As he worked alone on the land, or sat up with his ewes at
lambing time, the facts and material of his daily life fell
away, leaving the kernel of his purpose clean. And then it came
upon him that he would marry her and she would be his life.
Gradually, even without seeing her, he came to know her. He
would have liked to think of her as of something given into his
protection, like a child without parents. But it was forbidden
him. He had to come down from this pleasant view of the case.
She might refuse him. And besides, he was afraid of her.
But during the long February nights with the ewes in labour,
looking out from the shelter into the flashing stars, he knew he
did not belong to himself. He must admit that he was only
fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the
stars in the dark heaven travelling, the whole host passing by
on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and submissive to the
greater ordering.
Unless she would come to him, he must remain as a
nothingness. It was a hard experience. But, after her repeated
obliviousness to him, after he had seen so often that he did not
exist for her, after he had raged and tried to escape, and said
he was good enough by himself, he was a man, and could stand
alone, he must, in the starry multiplicity of the night humble
himself, and admit and know that without her he was nothing.
He was nothing. But with her, he would be real. If she were
now walking across the frosty grass near the sheep-shelter,
through the fretful bleating of the ewes and lambs, she would
bring him completeness and perfection. And if it should be so,
that she should come to him! It should be so--it was
ordained so.
He was a long time resolving definitely to ask her to marry
him. And he knew, if he asked her, she must really acquiesce.
She must, it could not be otherwise.
He had learned a little of her. She was poor, quite alone,
and had had a hard time in London, both before and after her
husband died. But in Poland she was a lady well born, a
landowner's daughter.
All these things were only words to him, the fact of her
superior birth, the fact that her husband had been a brilliant
doctor, the fact that he himself was her inferior in almost
every way of distinction. There was an inner reality, a logic of
the soul, which connected her with him.
One evening in March, when the wind was roaring outside, came
the moment to ask her. He had sat with his hands before him,
leaning to the fire. And as he watched the fire, he knew almost
without thinking that he was going this evening.