And now, indeed, the Traffords were coming to the most difficult and
fatal phase in marriage. They had had that taste of defiant adventure
which is the crown of a spirited love affair, they had known the
sweetness of a maiden passion for a maid, and they had felt all those
rich and solemn emotions, those splendid fears and terrible hopes that
weave themselves about the great partnership in parentage. And now, so
far as sex was concerned, there might be much joy and delight still, but
no more wonder, no fresh discoveries of incredible new worlds and
unsuspected stars. Love, which had been a new garden, an unknown land, a
sunlit sea to launch upon, was now a rich treasure-house of memories.
And memories, although they afford a perpetually increasing enrichment
to emotion, are not sufficient in themselves for the daily needs of
life.
For this, indeed, is the truth of passionate love, that it works outs
its purpose and comes to an end. A day arrives in every marriage when
the lovers must face each other, disillusioned, stripped of the last
shred of excitement--undisguisedly themselves. And our two were married;
they had bound themselves together under a penalty of scandalous
disgrace, to take the life-long consequences of their passionate
association.
It was upon Trafford that this exhaustion of the sustaining magic of
love pressed most severely, because it was he who had made the greatest
adaptations to the exigencies of their union. He had crippled, he
perceived more and more clearly, the research work upon which his whole
being had once been set, and his hours were full of tiresome and trivial
duties and his mind engaged and worried by growing financial anxieties.
He had made these abandonments in a phase of exalted passion for the one
woman in the world and her unprecedented child, and now he saw, in spite
of all his desire not to see, that she was just a weak human being among
human beings, and neither she nor little Margharita so very marvellous.
But while Marjorie shrank to the dimensions of reality, research
remained still a luminous and commanding dream. In love one fails or one
wins home, but the lure of research is for ever beyond the hills, every
victory is a new desire. Science has inexhaustibly fresh worlds to
conquer....
He was beginning now to realize the dilemma of his life, the reality of
the opposition between Marjorie and child and home on the one hand and
on the other this big wider thing, this remoter, severer demand upon his
being. He had long perceived these were distinct and different things,
but now it appeared more and more inevitable that they should be
antagonistic and mutually disregardful things. Each claimed him
altogether, it seemed, and suffered compromise impatiently. And this is
where the particular stress of his situation came in. Hitherto he had
believed that nothing of any importance was secret or inexplicable
between himself and Marjorie. His ideal of his relationship had assumed
a complete sympathy of feeling, an almost instinctive identity of
outlook. And now it was manifest they were living in a state of
inadequate understanding, that she knew only in the most general and
opaque forms, the things that interested him so profoundly, and had but
the most superficial interest in his impassioned curiosities. And
missing as she did the strength of his intellectual purpose she missed
too, she had no inkling of, the way in which her careless expansiveness
pressed upon him. She was unaware that she was destroying an essential
thing in his life.
He could not tell how far this antagonism was due to inalterable
discords of character, how far it might not be an ineradicable sex
difference, a necessary aspect of marriage. The talk of old Sir Roderick
Dover at the Winton Club germinated in his mind, a branching and
permeating suggestion. And then would come a phase of keen sympathy with
Marjorie; she would say brilliant and penetrating things, display a
swift cleverness that drove all these intimations of incurable
divergence clean out of his head again. Then he would find explanations
in the differences between his and Marjorie's training and early
associations. He perceived his own upbringing had had a steadfastness
and consistency that had been altogether lacking in hers. He had had the
rare advantage of perfect honesty in the teaching and tradition of his
home. There had never been any shams or sentimentalities for him to find
out and abandon. From boyhood his mother's hand had pointed steadily to
the search for truth as the supreme ennobling fact in life. She had
never preached this to him, never delivered discourses upon his father's
virtues, but all her conversation and life was saturated with this idea.
