Chapter III

(i)

'"T^HE emotion called " calf-love " is not only beautiful, it is often singularly constant; and Val carried back with him to Cambridge a photograph in a tiny locket with a concealed catch, two much creased letters, and a very potent Ideal.

Her handwriting — rather large and bold — was dearer to him even than the photograph; the one was a mere reproduction, the other an emanation. Her hand had actually rested on the paper, the emphatic little dashes here and there were the direct outcome of her actual feeling; so he made a little parcel of the locket and the letters, had them sewn into oil-silk with an outer covering of embroidery, and carried the whole on a thin chain inside his shirt, like a scapular. It was kissed night and morning; and it rested between his fingers as he knelt by his bedside, having rediscovered since Christmas the exquisite luxury that can be obtained from prayers.

Such was one manifestation of the new Ideal; but it worked in a hundred other directions as well, some of which would have been strangely bewildering to Gertie herself, had she known of them. It became a matter of common knowledge presently that Val Medd did not appreciate certain kinds of conversation, that he would not play poker for more than halfpenny points, and that he was in real danger of becoming a Sap. So mightily and sweetly did this Ideal order all things, that even Punctuality at Lectures came beneath its sway. Certain pictures disappeared from Medd's walls and were found by interested friends carefully packed in a pile on the top of his bedroom wardrobe. He still gave dinners in Jesus Lane, but they were peaceful and orderly affairs. He frequented the Pitt Club much as usual, but he straddled less across the fire in the smoking-room, and read more magazines in the reading-room. (Remonstrances were useless.)

Interiorly, therefore, the Ideal triumphed even more completely; and certain things henceforward became impossible for him; and among these, his old fear of Fear. It seemed to him sometimes, as he reflected during those long intervals which a boy in love will contrive to get for himself, merely incredible that cowardice had ever had any relations with him whatever. And even more than this; for he came presently to recognise for the first time, and without any emotion but that of a detached astonishment, that he had not always behaved with that fortitude which he would have wished. Of course his repeated explanations and acts of faith in himself had obscured his self-knowledge; and he still believed that it was a proper prudence only that had restrained him from attempting the ascent of the Matterhorn; yet he did now begin to understand that it was not a purely physical and irresistible force, independent of his own will, that had caused him. to cry out, "I can't... tl can't..."on the lower slope of the mountain. So complete, however, was the sweep which his Ideal had made of his imagination, that he could face this memory without shame. It was simply another Valentine Medd altogether who had done this thing, not the lover of Gertie Marjoribanks. Old things had passed away; all things were made new.

Meanwhile a very pretty little plot engaged his diplomatic powers, and he took his part in it with considerable skill.

He began by writing two letters, one in each of the first two weeks of the Lent term, to his sister May, explaining in the first that he was sorry he had given up doing his duty in this way since he had left Eton. This first letter, too, was honestly unpremeditated; he was only conscious of a vague impulse to be in closer touch, not with his sister, but with Gertie's friend. The second letter was deliberately guileful, and he ended it with a P. S.: "Why hasn't mother ever let you go abroad? I'd come with you like a shot any time you liked."

This produced, of course, a wail from May, saying how unfair it was that boys always had the best of everything, and inviting suggestions. And then Val unmasked one of his guns, said that he believed that Rome at Easter was perfectly charming, and why shouldn't he and May go there for a fortnight in the vacation? Would May see how the land lay? And then Val drew his breath hard, so to speak, and prayed and willed and rehearsed.

There followed a silence, and every day that passed at once deferred and rekindled hope. But his intuitions had been perfectly right and his trains of powder admirably laid. It was quite obvious that two girls would be better than one; that Gertie Marjoribanks, who knew French and Italian really well and was May's adored friend, was the proper person to be asked; so exactly ten days after Val's adroit remarks had left the Pitt Club letter-box, he sat smiling one morning, silent and preoccupied, over breakfast, to the indignation of Jim Waterbury, with whom he " kept," conscious that, tucked in between the kippers and the toast, was an incoherent torrent of delight from May announcing that consent had been given, and that on the Monday before Easter sb£ and Gertie Marjoribanks and Val were to be permitted to start for Rome. One single trail of cloud dimmed the perfection of the sky, and that was the possibility, added in a postscript, that Austin might also be coming with them.

This, however, was comparatively of little importance. Even Austin could not destroy the delight of a fortnight's travel with Gertie. And she was coming to Medhurs.t again in the summer, and again at Christmas; and he was to shoot at a house where she was to be staying in September.

