And it robbed me, too, of any fine perception of absurdity.
Yet that was not everything in our relationship. The elemental thing was there also. It came in very suddenly.
It was one day in the summer, though I do not now recall without reference to my experimental memoranda whether it was in July or August. I was working with a new and more bird-like aeroplane with wing curvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and Phillips, that I thought would give a different rhythm for the pitching oscillations than anything I'd had before. I was soaring my long course from the framework on the old barrow by my sheds down to Tinker's Corner. It is a clear stretch of downland, except for two or three thickets of box and thorn to the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which there is bush and a small rabbit warren, comes in from the east. I had started, and was very intent on the peculiar long swoop with which any new arrangement flew. Then, without any sort of notice, right ahead of me appeared Beatrice, riding towards Tinker's Corner to waylay and talk to me. She looked round over her shoulder, saw me coming, touched her horse to a gallop, and then the brute bolted right into the path of my machine.
There was a queer moment of doubt whether we shouldn't all smash together. I had to make up my mind very quickly whether I would pitch-up and drop backward at once and take my chance of falling undamaged—a poor chance it would have been—in order to avoid any risk to her, or whether I would lift against the wind and soar right over her. This latter I did. She had already got her horse in hand when I came up to her. Her woman's body lay along his neck, and she glanced up as I, with wings aspread, and every nerve in a state of tension, swept over her.
Then I had landed, and was going back to where her horse stood still and trembling.
We exchanged no greetings. She slid from her saddle into my arms, and for one instant I held her.
"Those great wings," she said, and that was all.
She lay in my arms, and I thought for a moment she had fainted.
"Very near a nasty accident," said Cothope, coming up and regarding our grouping with disfavour. He took her horse by the bridle. "Very dangerous thing coming across us like that."
Beatrice disengaged herself from me, stood for a moment trembling, and then sat down on the turf "I'll just sit down for a moment," she said.
"Oh!" she said.
She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with an expression between suspicion and impatience.
For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he'd better get her water.
As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely know how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swift emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. I see no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in that moment, but it did. I do not believe that before then I had thought of our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, the factor of passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, and neither of us said a word. But it was just as though something had been shouted from the sky.
Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face. "I shan't want any water," she said. "Call him back."
VI
After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had gone. She came to me less frequently, and when she came she would have some one with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk of the talking. All through September she was away. When we were alone together there was a curious constraint. We became clouds of inexpressible feeling towards one another; we could think of nothing that was not too momentous for words.
Then came the smash of Lord Roberts A, and I found myself with a bandaged face in a bedroom in the Bedley Corner dower-house with Beatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey very pink and shocked in the background, and my aunt jealously intervening.
My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have been taken to Lady Grove next day, but Beatrice would not permit that, and kept me at Bedley Corner three clear days. In the afternoon of the second day she became extremely solicitous for the proper aeration of the nurse, packed her off for an hour in a brisk rain, and sat by me alone.
I asked her to marry me.
All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent itself to eloquence. I lay on my back and talked through bandages, and with some little difficulty, for my tongue and mouth had swollen. But I was feverish and in pain, and the emotional suspense I had been in so long with regard to her became now an unendurable impatience.
"Comfortable?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Shall I read to you?"
"No. I want to talk."
"You can't. I'd better talk to you."
"No," I said, "I want to talk to you."
She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes. "I don't—I don't want you to talk to me," she said. "I thought you couldn't talk."
"I get few chances—of you."
"You'd better not talk. Don't talk now. Let me chatter instead. You ought not to talk."
"It isn't much," I said.
"I'd rather you didn't."
"I'm not going to be disfigured," I said. "Only a scar."
"Oh!" she said, as if she had expected something quite different. "Did you think you'd become a sort of gargoyle?"
"L'Homme qui Rit!—I didn't know. But that's all right. Jolly flowers those are!"
"Michaelmas daisies," she said. "I'm glad you'r not disfigured, and those are perennial sunflowers. Do you know no flowers at all? When I saw you on the ground I certainly thought you were dead. You ought to have been, by all the rules of the game."
She said some other things, but I was thinking of my next move.
"Are we social equals?" I said abruptly.
She stared at me. "Queer question," she said.
"But are we?"
"H'm. Difficult to say. But why do you ask? Is the daughter of a courtesy Baron who died—of general disreputableness, I believe—before his father—? I give it up. Does it matter?"
"No. My mind is confused. I want to know if you will marry me."
She whitened and said nothing. I suddenly felt I must plead with her. "Damn these bandages!" I said, breaking into ineffectual febrile rage.
She roused herself to her duties as nurse. "What are you doing? Why are you trying to sit up? Sit down! Don't touch your bandages. I told you not to talk."
She stood helpless for a moment, then took me firmly by the shoulders and pushed me back upon the pillow. She gripped the wrist of the hand I had raised to my face.
"I told you not to talk," she whispered close to my face. "I asked you not to talk. Why couldn't you do as I asked you?"
"You've been avoiding me for a month," I said.
"I know. You might have known. Put your hand back—down by your side."
I obeyed. She sat on the edge of the bed. A flush had come to her cheeks, and her eyes were very bright. "I asked you," she repeated, "not to talk."
My eyes questioned her mutely.
She put her hand on my chest. Her eyes were tormented.
"How can I answer you now?" she said.
"How can I say anything now?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
She made no answer.