But soon her thoughts became confused, incongruous. The glowing coals crumbled downwards on the hearth with a quiet grating sound. The ceiling leapt to an arch of guarding flame. Flames like sentinels sprang into being around the walls. They kept all shameful wolves away with their brandished swords. Whatever was to come after, she and Louis could sleep unscathed here. This innermost chamber, the very kernel of fire was their safe hiding place.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

What followed was a path into the unknown, and a path unexpectedly solitary.

It surprised, at first it frightened her that she was to get so little help from Louis. Without a doubt his presumed greater knowledge of life had been one of the powerful elements attracting her to him. With his advantages of age, experience, circumstances, he seemed to her to move surely in that fabulous world of mammon for which she had so hungered as a child and had not yet attained. For her he personified not only that for which the little green door in the wall of La Porziuncola had stood as the symbol, but also the finely decked luncheon table of Aunt Georgina. And between these two extremes of illicit adventure and conventional elegance (utterly dependent as they are one upon the other) lay the whole wondrous realm which is Society, which is aestheticism, which is history, which is the multi-coloured, solid-seeming fruit of human civilization. For a complexity of reasons, provincial and individual, the girl had always felt herself deprived of this traditional world. Now in Louis she was to possess it.

Yet they had not been lovers a week before she knew this same Louis powerless to direct their love’s course. It was like being at sea with a companion whose sole idea of seamanship was to let drift. She could not easily grasp what was the truth, that to Louis also, because of her being as she was, their situation was essentially without precedent. Still less did she understand – albeit she was compelled to act upon it – the curious fact that Louis was clutching like a drowning man at her spiritual certitude. It was essentially the same movement as that made thirty years earlier by Sholto her father towards Juley her mother.

But if Louis in himself was Joanna’s fascinating symbol for the greatly coveted world of mammon down the ages, there was that in the contingencies of their coming together which answered with equal strength to the opposite need of her nature. He was not merely the fruit, he was forbidden: therefore in partaking she gratified her lust for rebellion and for sacrifice, for rejection of and by the world. This it was which had stirred in her long ago when she kissed the blind woman. But now the two opposing passions, the high barbarian pride of life and the deep Christian pride of humiliation, were mounting together to fulfilment. All the long contact with her lover was coloured by them. It was the first that held sway over her imagination. It was the second that vitally governed her actions. The second too insinuated itself like some exquisite drug into every sensual abandonment (not for nothing is it that the most desperate of sinners are the quickest to comprehend Christ’s message).