They dined at the Loretto Restaurant with the Bernards and Richard
Hampden and Mrs. Godwin Capes, the dark-eyed, quiet-mannered wife of the
dramatist, a woman of impulsive speech and long silences, who had
subsided from an early romance (Capes had been divorced for her while
she was still a mere girl) into a markedly correct and exclusive mother
of daughters. Through the dinner Marjorie was watching Trafford and
noting the deep preoccupation of his manner. He talked a little to Mrs.
Bernard until it was time for Hampden to entertain her, then finding
Mrs. Capes was interested in Bernard, he lapsed into thought. Presently
Marjorie discovered his eyes scrutinizing herself.
She hoped the play would catch his mind, but the play seemed devised to
intensify his sense of the tawdry unreality of contemporary life.
Bernard filled the intervals with a conventional enthusiasm. Capes
didn't appear.
"He doesn't seem to care to see his things," his wife explained.
"It's so brilliant," said Bernard.
"He has to do it," said Mrs. Capes slowly, her sombre eyes estimating
the crowded stalls below. "It isn't what he cares to do."
The play was in fact an admirable piece of English stagecraft, and it
dealt exclusively with that unreal other world of beings the English
theatre has for its own purposes developed. Just as Greece through the
ages evolved and polished and perfected the idealized life of its
Homeric poems, so the British mind has evolved their Stage Land to
embody its more honourable dreams, full of heroic virtues, incredible
honour, genial worldliness, childish villainies, profound but amiable
waiters and domestics, pathetic shepherds and preposterous crimes.
Capes, needing an income, had mastered the habits and customs of this
imagined world as one learns a language; success endorsed his mastery;
he knew exactly how deeply to underline an irony and just when it is fit
and proper for a good man to call upon "God!" or cry out "Damn!" In this
play he had invented a situation in which a charming and sympathetic
lady had killed a gross and drunken husband in self-defence, almost but
not quite accidentally, and had then appealed to the prodigious hero for
assistance in the resulting complications. At a great cost of mental
suffering to himself he had told his First and Only Lie to shield her.
Then years after he had returned to England--the first act happened, of
course in India--to find her on the eve of marrying, without any of the
preliminary confidences common among human beings, an old school friend
of his. (In plays all Gentlemen have been at school together, and one
has been the other's fag.) The audience had to be interested in the
problem of what the prodigious hero was to do in this prodigious
situation. Should he maintain a colossal silence, continue his
shielding, and let his friend marry the murderess saved by his perjury,
or----?... The dreadful quandary! Indeed, the absolute--inconvenience!
Marjorie watched Trafford in the corner of the box, as he listened
rather contemptuously to the statement of the evening's Problem and then
lapsed again into a brooding quiet. She wished she understood his moods
better. She felt there was more in this than a mere resentment at her
persistence about the new house....
Why didn't he go on with things?...
This darkling mood of his had only become manifest to her during the
last three or four years of their life. Previously, of course, he had
been irritable at times.
Were they less happy now than they had been in the little house in
Chelsea? It had really been a horrible little house. And yet there had
been a brightness then--a nearness....
She found her mind wandering away upon a sort of stock-taking
expedition. How much of real happiness had she and Trafford had
together? They ought by every standard to be so happy....
She declined the Bernard's invitation to a chafing-dish supper, and
began to talk so soon as she and Trafford had settled into the car.
"Rag," she said, "something's the matter?"
"Well--yes."
"The house?"
"Yes--the house."
Marjorie considered through a little interval.
"Old man, why are you so prejudiced against a bigger house?"
"Oh, because the one we have bores me, and the next one will bore me
more."
"But try it."
"I don't want to."
"Well," she said and lapsed into silence.
"And then," he asked, "what are we going to do?"
"Going to do--when?"
"After the new house----"
"I'm going to open out," she said.
He made no answer.
"I want to open out. I want you to take your place in the world, the
place you deserve."
"A four-footman place?"
"Oh! the house is only a means."
He thought upon that. "A means," he asked, "to what? Look here,
Marjorie, what do you think you are up to with me and yourself? What do
you see me doing--in the years ahead?"
She gave him a silent and thoughtful profile for a second or so.
"At first I suppose you are going on with your researches."
"Well?"
"Then----I must tell you what I think of you, Rag. Politics----"
"Good Lord!"
"You've a sort of power. You could make things noble."
"And then? Office?"
"Why not? Look at the little men they are."
"And then perhaps a still bigger house?"
