第53章

While fondling these, he failed not to notice how the great book, as though it were a living mouth, spat its deathless scorn upon the things that he also--in the imperfect measure of his powers--had always hated: all cowardice of mind or body, all lying, all oppression, all unfaithfulness, all secret revenge and hypocrisy and double-dealing: the smut of the heart and mind.

But ah! the other things besides these.

Sown among the white wheat of the spirit were the red tares of the flesh;and as he strode back and forth through the harvest, he found himself plucking these also with feverish vehemence.There were things here that he had never seen in print: words that he had never even named to his secret consciousness; thoughts and desires that he had put away from his soul with many a struggle, many a prayer; stories of a kind that he had always declined to hear when told in companies of men: all here, spelled out, barefaced, without apology, without shame: the deposits of those old, old moral voices and standards long since buried deep under the ever rising level of the world's whitening holiness.

With utter guilt and shame he did not leave off till he had plucked the last red tare; and having plucked them, he had hugged the whole inflaming bundle against his blood--his blood now flushed with youth, flushed with health, flushed with summer.

And finally, in the midst of all these things, perhaps coloured by them, there had come to him the first great awakening of his life in a love that was forbidden.

He upbraided himself the more bitterly for the influence of the book because it was she who had placed both the good and the evil in his hand with perfect confidence that he would lay hold on the one and remain unsoiled by the other.She had remained spirit-proof herself against the influences that tormented him; out of her own purity she had judged him.And yet, on the other hand, with that terrible candour of mind which he used either for or against himself as rigidly as for or against another person, he pleaded in his own behalf that she had made a mistake in overestimating his strength, in underestimating his temptations.How should she know that for years his warfare had gone on direfully? How realize that almost daily he had stood as at the dividing of two roads: the hard, narrow path ascending to the bleak white peaks of the spirit; the broad, sweet, downward vistas of the flesh?

How foresee, therefore, that the book would only help to rend him in twain with a mightier passion for each?

He had been back at the school a week now.He had never dared go to see her.

Confront that luminous face with his darkened one? Deal such a soul the wound of such dishonour? He knew very well that the slightest word or glance of self-betrayal would bring on the immediate severance of her relationship with him: her wifehood might be her martyrdom, but it was martyrdom inviolate.And yet he felt that if he were once with her, he could not be responsible for the consequences: he could foresee no degree of self-control that would keep him from telling her that he loved her.He had been afraid to go.

But ah, how her image drew him day and night, day and night! Slipping between him and every other being, every other desire.Her voice kept calling to him to come to her--a voice new, irresistible, that seemed to issue from the deeps of Summer, from the deeps of Life, from the deeps of Love, with its almighty justification.

This was his first Saturday.To-day he had not even the school as a post of duty, to which he might lash himself for safety.He had gone away from town in an opposite direction from her home, burying himself alone in the forest.

But between him and that summoning voice he could put no distance.It sang out afresh to him from the inviting silence of the woods as well as from its innumerable voices.It sang to him reproachfully from the pages of the old book: "In the lusty month of May lovers call again to their mind old gentleness and old service and many deeds that were forgotten by negligence:" he had never even gone to thank her for all her kindness to him during his illness!

Still he held out, wrestling with himself.At last Love itself, the deceiver, snaringly pleaded that she alone could cure him of all this folly.

It had grown up wholly during his absence from her, no doubt by reason of this.Many a time before be had gone to her about other troubles, and always he had found her carrying that steady light of right-mindedness which had scatteredhis darkness and revealed his better pathway.

He sprang up and set off sternly through the woods.Goaded by love, he fancied that the presence of the forbidden woman would restore him to his old, blameless friendship.