Lover's Leap (7 page)

Two days later. Something happened yesterday that has pained and puzzled me very much. I had called at
Rose's flat to take her out to lunch. As we set out together I asked her which restaurant she would like to go to. Her reply was: ‘You're to choose to-day, Philip.'

I said I would much rather leave the choice to her.

‘No,' she persisted; ‘you choose.'

I actually felt myself quite unable to do so. We walked on in silence till at last I answered somewhat lamely: ‘Then I choose the one you prefer.'

Rose stopped,, Her lips were compressed with anger. ‘Philip,' she said, ‘if you don't name a restaurant now, instantly, I shall turn round and go home.'

Her unaccountable exasperation terrified me and I felt deeply wounded. Why should my wish that we should do what
she
liked best have made her so angry?

Four days later. Something of the same sort has happened to-day. Again for no reason, without any provocation from me, she turned on me. I was stung to protest.

‘What's wrong, Rose? What on earth have I done? All I want is to please you.'

She sighed wearily, as though what I had said had only exasperated her the more. ‘The way to please me, Philip,' she said, ‘is not to keep trying to.'

Could there have been a more stultifying reply? What does it mean? It tells me nothing except that we are hopelessly at loggerheads.

It is now six months since I became engaged to Philip, and I must pause and take stock of our position. It can only harm both of us if I go on pretending to myself that all is well. For the truth is that we are drifting Heaven knows where. I'm not sure if Philip realizes it, though it seems impossible that such a terribly sensitive creature should not. It's I, of course, who am to blame. I ought never to have become engaged to him. If only he had written instead of speaking I should never have thought twice about it. Even when he spoke, I was quite determined at first. It was that sudden, unexpected change in him that shook my resolve. For when I refused he suddenly broke out of his usual reserve. It was as if a lamp had been lighted in him. His eyes lost their veiled earnestness and became bright, lively, childlike, irresistibly appealing. It was the first time I had noticed their colour, an extraordinary and very beautiful brownish grey, like an agate. And it was not only his eyes: his voice and manner changed too. He had suddenly turned into a gay, impulsive, importunate schoolboy. He had all the bright confidence of a child, and I simply couldn't find it in my heart to crush it. Besides, it all seemed so simple, so light-hearted. I was to say Yes, simply because if I did so he would be made perfectly happy: it was to bind me to nothing. Later on, if I found I wanted to say No, that would be just as simple and cheerful a business. And so on the spur of the moment and on an impulse of kindness and affection I said Yes. It was all the easier to say it because the sudden change in him had touched me deeply. It had, for the moment at least, tipped over the balance from liking to loving. Before that, I hadn't thought of our being anything but good friends, and this, I'm sure, wasn't owing to stupidity on my part, but to his extreme reserve. Men have fallen in love with me from time to
time; if I stop to recollect I can count five of them, so willy-nilly I have acquired a certain eye for symptoms. But Philip never showed a sign except on two occasions, and those were so unaccountable in the light of his usual manner that I put them down to mere shyness, the sort of meaningless accident that sometimes occurs when, even between strangers, eye meets eye and a moment of confusion follows. And so I felt safe with him. I liked him immensely, much more than I have ever liked any other man, but I wasn't in the least in love with him. And that, I believed, was exactly his attitude to me. Therefore I felt safe in seeing a great deal of him: I had no fear that I was giving him a false impression or leading him on to disappointment. But when the truth came out, suddenly, point-blank, everything was altered. I realized that I must, after all, quite unintentionally have been rousing all sorts of hopes in him by these meetings, and I felt horribly guilty. It was that, as well as his disarming insistence, that drew that irresponsible Yes from me. It wasn't, of course, completely irresponsible. At the moment I thought it certain that I should fall in love with him. After all, what could be a better foundation for love than a friendship such as ours? And, in fact, hadn't I already, in response to that surprising change in him, begun to feel more than friendship? Each time that I recalled, on my way home, his eyes and the words with which he overbore my refusal so charmingly, I felt again the thrill they had roused in me. It wasn't till night that I fully realized what I had done. Then I saw that, though I had actually given no promise, I had none the less tied myself. The realization of that alarmed and horrified me, and I had a wild impulse to ring him up and break off at once. But that I couldn't do. The mistake was mine and I must not make Philip suffer for it. For an hour I lay on my bed struggling against the inevitable. In fact I had a good cry, and that, after a while, seemed to clear my
mind. Once more I saw the thing in the cheerful, simple light in which I had seen it at first: once more I saw Philip's eyes, heard his bright, eager voice, and I determined to stick to my word.