"You're not fair to me."
He pulled up the bearskin over his knees.
"Marjorie!" he said. "You see----We aren't going to do any of those
things at all.... _No!_..."
"I can't go on with my researches," he explained. "That's what you don't
understand. I'm not able to get back to work. I shall never do any good
research again. That's the real trouble, Marjorie, and it makes all the
difference. As for politics----I can't touch politics. I despise
politics. I think this empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and
patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it, silly, _silly_
beyond words; temporary, accidental, foolish, a mere stop-gap--like a
gipsey's roundabout in a place where one will presently build a
house.... You don't help make the house by riding on the roundabout....
There's no clear knowledge--no clear purpose.... Only research
matters--and expression perhaps--I suppose expression is a sort of
research--until we get that--that sufficient knowledge. And you see, I
can't take up my work again. I've lost something...."
She waited.
"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "and
I feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I've
been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Business
and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of
prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one
sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to
succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's
attention or imagination wander--and it's so degrading. Hopelessly
degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. _I_ don't want to buy
things. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It's
exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on
a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened--on nothing!
Nothing!"
"This is a mood," she whispered to his pause.
"It isn't a mood, it's a fact.... I've got nothing ahead, and I don't
know how to get back. My life's no good to me any more. I've spent
myself."
She looked at him with dismayed eyes. "But," she said, "this _is_ a
mood."
"No," he said, "no mood, but conviction. I _know_...."
He started. The car had stopped at their house, and Malcolm was opening
the door of the car. They descended silently, and went upstairs in
silence.
He came into her room presently and sat down by her fireside. She had
gone to her dressing-table and unfastened a necklace; now with this
winking and glittering in her hand she came and stood beside him.
"Rag," she said, "I don't know what to say. This isn't so much of a
surprise.... I _felt_ that somehow life was disappointing you, that I
was disappointing you. I've felt it endless times, but more so lately. I
haven't perhaps dared to let myself know just how much.... But isn't it
what life is? Doesn't every wife disappoint her husband? We're none of
us inexhaustible. After all, we've had a good time; isn't it a little
ungrateful to forget?..."
"Look here, Rag," she said. "I don't know what to do. If I did know, I
would do it.... What are we to do?"
"Think," he suggested.
"We've got to live as well as think."
"It's the immense troublesome futility of--everything," he said.
"Well--let us cease to be futile. Let us _do_. You say there is no grip
for you in research, that you despise politics.... There's no end of
trouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, change
the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves...."
"Who are we that we should tamper with the lives of others?"
"But one must do something."
He thought that over.
"No," he said "that's the universal blunder nowadays. One must do the
right thing. And we don't know the right thing, Marjorie. That's the
very heart of the trouble.... Does this life satisfy _you?_ If it did
would you always be so restless?..."
"But," she said, "think of the good things in life?"
"It's just the good, the exquisite things in life, that make me rebel
against this life we are leading. It's because I've seen the streaks of
gold that I know the rest for dirt. When I go cheating and scheming to
my office, and come back to find you squandering yourself upon a horde
of chattering, overdressed women, when I think that that is our
substance and everyday and what we are, then it is I remember most the
deep and beautiful things.... It is impossible, dear, it is intolerable
that life was made beautiful for us--just for these vulgarities."
"Isn't there----" She hesitated. "Love--still?"
"But----Has it been love? Love is a thing that grows. But we took it--as
people take flowers out of a garden, cut them off, put them in water....
How much of our daily life has been love? How much of it mere
consequences of the love we've left behind us?... We've just cohabited
and 'made love'--you and I--and thought of a thousand other things...."
He looked up at her. "Oh, I love a thousand things about you," he said.
"But do I love _you_, Marjorie? Have I got you? Haven't I lost
you--haven't we both lost something, the very heart of it all? Do you
think that we were just cheated by instinct, that there wasn't something
in it we felt and thought was there? And where is it now? Where is that
brightness and wonder, Marjorie, and the pride and the immense unlimited
hope?"
She was still for a moment, then knelt very swiftly before him and held
out her arms.
"Oh Rag!" she said, with a face of tender beauty. He took her finger
tips in his, dropped them and stood up above her.
"My dear," he cried, "my dear! why do you always want to turn love
into--touches?... Stand up again. Stand up there, my dear; don't think
I've ceased to love you, but stand up there and let me talk to you as
one man to another. If we let this occasion slide to embraces...."
He stopped short.