GERTRUDE. [Warmly.] Oh, I must say what I mean! I have often pulled
myself up short in my gossips with you, conscious of a sort of wall
between us. [AGNES comes slowly from the window.] Somehow, I feel now
that you haven't in the least made a friend of me. I'm hurt. St's
stupid of me; I can't help it.
AGNES. [After a moment's pause.] I am not the lady these people were
speaking of yesterday.
GERTRUDE. Not--?
AGNES. Mr. Cleeve is no longer with his wife; he has left her.
GERTRUDE. Left--his wife!
AGNES. Like yourself, I am a widow. I don't know whether you've ever
heard my name--Ebbsmith. [GERTRUDE stares at her blankly.] I beg your
pardon sincerely. I never meant to conceal my true position; such a
course is opposed to every true principle of mind. But I grew so
attached to you in Florence and--well, it was contemptibly weak; I'll
never do such a thing again. [She goes back to the table and commences
to refill the vase with the fresh flowers.]
GERTRUDE. When you say that Mr. Cleeve has left his wife, I suppose you
mean to tell me that you have taken her place?
AGNES. Yes, I mean that.
[GERTRUDE rises and walks to the door.]
GERTRUDE [At the door.] You knew that I could not speak to you after
hearing this?
AGNES. I thought it almost certain that you would not.
[After a moment's irresolution, GERTRUDE returns, and stands by the
settee.]
GERTRUDE. I can hardly believe you.
AGNES. I should like you to hear more than just the bare fact.
GETRUDE. [Drumming on the back of the settee.] Why don't you tell me
more?
AGNES. You were going, you know.
GERTRUDE. [Sitting.] I won't go quite like that. Please tell me.
AGNES. [Calmly.] Well--did you ever read of John Thorold--"Jack
Thorold, the demagogue?" [GERTRUDE shakes her head.] I daresay not.
John Thorold, once a schoolmaster, was my father. In my time he used to
write for the two or three, so-called, inflammatory journals, and hold
forth in small lecture-halls, occasionally even from the top of a
wooden stool in the Park, upon trade and labour questions, division of
wealth, and the rest of it. He believed in nothing that people who go
to church are credited with believing in, Mrs. Thorpe; his scheme for
the readjustment of things was Force; his pet doctrine, the ultimate
healthy healing that follows the surgery of Revolution. But to me he
was the gentlest creature imaginable; and I was very fond of him, in
spite of his--as I then thought--strange ideas. Strange ideas! Ha!
Many of 'em luckily don't sound quite so irrational today!
GERTRUDE. [Under her breath.] Oh!
AGNES. My home was a wretched one. If dad was violent out of the house,
mother was violent enough in it; with her it was rage, sulk, storm,
from morning till night; till one day father turned a deaf ear to
mother and died in his bed. That was my first intimate experience of
the horrible curse that falls upon so many.
GERTRUDE. Curse?
AGNES. The curse of unhappy marriage. Though really I'd looked on
little else all my life. Most of our married friends were cursed in a
like way; and I remember taking an oath, when I was a mere child, that
nothing should ever push me over into the choked-up, seething pit.
Fool! When I was nineteen I was gazing like a pet sheep into a man's
eyes; and one morning I was married, at St. Andrew's Church in Holborn,
to Mr. Ebbsmith, a barrister.
GERTRUDE. In church?
AGNES. Yes, in church--in church. In spite of father's unbelief and
mother's indifference, at the time I married I was as simple--ay, in
my heart, as devout--as any girl in a parsonage. The other thing
hadn't soaked into me. Whenever I could escape from our stifling rooms
at home, and slam the front door behind me, the air blew away
uncertainty and scepticism; I seemed only to have to take a long, deep
breath to be full of hope and faith. And it was like this till that man
married me.
GERTRUDE. Of course, I guess your marriage was an unfortunate one.
AGNES. It lasted eight years. For about twelve months he treated me
like a woman in a harem, for the rest of the time like a beast of
burden. Oh! When I think of it! [Wiping her brow with her
handkerchief.] Phew!
