careful way, and had taken pleasure in providing her with historical essays and political lives, and even in leading her through the mazes of modern politics.

Perhaps he did not realize, what it is always hard for the happy, objective male creature to realize, that if he had happened to be a doctor, Judith might have developed scientific tastes, or if a clergyman, have found nothing so interesting as theological discussion and the history of the Church.

Judith stood before her little library in the dark November dawn, with a candle in her hand, scanning the familiar titles with weary eyes. She was so young and strong, that even in her misery she could sleep the greater part of the night; but these last few days she had taken to waking at dawn, to lying for hours wide-eyed in her little white bed, while the slow day grew.

But to-day it was intolerable, she could bear it no longer, to lie and let the heavy, inarticulate sorrow prey on her.

She would try a book; not a very hopeful remedy in her own opinion, but one which Reuben, Esther, and Leo, who were all troubled by sleeplessness, regarded, she knew, as the best thing under the circumstances.

So she scanned the familiar bookshelves, then turned away; there was nothing there to meet her case.

She put on her dressing-gown and stole out softly across the passage to Leo’s empty room, where she remembered to have seen some books.

Here she set down the candle, and, as she looked round the dim walls, her thoughts went out suddenly to Leo himself, went out to him with a new tenderness, with something that was almost beyond comprehension.

She knew, though she did not use the word to herself, that after some blind, groping fashion of his own, Leo was an idealist--poor Leo!

There were books on a table near, and she took them up one by one: some volumes of Heine, in prose and verse; the operatic score of _Parsifal_; Donaldson on the _Greek Theatre_; and then two books of poetry, each of which, had she but known it, appealed strongly to two strongly marked phases of Leo’s mood--_Poems and Ballads_, and a worn green copy of the poems of Clough.

She turned over the leaves carelessly.

Poetry? Yes, she would try a little poetry. She had always enjoyed reading Tennyson and Shakespeare in the schoolroom. So she put the books under her arm, went back to her room, and crept into her little cold bed.

She took up the volume of Swinburne and began reading it mechanically by the flickering candlelight.

The rolling, copious phrases conveyed little meaning to her, but she liked the music of them. There was something to make a sophisticated onlooker laugh in the sight of this young, pure creature, with her strong, slow-growing passions, her strong, slow-growing intellect, bending over the diffuse, unreserved, unrestrained pages. She came at last to one poem, the _Triumph of Time_, which seemed to have more meaning than the others, and which arrested her attention, though even this was only comprehensible at intervals. She read on and on:--

“I have given no man of any fruit to eat;
I have trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine,
This wine and bread without lees or leaven,
We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,
Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,
One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.

“In the change of years, in the coil of things,
In the clamour and rumour of life to be,
We, drinking love at the furthest springs,
Covered with love as a covering tree,
We had grown as gods, as the gods above,
Filled from the heart to the lips with love,
Held fast in his arms, clothed warm with his wings,
O love, my love, had you loved but me!

“We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved
As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen
Grief collapse as a thing disproved,
Death consume as a thing unclean.
Twin halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past;
Had you loved me once, as you have not loved;
Had the chance been with us that has not been.”

The slow tears gathered in her eyes, and forcing themselves forward fell down her cheeks.

Then there was, after all, something to be said for feelings which had not their basis in material relationships. They were not mere phantasmagoria conjured up by silly people, by sentimental people, by women. Clever men, men of distinction, recognized them, treated them as of paramount importance.

The practical, if not the theoretical, teaching of her life had been to treat as absurd any close or strong feeling which had not its foundations in material interests. There must be no undue giving away of one’s self in friendship, in the pursuit of ideas, in charity, in a public cause. Only gushing fools did that sort of thing, and their folly generally met with its reward.

And this teaching, sensible enough in its way, had been accepted without question by the clannish, exclusive, conservative soul of Judith.

Where your interests lie, there should lie your duties; and where your duties, your feelings. A wholesome doctrine no doubt, if not one that will always meet the far-reaching and complicated needs of a human soul.

And if this doctrine applied to friendship, to philanthropy, to art and politics, in how much greater a degree must it apply to love, to the unspoken, unacknowledged love between a man and woman; a thing in its very essence immaterial, and which, in its nature, can have no rights, no duties attached to it?

It was the very hatred of the position into which she had been forced, the very loathing of what was so alien to her whole way of life and mode of thought that was giving Judith courage; if she could not vindicate herself, she must be simply crushed beneath the load of shame.

On one point, the nature and extent of her feeling for Reuben, there could no longer be illusion or self-deception; she would have walked to the stake for him without a murmur, and she knew it.

She knew, too, that Reuben loved her as far as in him lay; knew, with a bitter humiliation, how far short of hers fell his love.

Yet deep in her heart lay the touching obstinate belief of the woman who loves--that she was necessary to him, that she alone could minister to his needs; that in turning away from her and her large protection, her infinite toleration, he was turning away from the best which life had to offer him.

In the first sharp agony of awakening, Judith, as we know, had recognized that which had grown up between her and Reuben as a reality with rights and claims of its own. And the conviction of this was slowly growing upon her in the intervals of the swinging back of the pendulum, when she judged herself by conventional standards and felt herself withered by her own scorn, the scorn of her world, and the scorn of the man she loved.

A great tear splashing down across the _Triumph of Time_ recalled her to herself.

She shut the book and sat up in bed, sweeping back the heavy masses of hair from her forehead.

Often and often, with secret contempt and astonishment, had she seen Esther dissolved in tears over her favourite poets.

Should she grow in time to be like Esther, undignified, unreserved? Would people talk about her, pity her, say that she had had unfortunate love affairs?

Oh, yes, they would talk, that was the way of her world; even Rose who was kind, and her own mother who loved her; no doubt they had begun to talk already.

Then, with a sense of unutterable weariness, she fell back on the pillows and slept.