That decision made me happy again, and for many weeks all went well. Yet how easy it would really have been, if my presence of mind had not deserted me, to refuse without hurting him. ‘Not yet,' would have left him hope and happiness enough. And it seems to me now that, by the irony of fate, if only I had postponed it there would have been much more likelihood of my falling in love with him later. What defeats it now is the very fact of our being engaged. Because of course I'm not free, whatever Philip may have said about my being free to chuck him. There's an obligation on me to stick to him which is all the more binding for being left to my discretion. It is as if we were both caught in a trap. By right of our engagement Philip, in spite of himself, expects all sorts of things of me, and I on my side feel myself obliged to give them whether he expects them or not. Though he said so charmingly and with perfectly honest intention that he wouldn't mind if I didn't walk home with him from the Ethertons', I know very well that he
would
mind and, knowing that, I feel myself morally compelled to do so. That spoils everything: it robs the thing of all its spontaneity and turns it into a duty. O, but doesn't that sense of duty give away the lamentable truth, for if I were in love with Philip the question of duty would never arise. When he said that to be engaged to me would set him free, I did not understand what he meant, nor, alas, did I understand that his liberation would be my imprisonment. But now I understand only too well. When a man and woman are in love their old freedom becomes a prison to them and to become engaged sets them free. But I was not tired of my freedom: in fact, I have realized only since I lost it how precious it was to me.

And yet, if I had refused Philip six months ago, how glad I might have been by this time to give up for him the freedom I now so much regret. What am I to do? I could never make him understand that our engagement is falsifying our attitude to each other. He asks so little of me in words that I could never convince him of the burden of unspoken demands and appeals which he lays upon me. And being unaware of this, he must put down my moments of weariness and resentment to mere bad temper. So the trouble grows, acting, re-acting, and again re-acting, first on one of us, then on the other. The more weary and impatient I become, the more he leans upon me, speechlessly appealing. His love for me, his longing to cling, makes him blind and deaf to the cause of my irritation, and he responds to it by redoubling the cause. The gay, impulsive child in him, which I first saw when he proposed to me and knew so often in the weeks of happiness that followed, has died out of him now. He has shrunk back into his old reserved earnestness under which smoulders a dumb, thwarted intensity which I find both pathetic and irritating. It's an impossible situation. When one loves and the other doesn't, the two are bound to be at cross-purposes.

And yet, I have asked myself more than once lately, is Philip really in love with me? Isn't it rather that he wants me to be in love with him? It's not that he's ungenerous: he's as generous as he can be, and he's ready, far too ready, to do anything I wish. In fact he suppresses himself so completely when we're together that sometimes he seems to me little more than a lay-figure that's always getting in the way. At such times I feel, irritably, that his state is too negative, too spineless for love; and I have, besides, the curious feeling that he suppresses not only himself but me also. He wants to be loved, or else he's in love with himself and wants someone else to commend his choice, or he's in love with being in love, and
each of these states needs a second person to complete it. And so, as he had to choose someone, he has chosen me. That's where I come in. I am a mere instrument, chosen Heaven knows how or why.

But that's unjust and ungrateful to poor Philip. One can't analyse the tangle of human emotions quite as easily and brutally as that. And isn't it quite possible that all these annoyances and grievances of mine are of my own making? Isn't it perhaps that I have taken it for granted that I am no longer free and visit my irritation on an innocent Philip?

