It was only after they had been married six or seven years that Trafford
began to realize how widely his attitudes to Marjorie varied. He emerged
slowly from a naive unconsciousness of his fluctuations,--a naive
unconsciousness of inconsistency that for most men and women remains
throughout life. His ruling idea that she and he were friends, equals,
confederates, knowing everything about each other, co-operating in
everything, was very fixed and firm. But indeed that had become the
remotest rendering of their relationship. Their lives were lives of
intimate disengagement. They came nearest to fellowship in relation to
their children; there they shared an immense common pride. Beyond that
was a less confident appreciation of their common house and their joint
effect. And then they liked and loved each other tremendously. They
could play upon each other and please each other in a hundred different
ways, and they did so, quite consciously, observing each other with the
completest externality. She was still in many ways for him the bright
girl he had admired in the examination, still the mysterious dignified
transfiguration of that delightful creature on the tragically tender
verge of motherhood; these memories were of more power with him than the
present realities of her full-grown strength and capacity. He petted and
played with the girl still; he was still tender and solicitous for that
early woman. He admired and co-operated also with the capable, narrowly
ambitious, beautiful lady into which Marjorie had developed, but those
remoter experiences it was that gave the deeper emotions to their
relationship.
The conflict of aims that had at last brought Trafford from scientific
investigation into business, had left behind it a little scar of
hostility. He felt his sacrifice. He felt that he had given something
for her that she had had no right to exact, that he had gone beyond the
free mutualities of honest love and paid a price for her; he had
deflected the whole course of his life for her and he was entitled to
repayments. Unconsciously he had become a slightly jealous husband. He
resented inattentions and absences. He felt she ought to be with him and
orient all her proceedings towards him. He did not like other people to
show too marked an appreciation of her. She had a healthy love of
admiration, and in addition her social ambitions made it almost
inevitable that at times she should use her great personal charm to
secure and retain adherents. He was ashamed to betray the resentments
thus occasioned, and his silence widened the separation more than any
protest could have done....
For his own part he gave her no cause for a reciprocal jealousy. Other
women did not excite his imagination very greatly, and he had none of
the ready disposition to lapse to other comforters which is so frequent
a characteristic of the husband out of touch with his life's companion.
He was perhaps an exceptional man in his steadfast loyalty to his wife.
He had come to her as new to love as she had been. He had never in his
life taken that one decisive illicit step which changes all the aspects
of sexual life for a man even more than for a woman. Love for him was a
thing solemn, simple, and unspoilt. He perceived that it was not so for
most other men, but that did little to modify his own private attitude.
In his curious scrutiny of the people about him, he did not fail to note
the drift of adventures and infidelities that glimmers along beneath the
even surface of our social life. One or two of his intimate friends,
Solomonson was one of them, passed through "affairs." Once or twice
those dim proceedings splashed upward to the surface in an open scandal.
There came Remington's startling elopement with Isabel Rivers, the
writer, which took two brilliant and inspiring contemporaries suddenly
and distressingly out of Trafford's world. Trafford felt none of that
rage and forced and jealous contempt for the delinquents in these
matters which is common in the ill-regulated, virtuous mind. Indeed, he
was far more sympathetic with than hostile to the offenders. He had
brains and imagination to appreciate the grim pathos of a process that
begins as a hopeful quest, full of the suggestion of noble
possibilities, full of the craving for missed intensities of fellowship
and realization, that loiters involuntarily towards beauties and
delights, and ends at last too often after gratification of an appetite,
in artificially hideous exposures, and the pelting misrepresentations of
the timidly well-behaved vile. But the general effect of pitiful
evasions, of unavoidable meannesses, of draggled heroics and tortuously
insincere explanations confirmed him in his aversion from this
labyrinthine trouble of extraneous love....
But if Trafford was a faithful husband, he ceased to be a happy and
confident one. There grew up in him a vast hinterland of thoughts and
feelings, an accumulation of unspoken and largely of unformulated things
in which his wife had no share. And it was in that hinterland that his
essential self had its abiding place....
It came as a discovery; it remained for ever after a profoundly
disturbing perplexity that he had talked to Marjorie most carelessly,
easily and seriously, during their courtship and their honeymoon. He
remembered their early intercourse now as an immense happy freedom in
love. Then afterwards a curtain had fallen. That almost delirious sense
of escaping from oneself, of having at last found some one from whom
there need be no concealment, some one before whom one could stand
naked-souled and assured of love as one stands before one's God, faded
so that he scarce observed its passing, but only discovered at last
that it had gone. He misunderstood and met misunderstanding. He found he
could hurt her by the things he said, and be exquisitely hurt by her
failure to apprehend the spirit of some ill-expressed intention. And it
was so vitally important not to hurt, not to be hurt. At first he only
perceived that he reserved himself; then there came the intimation of
the question, was she also perhaps in such another hinterland as his,
keeping herself from him?
He had perceived the cessation of that first bright outbreak of
self-revelation, this relapse into the secrecies of individuality, quite
early in their married life. I have already told of his first efforts to
bridge their widening separation by walks and talks in the country, and
by the long pilgrimage among the Alps that had ended so unexpectedly at
Vevey. In the retrospect the years seemed punctuated with phases when
"we must talk" dominated their intercourse, and each time the impulse of
that recognized need passed away by insensible degrees again--with
nothing said.