On the evening of the day when Trafford first tried to stand upon his
leg, they talked far into the night. It had been a great and eventful
day for them, full of laughter and exultation. He had been at first
ridiculously afraid; he had clung to her almost childishly, and she had
held him about the body with his weight on her strong right arm and his
right arm in her left hand, concealing her own dread of a collapse under
a mask of taunting courage. The crutch had proved admirable. "It's my
silly knees!" Trafford kept on saying. "The leg's all right, but I get
put out by my silly knees."
They made the day a feast, a dinner of two whole day's rations and a
special soup instead of supper. "The birds will come," they explained to
each other, "ducks and geese, long before May. May, you know, is the
latest."
Marjorie confessed the habit of sharing his pipe was growing on her.
"What shall we do in Tyburnia!" she said, and left it to the
imagination.
"If ever we get back there," he said.
"I don't much fancy kicking a skirt before my shins again--and I'll be a
black, coarse woman down to my neck at dinner for years to come!..."
Then, as he lay back in his bunk and she crammed the stove with fresh
boughs and twigs of balsam that filled the little space about them with
warmth and with a faint, sweet smell of burning and with flitting red
reflections, he took up a talk about religion they had begun some days
before.
"You see," he said, "I've always believed in Salvation. I suppose a
man's shy of saying so--even to his wife. But I've always believed more
or less distinctly that there was something up to which a life
worked--always. It's been rather vague, I'll admit. I don't think I've
ever believed in individual salvation. You see, I feel these are deep
things, and the deeper one gets the less individual one becomes. That's
why one thinks of those things in darkness and loneliness--and finds
them hard to tell. One has an individual voice, or an individual
birthmark, or an individualized old hat, but the soul--the soul's
different.... It isn't me talking to you when it comes to that.... This
question of what we are doing with life isn't a question to begin with
for you and me as ourselves, but for you and me as mankind. Am I
spinning it too fine, Madge?"
"No," she said, intent; "go on."
"You see, when we talk rations here, Marjorie, it's ourselves, but when
we talk religion--it's mankind. You've either got to be Everyman in
religion or leave it alone. That's my idea. It's no more presumptuous to
think for the race than it is for a beggar to pray--though that means
going right up to God and talking to Him. Salvation's a collective thing
and a mystical thing--or there isn't any. Fancy the Almighty and me
sitting up and keeping Eternity together! God and R. A. G. Trafford,
F.R.S.--that's silly. Fancy a man in number seven boots, and a
tailor-made suit in the nineteen-fourteen fashion, sitting before God!
That's caricature. But God and Man! That's sense, Marjorie."...
He stopped and stared at her.
Marjorie sat red-lit, regarding him. "Queer things you say!" she said.
"So much of this I've never thought out. I wonder why I've never done
so.... Too busy with many things, I suppose. But go on and tell me more
of these secrets you've kept from me!"
"Well, we've got to talk of these things as mankind--or just leave them
alone, and shoot pheasants."...
"If I could shoot a pheasant now!" whispered Marjorie, involuntarily.
"And where do we stand? What do we need--I mean the whole race of
us--kings and beggars together? You know, Marjorie, it's this,--it's
Understanding. That's what mankind has got to, the realization that it
doesn't understand, that it can't express, that it's purblind. We
haven't got eyes for those greater things, but we've got the
promise--the intimation of eyes. We've come out of an unsuspecting
darkness, brute animal darkness, not into sight, that's been the
mistake, but into a feeling of illumination, into a feeling of light
shining through our opacity....
"I feel that man has now before all things to know. That's his supreme
duty, to feel, realize, see, understand, express himself to the utmost
limits of his power."
He sat up, speaking very earnestly to her, and in that flickering light
she realized for the first time how thin he had become, how bright and
hollow his eyes, his hair was long over his eyes, and a rough beard
flowed down to his chest. "All the religions," he said, "all the
philosophies, have pretended to achieve too much. We've no language yet
for religious truth or metaphysical truth; we've no basis yet broad
enough and strong enough on which to build. Religion and philosophy have
been impudent and quackish--quackish! They've been like the doctors, who
have always pretended they could cure since the beginning of things,
cure everything, and to this day even they haven't got more than the
beginnings of knowledge on which to base a cure. They've lacked
humility, they've lacked the honour to say they didn't know; the
priests took things of wood and stone, the philosophers took little odd
arrangements of poor battered words, metaphors, analogies, abstractions,
and said: "That's it! Think of their silly old Absolute,--ab-solutus, an
untied parcel. I heard Haldane at the Aristotelian once, go on for an
hour--no! it was longer than an hour--as glib and slick as a well-oiled
sausage-machine, about the different sorts of Absolute, and not a soul
of us laughed out at him! The vanity of such profundities! They've no
faith, faith in patience, faith to wait for the coming of God. And since
we don't know God, since we don't know His will with us, isn't it plain
that all our lives should be a search for Him and it? Can anything else
matter,--after we are free from necessity? That is the work now that is
before all mankind, to attempt understanding--by the perpetual finding
of thought and the means of expression, by perpetual extension and
refinement of science, by the research that every artist makes for
beauty and significance in his art, by the perpetual testing and
destruction and rebirth under criticism of all these things, and by a
perpetual extension of this intensifying wisdom to more minds and more
minds and more, till all men share in it, and share in the making of
it.... There you have my creed, Marjorie; there you have the very marrow
of me."...
