Chapter IV

The bay at Bridnorth is inclosed by two headlands of sandy stone. That to the east rises irregularly with belts of pine wood and sea-bent oaks, opening later in heathered moors that stretch in broad plateaus, then sink to sheltered hollows where one farm at least lies hidden in its clump of trees.

It is always a romantic world, that land which lies to the cliff edge beside the sea. The man who farms it is forever at close grips with the elements. He wrestles with Nature as those inland with their screening hedgerows have little knowledge of. The hawthorn and the few scattered trees that grow, all are trained by the prevailing winds into fantastic shapes no hand of man can regulate. Sheep may do well upon those windy pastures, but the cattle, ever at hiding in the hollows, wear a weather-beaten look. Crops are hazardous ventures and, like the sower, scattering his grain, must plant their feet full firmly in the soil if they would stand until their harvest time against the winds that sweep up from the sea.

Up through the belt of pine wood and across the heathered moors, Mary came often those days with her friend. The views from countless places called for his brush. Once she had brought him there to show him her Devon, he sought the golf links no more. They never played their final match.

On the first two occasions of their excursions beyond Penlock Hill, he painted assiduously. Mary brought a book and read. Long whiles between her reading she watched him, smiling, when, with almost childish distress, he assured her he had done pictures that at least were worth glancing at in a portfolio, if not a permanent frame.

For either it was, as in the first instance, that the atmosphere of a strange country defeated him and tricked his sense of color, or his mind was bent on other things, but both days were fruitless of results. On each of these occasions, as before, he threw the sketches down, unfinished, and fretted at his lack of skill.

"This Devon of yours," said he, "has got more color than I can get out of my box. What really is the matter is that it has more color than I've got in my eyes. If it's not in your eyes, it's not in your box. You can't squeeze a green field out of a tube of oxide of chromium. Paint's only the messenger between you and Nature."

Her sympathy was real. Notwithstanding that it gave her more of his attention, she fretted for him too. When the next day they met at the foot of Penlock Hill and she found him without his satchel, she was genuinely disappointed and unhappy.

"Aren't you sufficiently selfish," he asked, "to be sensible of the obvious fact that I'd far sooner talk to you than spend my time in useless efforts?"

"Perhaps it isn't in the nature of women to be really selfish," she said, with a laugh to lighten her meaning.

That set them at discussion upon the comparative selfishness of the sexes as they mounted the hill and took the beaten path across the heather.

For a man, he had strange points of view to her. With an honest bitterness, he complained about the selfishness of men.

"But what else can we be?" said he. "As things are, what else can we be? We run the world and this civilization's our conception of the measures on which it has to be run, and this civilization is built up on a solid rock of egotism and selfishness, with brute force to insist upon the upholding of the standard. I wonder what would happen," he went on, "if fair women, as Meredith visioned, rose in revolt. I wonder what would happen if they suddenly combined to refuse to give the world the material it builds its civilization with. I wonder where our brute force would come in then. What sort of children should we have if women had to be taken by brute force? And should we so take them if really they were to resist? Brute force has been opposed only with brute force. Our highest conception is that the strongest brute force wins. I wonder what brute force would do if it were opposed with the force of the spiritual ideals that women have and scarcely are awake to even yet. Are you awake to the spiritual ideals in you?"

He looked at her suddenly as they walked and as suddenly and as firmly she said--

"Yes."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the first woman I've ever met who would have answered as straight and direct as that. All the rest would have hedged and shilly-shallied. Some would have giggled. Half of them would frankly not have known what I meant."

"I know very well what you mean," she replied. "But if you're surprised at a woman knowing, I don't think you're any more surprised than I am at a man asking the question. How did you know to begin with that women have spiritual ideals at all, strong enough ever to think of their being ranged against brute force?"

She paused, but it was so obvious she had still more to say that he waited rather than interrupt the train of her thought.

"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman," she said.

In that pause she had wrestled with herself.

It had been the first time she had mentioned his wife in all their conversation. Well she knew what would be the effect of it. It would call her there between them. Inevitably it would thrust him a little away from her to give his wife room in their minds.

It had been an irresistible thought, yet why should she spoil the contact of mind between them by speaking it? Was it incumbent upon her in any way to remind him of his wife?

Yet partly she was curious to know, and wholly she was honest to speak. There was his wife. Nothing in Mary's thoughts would be reckoned without her. Did he find a deep interest in speaking to her? She believed he did, but there was his wife. She knew there was no attraction of physical beauty in her, yet had he not made it obvious in the last ten days that still she had attraction for him? It seemed certain to her that he had; but there was his wife.

At every turn in their conversation, at the end of every steadied glance, this woman she had never seen effected some intervention in thought or vision in Mary's mind. More plainly a thousand times it seemed she felt her presence than did he. There were moments when enthusiasm caught him and it appeared he had forgotten every one and everything but Mary there before him.

It became imperative then for her to summon that vision before her mind. She did it with an effort. But later, when alone at night before she turned to sleep, it came without call, trembling her with emotion at the thought that a moment might happen upon them when they would both forget or come to memory too late.

And what did she mean by that--too late? In all frankness and honesty, she did not know. It were better explained, she would not allow herself to know. Reaching that issue in her conscious thought about it all, emotion would sweep like a hot wind upon her. She would lie, half trembling in the darkness, pressing her hand upon her breast to frighten herself into some sort of terrible joy at the rapid beating of her heart and then, driving all conscious thought away from her, she would straighten her limbs in the bed, exerting her physical control, as when she nerved herself to play her game, thus forcing herself to quietude and ultimately to sleep.

So she came always consciously to a point of thought which, bringing her the vision of his wife and the sense of her own emotion, drifted her towards that subconsciousness of being wherein the pattern of so many a woman's life is made. She thought no more but, had she permitted it, would have lain, silent-minded in an ecstasy. It was no less than physical control, the straightening of her limbs, the clenching of her hands, the beating of her pillow into new resting places for her head, that put the ecstasy away.

Here, in some likeness, was that same moment, in the broad light of day with him beside her and the crisp heather roots beneath their feet. It was almost a physical effort in her throat that gave her strength to say--

"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman."

She meant him to realize that in her thoughts it was through his wife he had become possessed of such knowledge about women; that there was his wife; that she was there between them; that if he had for the instant forgotten her, she had not. It was as though, in a violent muscular effort, Mary had seized her by the wrist and jerked her into step with them. Almost was she catching for her breath when she had done it.

"My wife is a wonderful woman," said he quietly. "She has as big a heart as all this stretch of acres and that breadth of sea, but to-day is her to-morrow. I didn't learn about the spiritual ideals of women from her."

"Where did you learn it then?" asked Mary.

"Now you're asking me something I couldn't possibly tell you," said he, and then he smiled. He had seen the look leap slanting across her eyes as she thought of the other woman who had taught him.

"Because," he added--"I don't know."