I have complained of the burden of Philip's unspoken appeals, the silent pressure which, without a word said, he exerts on me. But though it is certainly better that I should admit to myself that it exists than pretend that all is well, still, general accusations of this kind cannot do much good, indeed they may be nothing more than the fancies of my own ill humour which I lay at Philip's door instead of my own. It is most important, it seems to me now, that I should try to clear up in my own mind this complicated tangle which seems to have formed itself without my knowledge and against my conscious will. Let me try to be more definite. When is it that I feel most irritated?

An inner voice replies instantly to that question with the word
music
. Yes, music, my own piano-playing, has gradually become a centre of irritation. Philip loves music and from the beginning has often asked me to play to him. At first I loved doing so, but lately I have come to dislike it more and more. But although I have been aware of this I have never tried to discover the reason for it. Generally it is delightful to play to an understanding listener, and Philip is certainly that. Why then do I feel impelled to refuse whenever he asks me to play? The fact is, I think, that whenever he does so I have the feeling that
he is getting at me. He is trying—and when I play to him, succeeding—to extort from me in music what I cannot give him directly. I refuse him love, so he persuades me, under cover of asking for pleasant entertainment, to bestow on him the emotional offering which music-making certainly is. And I resent this. I feel that he is extorting on false pretences something he knows I do not wish to give, and when I see, afterwards, how deeply my playing has affected him, I feel anger boil up in me. It is exactly as if he had laid hands on me and kissed me by force. Sometimes I actually find myself playing badly, as if to spoil the transmission as it were. But how do I know that Philip consciously or unconsciously goes through this process? Isn't it much more probably my own imagination, a mere symbol of my chafing against our engagement? It seems as if, in spite of myself, I have a grudge against the poor boy. Nothing he can do is right. I seem to be resolved, just because 1 can't give him what he so urgently needs, to deny him even the little kindnesses I
can
give. Why is it? What forces me to be so horribly unkind to him?

He himself does, the inner voice at once replies. He clings to me, leans on me; he won't let me alone. And he is so fiendishly subtle in his methods. A week ago, when I went to see him, I found that he had bought a piano.

‘But what do you want with a piano?' I said, for he doesn't play at all.

‘O I got it merely so that you'll be able to play when you feel like it,' he answered casually. ‘Try it, Rose. Tell me if it suits you.'

I sat down at once to hide my face from him and to avoid the necessity of speaking. For I felt both touched and exasperated. His buying of the piano seemed to me at once irresistibly pathetic and hatefully cunning. It was another gentle, unspoken appeal for pity, but it was also a crafty and potent moral imposition. For the fact that
he has bought it for me and that it will be incessantly waiting there for me to play on it imposes on me a solemn duty to come and do so and to be grateful to him for it. It's another knot in the rope that is strangling me. I shall never be able, now, when Philip is there, to sit down to the piano casually, on the spur of the moment. Playing to him has been saddled with so much moral and emotional significance that it has become almost unbearable.

How cruel and spiteful I am growing. I never used to be like this, and even now I don't want to be. It is something quite outside my will. I hate myself for it, and not only myself but Philip too. Yes, rightly or wrongly, I blame him for it.

Let me take another instance. I know that Philip … I will not say expects, but hopes that I will tell him of all my movements when I am out of his sight. I am bound to confess, when I look at it reasonably, that it is only natural in the circumstances that he should: he wants to share my life, and if I tell him of what I have done and where I have been and whom I have met since last we saw each other, that prevents him from feeling left out in the cold. Yes, it is reasonable and natural, but O how irritating. For it is not merely that it is a consolation to him: it is also, for him, a means of clinging to me. That is what I chafe against. It plays upon my compassion. If I don't tell him, I feel a brute: if I do, I feel that I have been morally compelled to. I have been cajoled through my better nature into tightening my handcuffs. And so, at times, I cannot bring myself to confess, and I find myself, just to assert my freedom, making a secret of something that is no secret at all, something that I would tell him with perfect willingness if only I were under no obligation to do so. And when I do that, when I withhold information about where and with whom I had dinner last night for instance, Philip gently tries to draw me by asking me if I spent a pleasant evening, if I was at a concert or a theatre,
and so makes it impossible for me not to tell him without giving him the impression that I have something to hide, an impression which, no doubt, he would develop into all sorts of miseries and tortures for himself.