Compared with this atmosphere of high and sustained direction, the
intellectual and moral quality of the Popes, he saw, was the quality of
an agitated rag bag. They had thought nothing out, joined nothing
together, they seemed to believe everything and nothing, they were
neither religious nor irreligious, neither moral nor adventurous. In the
place of a religion, and tainting their entire atmosphere, they had the
decaying remains of a dead Anglicanism; it was clear they did not
believe in its creed, and as clear that they did not want to get rid of
it; it afforded them no guidance, but only vague pretensions, and the
dismal exercises of Silas Root flourished in its shadows, a fungus, a
post-mortem activity of the soul. None of them had any idea of what they
were for or what their lives as a whole might mean; they had no
standards, but only instincts and an instinctive fear of instincts; Pope
wanted to be tremendously respected and complimented by everybody and
get six per cent. for his money; Mrs. Pope wanted things to go smoothly;
the young people had a general indisposition to do anything that might
"look bad," and otherwise "have a good time." But neither Marjorie nor
any of them had any test for a good time, and so they fluctuated in
their conceptions of what they wanted from day to day. Now it was
Plessingtonian standards, now Carmel standards, now the standards of
Agatha Alimony; now it was a stimulating novel, now a gleam of aesthetic
imaginativeness come, Heaven knows whence, that dominated her mood. He
was beginning to understand all this at last, and to see the need of
coherence in Marjorie's mood.
He realized the unfairness of keeping his thoughts to himself, the need
of putting his case before her, and making her realize their fatal and
widening divergence. He wanted to infect her with his scientific
passion, to give her his sense of the gravity of their practical
difficulties. He would sit amidst his neglected work in his laboratory
framing explanatory phrases. He would prepare the most lucid and
complete statements, and go about with these in his mind for days
waiting for an opportunity of saying what he felt so urgently had to be
said.
But the things that seemed so luminous and effective in the laboratory
had a curious way of fading and shrinking beside the bright colours of
Marjorie's Bokhara hangings, in the presence of little Margharita pink
and warm and entertaining in her bath, or amidst the fluttering rustle
of the afternoon tea-parties that were now becoming frequent in his
house. And when he was alone with her he discovered they didn't talk now
any more--except in terms of a constrained and formal affection.
What had happened to them? What was the matter between himself and
Marjorie that he couldn't even intimate his sense of their divergence?
He would have liked to discuss the whole thing with his mother, but
somehow that seemed disloyal to Marjorie....
One day they quarrelled.
He came in about six in the afternoon, jaded from the delivery of a
suburban lecture, and the consequent tedium of suburban travel, and
discovered Marjorie examining the effect of a new picture which had
replaced the German print of sunlit waves over the dining-room
mantelpiece. It was a painting in the post-impressionist manner, and it
had arrived after the close of the exhibition in Weldon Street, at
which Marjorie had bought it. She had bought it in obedience to a sudden
impulse, and its imminence had long weighed upon her conscience. She had
gone to the show with Sydney Flor and old Mrs. Flor, Sydney's mother,
and a kind of excitement had come upon them at the idea of possessing
this particular picture. Mrs. Flor had already bought three Herbins, and
her daughter wanted to dissuade her from more. "But they're so
delightful," said Mrs. Flor. "You're overrunning your allowance," said
Sydney. Disputing the point, they made inquiries for the price, and
learnt that this bright epigram in colour was going begging--was even
offered at a reduction from the catalogue price. A reduced price always
had a strong appeal nowadays to Marjorie's mind. "If you don't get it,"
she said abruptly, "I shall."
The transition from that attitude to ownership was amazingly rapid. Then
nothing remained but to wait for the picture. She had dreaded a mistake,
a blundering discord, but now with the thing hung she could see her
quick eye had not betrayed her. It was a mass of reds, browns, purples,
and vivid greens and greys; an effect of roof and brick house facing
upon a Dutch canal, and it lit up the room and was echoed and reflected
by all the rest of her courageous colour scheme, like a coal-fire amidst
mahogany and metal. It justified itself to her completely, and she faced
her husband with a certain confidence.
"Hullo!" he cried.
"A new picture," she said. "What do you think of it?"
"What is it?"
"A town or something--never mind. Look at the colour. It heartens
everything."
Trafford looked at the painting with a reluctant admiration.
"It's brilliant--and impudent. He's an artist--whoever he is. He hits
the thing. But--I say--how did you get it?"
"I bought it."
"Bought it! Good Lord! How much?"
"Oh! ten guineas," said Marjorie, with an affectation of ease; "it will
be worth thirty in ten years' time."