Marjorie kept well throughout March and April, and then suddenly she
grew unutterably weary and uncomfortable in London. The end of April
came hot and close and dry--it might have been July for the heat--the
scrap of garden wilted, and the streets were irritating with fine dust
and blown scraps of paper and drifting straws. She could think of
nothing but the shade of trees, and cornfields under sunlight and the
shadows of passing clouds. So Trafford took out an old bicycle and
wandered over the home counties for three days, and at last hit upon a
little country cottage near Great Missenden, a cottage a couple of girl
artists had furnished and now wanted to let. It had a long, untidy
vegetable garden and a small orchard and drying-ground, with an old,
superannuated humbug of a pear-tree near the centre surrounded by a
green seat, and high hedges with the promise of honeysuckle and
dog-roses, and gaps that opened into hospitable beechwoods--woods not
so thick but that there were glades of bluebells, bracken and, to be
exact, in places embattled stinging-nettles. He took it and engaged a
minute, active, interested, philoprogenitive servant girl for it, and
took Marjorie thither in a taxi-cab. She went out, wrapped in a shawl,
and sat under the pear-tree and cried quietly with weakness and
sentiment and the tenderness of afternoon sunshine, and forthwith began
to pick up wonderfully, and was presently writing to Trafford to buy her
a dog to go for walks with, while he was away in London.
Trafford was still struggling along with his research in spite of a
constant gravitation to the cottage and Marjorie's side, but he was also
doing his best to grapple with the difficulties of his financial
situation. His science notes, which were very uncongenial and difficult
to do, and his lecturing, still left his income far behind his
expenditure, and the problem of minimising the inevitable fresh inroads
on his capital was insistent and distracting. He discovered that he
could manage his notes more easily and write a more popular article if
he dictated to a typist instead of writing out the stuff in his own
manuscript. Dictating made his sentences more copious and open, and the
effect of the young lady's by no means acquiescent back was to make him
far more explicit than he tended to be pen in hand. With a pen and alone
he felt the boredom of the job unendurably, and, to be through with it,
became more and more terse, allusive, and compactly technical, after the
style of his original papers. One or two articles by him were accepted
and published by the monthly magazines, but as he took what the editors
sent him, he did not find this led to any excessive opulence....
But his heart was very much with Marjorie through all this time.
Hitherto he had taken her health and vigour and companionship for
granted, and it changed his attitudes profoundly to find her now an
ailing thing, making an invincible appeal for restraint and
consideration and help. She changed marvellously, she gained a new
dignity, and her complexion took upon itself a fresh, soft beauty. He
would spend three or four days out of a week at the cottage, and long
hours of that would be at her side, paper and notes of some forthcoming
lecture at hand neglected, talking to her consolingly and dreamingly.
His thoughts were full of ideas about education; he was obsessed, as are
most intelligent young parents of the modern type, by the enormous
possibilities of human improvement that might be achieved--if only one
could begin with a baby from the outset, on the best lines, with the
best methods, training and preparing it--presumably for a cleaned and
chastened world. Indeed he made all the usual discoveries of intelligent
modern young parents very rapidly, fully and completely, and overlooked
most of those practical difficulties that finally reduce them to human
dimensions again in quite the normal fashion.
"I sit and muse sometimes when I ought to be computing," he said. "Old
Durgan watches me and grunts. But think, if we take reasonable care,
watch its phases, stand ready with a kindergarten toy directly it
stretches out its hand--think what we can make of it!"...
"We will make it the most wonderful child in the world," said Marjorie.
"Indeed! what else can it be?"
"Your eyes," said Trafford, "and my hands."
"A girl."
"A boy."
He kissed her white and passive wrist.