GERTRUDE. It changed you?
AGNES. Oh, yes, it changed me.
GERTRUDE. You spoke of yourself just now as a widow. He's dead?
AGNES. He died on our wedding day--the eighth anniversary.
GERTRUDE. You were free then--free to begin again.
AGNES. Eh? [Looking at GERTRUDE.] Yes; but you don't begin to believe
all over again. [She gathers up the stalks of the flowers from the
tray, and, kneeling, crams them into the stove.] However, this is an
old story. I'm thirty-three now.
GERTRUDE. [Hesitatingly.] You and Mr. Cleeve--?
AGNES. We've known each other since last November--no longer. Six
years of my life unaccounted for, eh? Well, for a couple of years or so
I was lecturing.
GERTRUDE. Lecturing?
AGNES. Ah, I'd become an out-and-out child of my father by that time--
spouting, perhaps you'd call it, standing on the identical little
platforms he used to speak from, lashing abuses with my tongue as he
had done. Oh, and I was fond, too, of warning women.
GERTRUDE. Against what?
AGNES. Falling into the pit.
GERTRUDE. Marriage?
AGNES. The chocked-up, seething pit--until I found my bones almost
through my skin and my voice too weak to travel across a room.
GERTRUDE. From what cause?
AGNES. Starvation, my dear. So, after lying in a hospital for a month
or two, I took up nursing for a living. Last November I was sent for by
Dr. Bickerstaff to go through to Rome to look after a young man who'd
broken down there, and who declined to send for his friends. My patient
was Mr. Cleeve--[taking up the tray]--and that's where his fortunes
join mine. [She crosses the room, and puts the tray upon the cabinet.]
GERTRUDE. And yet, judging from what that girl said yesterday, Mr.
Cleeve married quite recently?
AGNES. Less than three years ago. Men don't suffer as patiently as
women. In many respects his marriage story is my own, reversed--the
man in place of the woman. I endured my hell, though; he broke the
gates of his.
GERTRUDE. I have often seen Mr. Cleeve's name in the papers. His future
promised to be brilliant, didn't it?
AGNES. [Tidying the table, folding the newspapers, &c.] There's a great
career for him still.
GERTRUDE. In Parliament--now?
AGNES. No, he abandons that, and devotes himself to writing. We shall
write much together, urging our views on this subject of Marriage. We
shall have to be poor, I expect, but we shall be content.
GERTRUDE. Content!
AGNES. Quite content. Don't judge us by my one piece of cowardly folly
in keeping the truth from you, Mrs. Thorpe, Indeed, it's our great plan
to live the life we have mapped out for ourselves, fearlessly, openly;
faithful to each other, helpful to each other, so long as we remain
together.
GERTRUDE. But tell me--you don't know how I--how I have liked you!--
tell me, if Mr. Cleeve's wife divorces him, he will marry you?
AGNES. No.
GERTRUDE. No!
AGNES. No. I haven't made you quite understand--Lucas and I don't
desire to marry, in your sense.
GERTRUDE. But you are devoted to each other!
AGNES. Thoroughly.
GERTRUDE. What, is that the meaning of "for as long as you are
together?" You would go your different ways if ever you found that one
of you was making the other unhappy?
AGNES. I do mean that. We remain together only to help, to heal, to
console. Why should men and women be so eager to grant to each other
the power of wasting life? That is what marriage gives--the right to
destroy years and years of life. And the right, once given, it attracts
--attracts! We have both suffered from it. So many rich years out of my
life have been squandered by it. And out of his life, so much force,
energy--spent in battling with the shrew, the termagant he has now
fled from; strength never to be replenished, never to be repaid--all
wasted, wasted!
GERTRUDE. Your legal marriage with him might not bring further
miseries.
AGNES. Too late! We have done with marriage; we distrust it. We are not
now among those who regard marriage as indispensable to union. We have
done with it!
GERTRUDE. [Advancing to her.] You know that it would be impossible for
me, if I would do so, to deceive my brother as to all this.
AGNES. Why, of course, dear.