PAGE 11
The Long Run
by
“She was too discerning not to see this too. Her face softened, grew inexpressibly appealing, and she dropped again into that chair you’re in, leaned forward, and looked up with her grave smile.
“‘You think I’m beside myself–raving? (You’re not thinking of yourself, I know.) I’m not: I never was saner. Since I’ve known you I’ve often thought this might happen. This thing between us isn’t an ordinary thing. If it had been we shouldn’t, all these months, have drifted. We should have wanted to skip to the last page–and then throw down the book. We shouldn’t have felt we could trust the future as we did. We were in no hurry because we knew we shouldn’t get tired; and when two people feel that about each other they must live together–or part. I don’t see what else they can do. A little trip along the coast won’t answer. It’s the high seas–or else being tied up to Lethe wharf. And I’m for the high seas, my dear!’
“Think of sitting here–here, in this room, in this chair–and listening to that, and seeing the tight on her hair, and hearing the sound of her voice! I don’t suppose there ever was a scene just like it….
“She was astounding–inexhaustible; through all my anguish of resistance I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn’t been, so completely, a woman pleading for her life….
“Her life: that was the thing at stake! She couldn’t do with less of it than she was capable of; and a woman’s life is inextricably part of the man’s she cares for.
“That was why, she argued, she couldn’t accept the usual solution: couldn’t enter into the only relation that society tolerates between people situated like ourselves. Yes: she knew all the arguments on that side: didn’t I suppose she’d been over them and over them? She knew (for hadn’t she often said it of others?) what is said of the woman who, by throwing in her lot with her lover’s, binds him to a lifelong duty which has the irksomeness without the dignity of marriage. Oh, she could talk on that side with the best of them: only she asked me to consider the other–the side of the man and woman who love each other deeply and completely enough to want their lives enlarged, and not diminished, by their love. What, in such a case–she reasoned–must be the inevitable effect of concealing, denying, disowning, the central fact, the motive power of one’s existence? She asked me to picture the course of such a love: first working as a fever in the blood, distorting and deflecting everything, making all other interests insipid, all other duties irksome, and then, as the acknowledged claims of life regained their hold, gradually dying–the poor starved passion!–for want of the wholesome necessary food of common living and doing, yet leaving life impoverished by the loss of all it might have been.
“‘I’m not talking, dear–‘ I see her now, leaning toward me with shining eyes: ‘I’m not talking of the people who haven’t enough to fill their days, and to whom a little mystery, a little manoeuvring, gives an illusion of importance that they can’t afford to miss; I’m talking of you and me, with all our tastes and curiosities and activities; and I ask you what our love would become if we had to keep it apart from our lives, like a pretty useless animal that we went to peep at and feed with sweetmeats through its cage?’
“I won’t, my dear fellow, go into the other side of our strange duel: the arguments I used were those that most men in my situation would have felt bound to use, and that most women in Paulina’s accept instinctively, without even formulating them. The exceptionalness, the significance, of the case lay wholly in the fact that she had formulated them all and then rejected them….