Towery City, and branchy between towers,
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmd, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river rounded,
The dapple-eared lily below.
“Harriet,” said Peter; ‘I want to ask your forgiveness for these last five years.”
“I think,” said Harriet, “it ought to be the other way round.”
“I think not. When I remember how we first met-”
“Peter, don’t think about that ghastly time. I was sick of myself, body and soul. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“And I chose that time, when I should have thought only of you, to thrust myself upon you, to make demands of you, like a damned arrogant fool-as though I had only to ask and have. Harriet, I ask you to believe that, whatever it looked like, my blundering was nothing worse than vanity and a blind, childish impatience to get my own way.”
She shook her head, finding no words.
“I had found you,” he vent on, a little more quietly, “beyond all hope or expectation, at a time when I thought no woman could ever mean anything to me beyond a little easy sale and exchange of pleasure. And I was so terrified of losing you before I could grasp you that I babbled out all my greed and fear as though, God help me, you had nothing to think of but me and my windy self-importance. As though it mattered. As though the very word of love had not been the most crashing insolence a man could offer you.”
“No, Peter. Never that.”
“My dear-you showed me what you thought of me when you said you would live with me but not marry me.”
“Don’t. I am ashamed of that.”
“Not so bitterly ashamed as I have been. If you knew how I have tried to forget it. I told myself that you were only afraid of the social consequences of marriage. I comforted myself with pretending that it showed you liked me a little. I bolstered up my conceit for months, before I would admit the humiliating truth that I ought to have known from the beginning-that you were so sick of my pestering that you would have thrown yourself to me as one throws a bone to a dog, to stop the brute from yelping.”
“Peter, that isn’t true. It was myself I was sick of. How could I give you base coin for a marriage-portion?”
“At least I had the decency to know that I couldn’t take it in settlement of a debt. But I have never dared to tell you what that rebuke meant to me, when at last I saw it for what it was… Harriet; I have nothing much in the way of religion, or even morality, but I do recognize a code of behaviour of sorts. I do know that the worst sin-perhaps the only sin-passion can commit, is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell-there is no middle way… Don’t misunderstand me. I have bought it, often-but never by forced sale or at ‘stupendous sacrifice.’… Don’t, for God’s sake, ever think you owe me anything. If I can’t have the real thing, I can make do with the imitation. But I will not have surrenders or crucifixions… If you have come to feel any kindness for me at all, tell me that you would never make me that offer again.”
“Not for anything in the world. Not now or at any time since. It isn’t only that I have found a value for myself. But when I made you the offer, it meant nothing to me-now it would mean something.”
“If you have found your own value,” he said, “that is immeasurably the greatest thing… It has taken me a long time to learn my lesson, Harriet. I have had to pull down, brick by brick, the barriers I had built up by my own selfishness and folly. If, in all these years, I have managed to get back to the point at which I ought to have started, will you tell me so and give me leave to begin again? Once or twice in the last few days I have fancied that you might feel as though this unhappy interval might be wiped out and forgotten.”
“No; not that. But as though I could be glad to remember it.”
“Thank you. That is far more than I expected or deserved.”
“Peter-it’s not fair to let you talk like this. It’s I who ought to apologize. If I owe you nothing else, I owe you my self-respect. And I owe you my life-”
“Ah!” said he, smiling. “But I have given you that back by letting you risk it. That was the last kick that sent my vanity out of doors.”
“Peter, I did manage to appreciate that. Mayn’t I be grateful for that?”
“I don’t want gratitude-”
“But won’t you take it, now that I want to give it you?”
“If you feel like that about it, then I have no right to refuse. Let that clear all scores, Harriet. You have given me already far more than you know. You are free now and for ever, so far as I am concerned. You saw yesterday what personal claims might lead to-though I didn’t intend you to see it in quite that brutal way. But if circumstances made me a little more honest than I meant to be, still, I did mean to be honest up to a point.”
“Yes,” said Harriet, thoughtfully. “I can’t see you burking a fact to support a thesis.”
“What would be the good? What could I ever have gained by letting you imagine a lie? I set out in a lordly manner to offer you heaven and earth. I find that all I have to give you is Oxford-which was yours already. Look! Go round about her and tell the towers thereof. It has been my humble privilege to clean and polish your property and present her for your inspection upon a silver salver. Enter into your heritage and do not, as is said in another connection, be afraid with any amazement.”
“Peter dear,” said Harriet. She turned her back upon the shining city, leaning back against the balustrade, and looking at him. “Oh, damn!”
“Don’t worry,” said Peter. “It’s quite all right. By the way, it looks as though it was Rome again for me next week. But I shan’t leave Oxford till Monday. On Sunday there’s a Balliol Concert. Will you come to it? We’ll have one other gaudy night, and comfort our souls with the Bach Concerto for two violins. If you will bear with me so far. After that, I shall be clearing off and leaving you to-”
“To Wilfrid and Co.,” said Harriet, in a kind of exasperation.
“Wilfrid?” said Peter, momentarily at a loss, with his mind scampering after rabbits.
“Yes, I’m re-writing Wilfrid.”
“Good God, yes. The chap with the morbid scruples. How’s he getting on?”
“He’s better, I think. Almost human. I shall have to dedicate the book to you, I think. ‘To Peter, who made Wilfrid what he is’-that sort of thing… Don’t laugh like that. I’m really working at Wilfrid.”
For some reason, that anxious assurance shook him as nothing else had done. “My dear-if anything I have said… If you have let me come as far as your work and your life… Here! I think I’d better remove myself before I do anything foolish… I shall be honoured to go down to posterity in the turn-up of Wilfrid’s trouser… You will come on Sunday? I am dining with the Master, but I will meet you at the foot of the stair?… Till then.”
He slipped away along the gallery and was gone. Harriet was left to survey the kingdom of the mind, glittering from Merton to Bodley, from Carfax to Magdalen Tower. But her eyes were on one slight figure that crossed the cobbled Square, walking lightly under the shadow of St. Mary’s into the High. All the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.