How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her, with a sensation of quick fear, that this face was of no age at all. She had (or so she had believed) disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood--and the imagined Solomon too. Solomon--for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. At that moment, as her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father's house. It was, of course, only for a flash. Next moment she was once more the ordinary social Jane, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely (at least she hoped that rudeness would be the main impression produced) at a total stranger. But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now...There is so much meaning here that it's hard to know where to begin.
..."And now," thought Jane, "it's coming--it's coming-it's coming now." All the most intolerable questions he might ask, all the most extravagant things he might make her do, flashed through her mind in a fatuous medley. For all power of resistance seemed to have been drained away from her and she was left without protection.
...She was so divided against herself that one might say there were three, if not four, Janes in the compartment.
The first was a Jane simply receptive of the Director, recalling every word and every look, and delighting in them--a Jane taken utterly off her guard, shaken out of the modest little outfit of contemporary ideas which had hitherto made her portion of wisdom, and swept away on the flood tide of an experience which she did not understand and could not control. For she was trying to control it; that was the function of the second Jane. This second Jane regarded the first with disgust, as the kind of woman, in fact, whom she had always particularly despised. Once, coming out of a cinema, she had heard a little shop girl say to her friend, "Oh, wasn't he lovely! If he'd looked at me the way he looked at her, I'd have followed him to the end of the world." A little, tawdry, made-up girl, sucking a peppermint. Whether the second Jane was right in equating the first Jane with that girl, may be questioned, but she did. And she found her intolerable. To have surrendered without terms at the mere voice and look of this stranger, to have abandoned (without noticing it) that prim little grasp on her own destiny, that perpetual reservation, which she thought essential to her status as a grown-up, integrated, intelligent person...the thing was utterly degrading, vulgar, uncivilised.
The third Jane was a new and unexpected visitant. Of the first there had been traces in girlhood, and the second was what Jane took to be her "real" or normal self. But the third one, this moral Jane, was one whose existence she had never suspected. Risen from some unknown region of grace or heredity, it uttered all sorts of things which Jane had often heard before but which had never, till that moment, seemed to be connected with real life. If it had simply told her that her feelings about the Director were wrong, she would not have been very surprised, and would have discounted it as the voice of tradition. But it did not. It kept on blaming her for not having similar feelings about Mark. It kept on pressing into her mind those new feelings about Mark, feelings of guilt and pity, which she had first experienced in the Director's room. It was Mark who had made the fatal mistake; she must, must, must be "nice" to Mark. The Director obviously insisted on it. At the very moment when her mind was most filled with another man there arose, clouded with some undefined emotion, a resolution to give Mark much more than she had ever given him before, and a feeling that in so doing she would be really giving it to the Director. And this produced in her such a confusion of sensations that the whole inner debate became indistinct and flowed over into the larger experience of the fourth Jane, who was Jane herself and dominated all the rest at every moment without effort and even without choice.
This fourth and supreme Jane was simply in the state of joy. The other three had no power upon her, for she was in the sphere of Jove, amid light and music and festal pomp, brimmed with life and radiant in health, jocund and clothed in shining garments. She thought scarcely at all of the curious sensations which had immediately preceded the Director's dismissal of her and made that dismissal almost a relief. When she tried to, it immediately led her thoughts back to the Director himself. Whatever she tried to think of led back to the Director himself and, in him, to joy. She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else--perhaps--she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea--a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation--it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity--that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others. Her beauty belonged to the Director. It belonged to him so completely that he could even decide not to keep it for himself but to order that it be given to another, by an act of obedience lower, and therefore higher, more unconditional and therefore more delighting, than if he had demanded it for himself.
1) There is a metaphorical picture here of our proper response and attitude to Christ, as his bride. The evocation of Solomon refers back to the Song of Songs, which is both a literal picture of actual love between lover and beloved, the way it should be, and a metaphor of Jehovah and Israel (and ultimately of Jesus and the true Church). And it also operates on the personal level, describing the crux of the mystical life in Him, which is surrender.
2) It is a portrait of a woman turning away from modernity and feminism and embracing her essential womanhood, with all its unpopular connotations of surrender, submission, and obedience. But, as in the life in Christ, through the surrender of the self, the submission of the will, and obedience in thought and action, she discovers her real self, her own true beauty, and a new sort of love which she had never even imagined before.
3) It provides a picture for a man of what he can aspire to be to a woman. A man who, just once in his life, could make a woman feel that way could be satisfied that he had lived a full and meaningful life.
4) It describes superbly the process of inner crisis, when we aren't sure of our own thoughts and don't know our own feelings. The image of four Janes struggling against each other is brilliant, and the epiphany of the fourth being clearly the true Jane is genius. It is that inner voice which, like looking back on a riddle to which we now know the answer, we cannot believe we didn't recognize all along as being the true Inner Voice.
5) It paints a beautiful and painstaking picture of what it is to experience true love, for either sex. That is, true eros; holy erotic love; romantic love in submission to Christ. Desire without guilt. Affection without possessiveness. Intimacy without selfishness. Love for one person that enhances one's love for all others, and for the whole world and all that is in it. Love that creates a sacred feast of the senses, giving new significance and exalted enjoyment to music, poetry, beauty, food, drink, light, air, and life. The imagery of the beloved is somewhat different when it is a man loving a woman. To re-work Lewis's image: "He had long since forgotten the imagined Guinevere of his childhood, and Mary too. That sparkling starlight blend of queen and maiden and enchantress stole back upon his mind. For the first time in all those years he tasted the word Queen itself with all linked associations of wisdom, marriage, motherhood, beauty, and gentleness." In other words, when one is truly in love, the beloved becomes the archetype and image of the whole sex: the Adam or Eve; the King or Queen; the Mars or Venus. But it turns the heart outward, rather than inward. One wants to revel in the joy and share it with the whole universe, rather than building a wall around one's self and the beloved to exclude all others from it.
But none of this can be obtained by seeking or striving for it. The only way to find it is to lose it; the only way to get it is to give it up.