He became silent.
"Will you go back to your work?" she said, abruptly. "Go back to your
laboratory?"
He stared at her for a moment without speaking. "Never," he said at
last.
"But," she said, and the word dropped from her like a stone that falls
down a well....
"My dear," he said, at last, "I've thought of that. But since I left
that dear, dusty little laboratory, and all those exquisite subtle
things--I've lived. I've left that man seven long years behind me. Some
other man must go on--I think some younger man--with the riddles I found
to work on then. I've grown--into something different. It isn't how
atoms swing with one another, or why they build themselves up so and not
so, that matters any more to me. I've got you and all the world in which
we live, and a new set of riddles filling my mind, how thought swings
about thought, how one man attracts his fellows, how the waves of motive
and conviction sweep through a crowd and all the little drifting
crystallizations of spirit with spirit and all the repulsions and eddies
and difficulties, that one can catch in that turbulent confusion. I want
to do a new sort of work now altogether.... Life has swamped me once,
but I don't think it will get me under again;--I want to study men."
He paused and she waited, with a face aglow.
"I want to go back to watch and think--and I suppose write. I believe I
shall write criticism. But everything that matters is criticism!... I
want to get into contact with the men who are thinking. I don't mean to
meet them necessarily, but to get into the souls of their books. Every
writer who has anything to say, every artist who matters, is the
stronger for every man or woman who responds to him. That's the great
work--the Reality. I want to become a part of this stuttering attempt to
express, I want at least to resonate, even if I do not help.... And you
with me, Marjorie--you with me! Everything I write I want you to see and
think about. I want you to read as I read.... Now after so long, now
that, now that we've begun to talk, you know, talk again----"
Something stopped his voice. Something choked them both into silence. He
held out a lean hand, and she shuffled on her knees to take it....
"Don't please make me," she stumbled through her thoughts, "one of those
little parasitic, parroting wives--don't pretend too much about
me--because you want me with you----. Don't forget a woman isn't a man."
"Old Madge," he said, "you and I have got to march together. Didn't I
love you from the first, from that time when I was a boy examiner and
you were a candidate girl--because your mind was clear?"
"And we will go back," she whispered, "with a work----"
"With a purpose," he said.
She disengaged herself from his arm, and sat close to him upon the
floor. "I think I can see what you will do," she said. She mused. "For
the first time I begin to see things as they may be for us. I begin to
see a life ahead. For the very first time."
Queer ideas came drifting into her head. Suddenly she cried out sharply
in that high note he loved. "Good heavens!" she said. "The absurdity!
The infinite absurdity!"
"But what?"
"I might have married Will Magnet----. That's all."
She sprang to her feet. There came a sound of wind outside, a shifting
of snow on the roof, and the door creaked. "Half-past eleven," she
exclaimed looking at the watch that hung in the light of the stove door.
"I don't want to sleep yet; do you? I'm going to brew some tea--make a
convivial drink. And then we will go on talking. It's so good talking to
you. So good!... I've an idea! Don't you think on this special day, it
might run to a biscuit?" Her face was keenly anxious. He nodded. "One
biscuit each," she said, trying to rob her voice of any note of
criminality. "Just one, you know, won't matter."
She hovered for some moments close to the stove before she went into the
arctic corner that contained the tin of tea. "If we can really live like
that!" she said. "When we are home again."
"Why not?" he answered.
She made no answer, but went across for the tea....
He turned his head at the sound of the biscuit tin and watched her put
out the precious discs.
"I shall have another pipe," he proclaimed, with an agreeable note of
excess. "Thank heaven for unstinted tobacco...."
And now Marjorie's mind was teaming with thoughts of this new conception
of a life lived for understanding. As she went about the preparation of
the tea, her vividly concrete imagination was active with the
realization of the life they would lead on their return. She could not
see it otherwise than framed in a tall, fine room, a study, a study in
sombre tones, with high, narrow, tall, dignified bookshelves and rich
deep green curtains veiling its windows. There should be a fireplace of
white marble, very plain and well proportioned, with furnishings of old
brass, and a big desk towards the window beautifully lit by electric
light, with abundant space for papers to lie. And she wanted some touch
of the wilderness about it; a skin perhaps....
The tea was still infusing when she had determined upon an enormous
paper-weight of that iridescent Labradorite that had been so astonishing
a feature of the Green River Valley. She would have it polished on one
side only--the other should be rough to show the felspar in its natural
state....
It wasn't that she didn't feel and understand quite fully the intention
and significance of all he had said, but that in these symbols of
texture and equipment her mind quite naturally clothed itself. And
while this room was coming into anticipatory being in her mind, she was
making the tea very deftly and listening to Trafford's every word.