Blix and Condy went on; on along the narrow road upon the edge of the salt marshes and tules that lay between the station and the Golden Gate; on to the Golden Gate itself, and around the old grime-incrusted fort to the ocean shore, with its reaches of hard, white sand, where the bowlders lay tumbled and the surf grumbled incessantly.
The world seemed very far away from them here on the shores of the Pacific, on that first afternoon of the New Year. They were supremely happy, and they sufficed to themselves. Condy had forgotten all about the next day, when he must say good-by to Blix.
It did not seem possible, it was not within the bounds of possibility, that she was to go away--that they two were to be separated. And for that matter, to-morrow was to-morrow. It was twenty-four hours away. The present moment was sufficient.
The persistence with which they clung to the immediate moment, their happiness in living only in the present, had brought about a rather curious condition of things between them.
In their love for each other there was no thought of marriage;they were too much occupied with the joy of being together at that particular instant to think of the future. They loved each other, and that was enough. They did not look ahead further than the following day, and then but furtively, and only in order that their morrow's parting might intensify their happiness of to-day.
That New Year's Day was to be the end of everything. Blix was going; she and Condy would never see each other again. The thought of marriage--with its certain responsibilities, its duties, its gravity, its vague, troublous seriousness, its inevitable disappointments--was even a little distasteful to them.
Their romance had been hitherto without a flaw; they had been genuinely happy in little things. It was as well that it should end that day, in all its pristine sweetness, unsullied by a single bitter moment, undimmed by the cloud of a single disillusion or disappointment. Whatever chanced to them in later years, they could at least cherish this one memory of a pure, unselfish affection, young and unstained and almost without thought of sex, come and gone on the very threshold of their lives. This was the end, they both understood. They were glad that it was to be so.
They did not even speak again of writing to each other.
They found once more the little semicircle of blackberry bushes and the fallen log, half-way up the hill above the shore, and sat there a while, looking down upon the long green rollers, marching incessantly toward the beach, and there breaking in a prolonged explosion of solid green water and flying spume. And their glance followed their succeeding ranks further and further out to sea, till the multitude blended into the mass--the vast, green, shifting mass that drew the eye on and on, to the abrupt, fine line of the horizon.
There was no detail in the scene. There was nothing but the great reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plane of blue sky, and the bare green slope of land--three immensities, gigantic, vast, primordial. It was no place for trival ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race.
The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with them a feeling of kindly but enormous force--elemental force, fresh, untutored, new, and young. There was buoyancy in it; a fine, breathless sense of uplifting and exhilaration; a sensation as of bigness and a return to the homely, human, natural life, to the primitive old impulses, irresistible, changeless, and unhampered;old as the ocean, stable as the hills, vast as the unplumbed depths of the sky.
Condy and Blix sat still, listening, looking, and watching--the intellect drowsy and numb; the emotions, the senses, all alive and brimming to the surface. Vaguely they felt the influence of the moment. Something was preparing for them. From the lowest, untouched depths in the hearts of each of them something was rising steadily to consciousness and the light of day. There is no name for such things, no name for the mystery that spans the interval between man and woman--the mystery that bears no relation to their love for each other, but that is something better than love, and whose coming savors of the miraculous.
The afternoon had waned and the sun had begun to set when Blix rose.
"We should be going, Condy," she told him.
They started up the hill, and Condy said: "I feel as though I had been somehow asleep with my eyes wide open. What a glorious sunset! It seems to me as though I were living double every minute; and oh! Blix, isn't it the greatest thing in the world to love each other as we do?"They had come to the top of the hill by now, and went on across the open, breezy downs, all starred with blue iris and wild heliotrope. Blix drew his arm about her waist, and laid her cheek upon his shoulder with a little caressing motion.
"And I do love you, dear," she said--"love you with all my heart.
And it's for always, too; I know that. I've been a girl until within the last three or four days--just a girl, dearest; not very serious, I'm afraid, and not caring for anything else beyond, what was happening close around me--don't you understand? But since I've found out how much I loved you and knew that you loved me--why, everything is changed for me. I'm not the same, I enjoy things that I never thought of enjoying before, and I feel so--oh, LARGER, don't you know?--and stronger, and so much more serious.