The necessary secrecy of the whole affair, too, added poignancy. It was delicious in a certain sense that Gertie could not be written to; for the two had resolved with excellent prudence not to write to one another more than once in six weeks. And, instead, there was the sense of a joy shared in silence, of two hearts exulting together without hint or sign to the one from the other....

It is harder to describe Gertie's own attitude, since in her more complex emotions were at work. In the case of Val there was but one supreme white-hot fact — the fact of the ten times refined love of a young male to his mate — refined by romance, by heredity, and permitted to burn the more purely from the rather simple nature of the fuel. But the girl, younger in years, was not only more complex, but infinitely more experienced. Music and acting had been her outlet up to now, and these had increased her imaginative range as well as developing her powers of sensation. The two hearts were, one to the other, as a bow to a violin. It is the violin that actually holds the music, from the shrill cry of the treble to the languorous murmur of the bass; and if the bow shivers with the ecstasy of the touch, it is a single ecstasy and not a thousand. It is true that just now the music was being called out by the bow; that Gertie answered Val; that the boy was dominant; but it is no less true that the music was in the violin, not in the bow; and, though she played his tune just now with all her heart, that she was capable of other melodies as well. If the bow were to be broken another could be made; if the violin were broken its exact fellow could not be found.

Very well, then; it was one aspect of Val that for the present held her vision, and to that she bowed down her whole being, genuinely and even profoundly. She had got accustomed to him in the intimacy of Medhurst, and having worked through those superficial awkwardnesses and un familiarities that otherwise might have hindered her knowledge of him, had arrived at a stratum of his character — his romantic faculties and imaginations — which she thought were so well illustrated by his external appearance. He had a knightly sort of face, grim and pure, a down-bent nose, thin, compressed lips, a projecting chin, and crisp hair; he was long-limbed and sinewy.... And he had ridden after her at a gallop and saved her life. He stood to her, therefore, as a kind of gallant; he had made love ardently and simply; and so at last her rather rich nature had fastened upon him as a kind of Sir Percival, had decked him out in virtues such as those of courage and strength, and crowned him king.

She was behaving, then, as such girls will. At first she had carried the little ring he had sent her, set with one large turquoise, where he carried her locket, and it had risen and fallen with her breathing. Then, greatly daring, she had put it on, where she had worn it ever since. She too remembered him continually, when she woke and before she slept; she too locked her door sometimes, put out the light, and dreamed before the fire. All this was perfectly genuine; she loved to think of herself with him, obeying him, yielding to him, leaning upon him; she was magnificently aloof with the middle-aged Viscount, and wondered whether she showed signs of a secret sorrow; she acted and played with real passion.... She was more often silent; and she wrote to May every single day, laying it upon herself not to mention Val's name more than once a fortnight.

Now all this was perfectly simple and genuine; it was schoolgirl love, no doubt, but it was none the worse for that; it was perfectly sweet and fresh; it was the strongest emotion she had ever felt. There was no coquetry in it; to have given him pain would have given her agony; it was her deliberate and sincere resolve to carry through the engagement to its conclusion; she saw herself as his wife; as the mother of his children. She proposed to grow aged and silver-haired in his love service, and exactly to resemble Lady Beatrice Medd thirty years hence. And so forth.

But her complexity vented itself in her consciousness of herself as performing those duties, and in an idea that she had a wider range than Val. In him, all other emotions had vanished in his love; in her, other emotions ministered to love, but preserved their own identity. For example, she wondered whether, as has been said, she showed signs of a secret sorrow; and Val never wondered at all — he would have been miserable and ashamed at the thought that such a tjiing could possibly happen to himself. Two months ago he might have so wondered; now his complexity was gone. Or, again, she formed little pictures of herself as " managing " him; Val thought of nothing but of loving her. In fact, she flattered herself, as feminine minds will, by dwelling upon his dear simplicity, while Val thought nothing of her qualities and all of her. Lastly, she measured her love to him by the sacrifices that she was so gladly making for him (the Viscount, for instance). She wondered whether it was conceivable that Providence might arrange for Val's inheriting of Medhurst, whereas Val forgot to think of sacrifices at all.

Here, then, the two were; eighty miles apart as we measure space, utterly together as both sincerely believed. Again and again Val, brooding happily over the fire after a lonely dinner, watched her in imagination as she lay down to sleep.... Again and again Gertie, lying down to sleep, watched Val in imagination brooding over the fire.... They were boy and girl indeed. But they were none the worse for that.

So much for Psychology.

unp