At least there came out of these discussions one thing, a phrase, a
purpose, which was to rule the lives of the Traffords for some years. It
expressed their realization that instinct and impulse had so far played
them false, that life for all its rich gifts of mutual happiness wasn't
adjusted between them. "We've got," they said, "to talk all this out
between us. We've got to work this out." They didn't mean to leave
things at a misfit, and that was certainly their present relation. They
were already at the problem of their joint lives, like a tailor with his
pins and chalk. Marjorie hadn't rejected a humorist and all his works in
order to decline at last to the humorous view of life, that rather
stupid, rather pathetic, grin-and-bear-it attitude compounded in
incalculable proportions of goodwill, evasion, indolence, slovenliness,
and (nevertheless) spite (masquerading indeed as jesting comment), which
supplies the fabric of everyday life for untold thousands of educated
middle-class people. She hated the misfit. She didn't for a moment
propose to pretend that the ungainly twisted sleeve, the puckered back,
was extremely jolly and funny. She had married with a passionate
anticipation of things fitting and fine, and it was her nature, in great
matters as in small, to get what she wanted strenuously before she
counted the cost. About both their minds there was something sharp and
unrelenting, and if Marjorie had been disposed to take refuge from facts
in swathings of aesthetic romanticism, whatever covering she contrived
would have been torn to rags very speedily by that fierce and steely
veracity which swung down out of the laboratory into her home.
One may want to talk things out long before one hits upon the phrases
that will open up the matter.
There were two chief facts in the case between them and so far they had
looked only one in the face, the fact that Marjorie was unemployed to a
troublesome and distressing extent, and that there was nothing in her
nature or training to supply, and something in their circumstances and
relations to prevent any adequate use of her energies. With the second
fact neither of them cared to come to close quarters as yet, and neither
as yet saw very distinctly how it was linked to the first, and that was
the steady excess of her expenditure over their restricted means. She
was secretly surprised at her own weakness. Week by week and month by
month, they were spending all his income and eating into that little
accumulation of capital that had once seemed so sufficient against the
world....
And here it has to be told that although Trafford knew that Marjorie had
been spending too much money, he still had no idea of just how much
money she had spent. She was doing her utmost to come to an
understanding with him, and at the same time--I don't explain it, I
don't excuse it--she was keeping back her bills from him, keeping back
urgent second and third and fourth demands, that she had no cheque-book
now to stave off even by the most partial satisfaction. It kept her
awake at nights, that catastrophic explanation, that all unsuspected by
Trafford hung over their attempts at mutual elucidation; it kept her
awake but she could not bring it to the speaking point, and she clung,
in spite of her own intelligence, to a persuasion that _after_ they had
got something really settled and defined then it would be time enough
to broach the particulars of this second divergence....
Talking one's relations over isn't particularly easy between husband and
wife at any time; we are none of us so sure of one another as to risk
loose phrases or make experiments in expression in matters so vital;
there is inevitably an excessive caution on the one hand and an abnormal
sensitiveness to hints and implications on the other. Marjorie's bills
were only an extreme instance of these unavoidable suppressions that
always occur. Moreover, when two people are continuously together, it is
amazingly hard to know when and where to begin; where intercourse is
unbroken it is as a matter of routine being constantly interrupted. You
cannot broach these broad personalities while you are getting up in the
morning, or over the breakfast-table while you make the coffee, or when
you meet again after a multitude of small events at tea, or in the
evening when one is rather tired and trivial after the work of the day.
Then Miss Margharita Trafford permitted no sustained analysis of life in
her presence. She synthesized things fallaciously, but for the time
convincingly; she insisted that life wasn't a thing you discussed, but
pink and soft and jolly, which you crowed at and laughed at and
addressed as "Goo." Even without Margharita there were occasions when
the Traffords were a forgetfulness to one another. After an ear has been
pinched or a hand has been run through a man's hair, or a pretty bare
shoulder kissed, all sorts of broader interests lapse into a temporary
oblivion. They found discussion much more possible when they walked
together. A walk seemed to take them out of the everyday sequence,
isolate them from their household, abstract them a little from one
another. They set out one extravagant spring Sunday to Great Missenden,
and once in spring also they discovered the Waterlow Park. On each
occasion they seemed to get through an enormous amount of talking. But
the Great Missenden walk was all mixed up with a sweet keen wind, and
beechwoods just shot with spring green and bursting hedges and the
extreme earliness of honeysuckle, which Trafford noted for the first
time, and a clamorous rejoicing of birds. And in the Waterlow Park there
was a great discussion of why the yellow crocus comes before white and
purple, and the closest examination of the manner in which daffodils and
narcissi thrust their green noses out of the garden beds. Also they
found the ugly, ill-served, aggressively propagandist non-alcoholic
refreshment-room in that gracious old house a scandal and
disappointment, and Trafford scolded at the stupidity of officialdom
that can control so fine a thing so ill.
Though they talked on these walks they were still curiously evasive.
Indeed, they were afraid of each other. They kept falling away from
their private thoughts and intentions. They generalized, they discussed
Marriage and George Gissing and Bernard Shaw and the suffrage movement
and the agitation for the reform of the divorce laws. They pursued
imaginary cases into distant thickets of contingency remotely far from
the personal issues between them....