Spring and a renewed and deepened love for her husband were in
Marjorie's blood. Her mind worked rapidly during the next few days, and
presently she found herself clearly decided upon her course of action.
She had to pull herself together and help him, and if that meant a
Spartan and strenuous way of living, then manifestly she must be Spartan
and strenuous. She must put an end once for all to her recurrent
domestic deficits, and since this could only be done by getting rid of
May, she must get rid of May and mind the child herself. (Every day,
thank Heaven! Margharita became more intelligent, more manageable, and
more interesting.) Then she must also make a far more systematic and
thorough study of domestic economy than she had hitherto done, and run
the shopping and housekeeping on severer lines; she bought fruit
carelessly, they had far too many joints; she never seemed able to
restrain herself when it came to flowers. And in the evenings, which
would necessarily be very frequently lonely evenings if Trafford's
researches were to go on, she would typewrite, and either acquire great
speed at that or learn shorthand, and so save Trafford's present
expenditure on a typist. That unfortunately would mean buying a
typewriter.
She found one afternoon in a twopenny book-box, with which she was
trying to allay her craving for purchases, a tattered little pamphlet
entitled: "Proposals for the Establishment of an Order of Samurai,"
which fell in very exactly with her mood. The title "dated"; it carried
her mind back to her middle girlhood and the defeats of Kuropatki and
the futile earnest phase in English thought which followed the Boer War.
The order was to be a sort of self-appointed nobility serving the world.
It shone with the light of a generous dawn, but cast, I fear, the shadow
of the prig. Its end was the Agenda Club.... She read and ceased to
read--and dreamt.
The project unfolded the picture of a new method of conduct to her,
austere, yet picturesque and richly noble. These Samurai, it was
intimated, were to lead lives of hard discipline and high effort, under
self-imposed rule and restraint. They were to stand a little apart from
the excitements and temptations of everyday life, to eat sparingly,
drink water, resort greatly to self-criticism and self-examination, and
harden their spirits by severe and dangerous exercises. They were to
dress simply, work hard, and be the conscious and deliberate salt of the
world. They were to walk among mountains. Incidentally, great power was
to be given them. Such systematic effort and self-control as this,
seemed to Marjorie to give just all she wasn't and needed to be, to save
her life and Trafford's from a common disaster....
It particularly appealed to her that they were to walk among
mountains....
But it is hard to make a change in the colour of one's life amidst the
routine one has already established about oneself, in the house that is
grooved by one's weaknesses, amidst hangings and ornaments living and
breathing with the life of an antagonistic and yet insidiously congenial
ideal. A great desire came upon Marjorie to go away with Trafford for a
time, out of their everyday life into strange and cool and spacious
surroundings. She wanted to leave London and its shops, and the home and
the movements and the callers and rivalries, and even dimpled little
Margharita's insistent claims, and get free and think. It was the first
invasion of their lives by this conception, a conception that was ever
afterwards to leave them altogether, of retreat and reconstruction. She
knelt upon the white sheepskin hearthrug at Trafford's feet one night,
and told him of her desire. He, too, was tired of his work and his
vexations, and ripe for this suggestion of an altered life. The Easter
holiday was approaching, and nearly twenty unencumbered days. Mrs.
Trafford, they knew, would come into the house, meanwhile, and care for
Margharita. They would go away somewhere together and walk, no luggage
but a couple of knapsacks, no hotel but some homely village inn. They
would be in the air all day, until they were saturated with sweet air
and spirit of clean restraints. They would plan out their new rule,
concentrate their aims. "And I could think," said Trafford, "of this new
work I can't begin here. I might make some notes." Presently came the
question of where the great walk should be. Manifestly, it must be among
mountains, manifestly, and Marjorie's eye saw those mountains with snow
upon their summits and cold glaciers on their flanks. Could they get to
Switzerland? If they travelled second class throughout, and took the
cheaper way, as Samurai should?...