IX
Meantime, I meditated.
“I am in love with Avis—oh, granted! I am not the least bit in love with—we will euphemistically say ‘anyone else.’ But confound it! I am coming to the conclusion that marrying a woman because you happen to be in love with her is about as logical a proceeding as throwing the cat out of the window because the rhododendrons are in bloom. Why, if I marry Avis I shall probably have to live with her the rest of my life!
“What if that obsolete notion of Schopenhauer’s were true after all—that love is a blind instinct which looks no whit toward the welfare of the man and woman it dominates, but only to the equipment a child born of them would inherit? What if, after all, love tends, without variation, to yoke the most incompatible in order that the average type of humanity may be preserved? Then the one passion we esteem as sacred would be simply the deranged condition of any other beast in rutting-time. Then we, with the pigs and sparrows, would be just so many pieces on the chessboard, and our evolutions would be just a friendly trial of skill between what we call life and death.
“I love Avis Beechinor. But I have loved, in all sincerity, many other women, and I rejoice today, unfeignedly, that I never married any of them. For marriage means a lifelong companionship, a long, long journey wherein must be adjusted, one by one, each tiniest discrepancy between the fellow-wayfarers; and always a pebble if near enough to the eye will obscure a mountain.
“Why, Avis cannot attempt a word of four syllables without coming at least once to grief! It is a trifle of course, but in a lifelong companionship there are exactly fourteen thousand trifles to one event of importance. And deuce take it! the world is populated by men and women, not demigods; the poets are specious and abandoned rhetoricians; for it never was, and never will be, possible to love anybody ‘to the level of everyday’s Most quiet need by sun or candlelight.’
“Or not to me at least.
“In a sentence, when it comes to a lifelong companionship, I prefer not the woman who would make me absolutely happy for a twelvemonth, but rather the woman with whom I could chat contentedly for twenty years, and who would keep me to the mark. I am rather tired of being futile; and not for any moral reason, but because it is not worthy of me. In fine, I do not want to die entirely. I want to leave behind some not inadequate expression of Robert Etheridge Townsend, and I do not care at all what people say of it, so that it is here when I am gone. Oh, Stella understood! ‘I want my life to count, I want to leave something in the world that wasn’t there before I came.’
“Now Bettie—”
I arose resolutely. “I had much better go for a long, and tedious, and jolting, and universally damnable walk. Bettie would make something vital of me—if I could afford her the material—”
And I grinned a little. “ ‘Go, therefore, now, and work; for there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.’ Yes, you would certainly have need of a miracle, dear Bettie—”