The Long Run

for whom the light would go out if she went. Whereas to Philip I’ve been simply—well, what New York was before he decided to travel: the most important thing in life till he made up his mind to leave it; and now merely the starting-place of several lines of steamers. Oh, I didn’t have to love you to know that! I only had to live with him…. If he lost his eyeglasses he’d think it was the fault of the eyeglasses; he’d really feel that the eyeglasses had been careless. And he’d be convinced that no others would suit him quite as well. But at the optician’s he’d probably be told that he needed something a little different, and after that he’d feel that the old eyeglasses had never suited him at all, and that that was their fault too….’

“At one moment—but I don’t recall when—I remember she stood up with one of her quick movements, and came toward me, holding out her arms. ‘Oh, my dear, I’m pleading for my life; do you suppose I shall ever want for arguments?’ she cried….

“After that, for a bit, nothing much remains with me except a sense of darkness and of conflict. The one spot of daylight in my whirling brain was the conviction that I couldn’t—whatever happened—profit by the sudden impulse she had acted on, and allow her to take, in a moment of passion, a decision that was to shape her whole life. I couldn’t so much as lift my little finger to keep her with me then, unless I were prepared to accept for her as well as for myself the full consequences of the future she had planned for us….

“Well—there’s the point: I wasn’t. I felt in her—poor fatuous idiot that I was!—that lack of objective imagination which had always seemed to me to account, at least in part, for many of the so-called heroic qualities in women. When their feelings are involved they simply can’t look ahead. Her unfaltering logic notwithstanding, I felt this about Paulina as I listened. She had a specious air of knowing where she was going, but she didn’t. She seemed the genius of logic and understanding, but the demon of illusion spoke through her lips….

“I said just now that I hadn’t, at the outset, given my own side of the case a thought. It would have been truer to say that I hadn’t given it a separate thought. But I couldn’t think of her without seeing myself as a factor—the chief factor—in her problem, and without recognizing that whatever the experiment made of me, that it must fatally, in the end, make of her. If I couldn’t carry the thing through she must break down with me: we should have to throw our separate selves into the melting-pot of this mad adventure, and be ‘one’ in a terrible indissoluble completeness of which marriage is only an imperfect counterpart….

“There could be no better proof of her extraordinary power over me, and of the way she had managed to clear the air of sentimental illusion, than the fact that I presently found myself putting this before her with a merciless precision of touch.

“‘If we love each other enough to do a thing like this, we must love each other enough to see just what it is we’re going to do.’

“So I invited her to the dissecting-table, and I see now the fearless eye with which she approached the cadaver. ‘For that’s what it is, you know,’ she flashed out at me, at the end of my long demonstration. ‘It’s a dead body, like all the instances and examples and hypothetical cases that ever were! What do you expect to learn from thai? The first great anatomist was the man who stuck his knife in a heart that was beating; and the only way to find out what doing a thing will be like is to do it!’

“She looked away from me suddenly, as if she were fixing her eyes on some vision on the outer rim of consciousness. ‘No: there’s one other way,’ she exclaimed; ‘and that is, not to do it! To abstain and refrain; and then see what we become, or what we don’t become, in the long run, and to draw our inferences. That’s the game that almost everybody about us is playing, I suppose; there’s hardly one of the dull people one meets at dinner who hasn’t had, just once, the chance of a berth on a ship that was off for the Happy Isles, and hasn’t refused it for fear of sticking on a sand-bank!

“‘I’m doing my best, you know,’ she continued, ‘to see the sequel as you see it, as you believe it’s your duty to me to see it. I know the instances you’re thinking of: the listless couples wearing out their lives in shabby watering places, and hanging on the favour of hotel acquaintances; or the proud quarrelling wretches shut up alone in a fine house because they’re too good for the only society they can get, and trying to cheat their boredom by squabbling with their tradesmen and spying on their servants. No doubt there are such cases; but I don’t recognize either of us in those dismal figures. Why, to do it would be to admit that our life, yours and mine, is in the people about us and not in ourselves; that we’re parasites and not self-sustaining creatures; and that the lives we’re leading now are so brilliant, full and satisfying that what we should have to give up would surpass even the blessedness of being together!’

“At that stage, I confess, the solid ground of my resistance began to give way under me. It was not that my convictions were shaken, but that she had swept me into a world whose laws were different, where one could reach out in directions that the slave of gravity hasn’t pictured. But at the same time my opposition hardened from reason into instinct. I knew it was her voice, and not her logic, that was unsettling me. I knew that if she’d written out her thesis and sent it me by post I should have made short work of it; and again the part of me which I called by all the finest names: my chivalry, my unselfishness, my superior masculine experience, cried out with one voice: ‘You can’t let a woman use her graces to her own undoing—you can’t, for her own sake, let her eyes convince you when her reasons don’t!’

“And then, abruptly, and for the first time, a doubt entered me: a doubt of her perfect moral honesty. I don’t know how else to describe my feeling that she wasn’t playing fair, that in coming to my house, in throwing herself at my head (I called things by their names), she had perhaps not so much obeyed an irresistible impulse as deeply, deliberately reckoned on the dissolvent effect of her generosity, her rashness and her beauty….

“From the moment that this mean doubt raised its head in me I was once more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating, before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped gestures of the ‘man of honour.’… Oh, the sorry figure I must have cut! You’ll understand my dropping the curtain on it as quickly as I can….

“Yet I remember, as I made my point, being struck by its impressiveness. I was suffering and enjoying my own suffering. I told her that, whatever step we decided to take, I owed it to her to insist on its being taken soberly, deliberately—

“(‘No: it’s “advisedly,” isn’t it? Oh, I was thinking of the Marriage Service,’ she interposed with a faint laugh.)

“—that if I accepted, there, on the spot, her headlong beautiful gift of herself, I should feel I had taken an unfair advantage of her, an advantage which she would be justified in reproaching me with afterward; that I was not afraid to tell her this because she was intelligent enough to know that my scruples were the surest proof of the quality of my love; that I refused to owe my happiness to an unconsidered impulse; that we must see each other again, in her own house, in less agitating circumstances, when she had had time to reflect on my words, to study her heart and look into the future….

“The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine. It fell, little by little, under her quiet gaze, a gaze in which there was neither contempt nor irony nor wounded pride, but only a tender wistfulness of interrogation; and I think the acutest point in my suffering was reached when she said, as I ended: ‘Oh; yes, of course I understand.’