She felt as if this whirlwind were calming down somehow! As if this
feeling of support, which was tempting her to close her eyes deliciously
and let herself be carried on and on into the unknown undefiled by vile
experiences, were less certain, had wavered threateningly. She tried to
read something in his face, in that energetic kindly face to which she
had become accustomed so soon. But she was not yet capable of
understanding its expression. Scared, discouraged on the threshold of
adolescence, plunged in moral misery of the bitterest kind, she had not
learned to read--not that sort of language.
If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally is, it would
have been greater than the egoism of his vanity--or of his generosity, if
you like--and all this could not have happened. He would not have hit
upon that renunciation at which one does not know whether to grin or
shudder. It is true too that then his love would not have fastened
itself upon the unhappy daughter of de Barral. But it was a love born of
that rare pity which is not akin to contempt because rooted in an
overwhelmingly strong capacity for tenderness--the tenderness of the
fiery kind--the tenderness of silent solitary men, the voluntary,
passionate outcasts of their kind. At the time I am forced to think that
his vanity must have been enormous.
"What big eyes she has," he said to himself amazed. No wonder. She was
staring at him with all the might of her soul awakening slowly from a
poisoned sleep, in which it could only quiver with pain but could neither
expand nor move. He plunged into them breathless and tense, deep, deep,
like a mad sailor taking a desperate dive from the masthead into the blue
unfathomable sea so many men have execrated and loved at the same time.
And his vanity was immense. It had been touched to the quick by that
muscular little feminist, Fyne. "I! I! Take advantage of her
helplessness. I! Unfair to that creature--that wisp of mist, that white
shadow homeless in an ugly dirty world. I could blow her away with a
breath," he was saying to himself with horror. "Never!" All the
supremely refined delicacy of tenderness, expressed in so many fine lines
of verse by Carleon Anthony, grew to the size of a passion filling with
inward sobs the big frame of the man who had never in his life read a
single one of those famous sonnets singing of the most highly civilized,
chivalrous love, of those sonnets which . . . You know there's a volume
of them. My edition has the portrait of the author at thirty, and when I
showed it to Mr. Powell the other day he exclaimed: "Wonderful! One
would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony himself if . . ." I
wanted to know what that if was. But Powell could not say. There was
something--a difference. No doubt there was--in fineness perhaps. The
father, fastidious, cerebral, morbidly shrinking from all contacts, could
only sing in harmonious numbers of what the son felt with a dumb and
reckless sincerity.