The last three days of their stay in Paris were marked by a return
on the part of Thornton to his old devotion. He declined invitations
ruthlessly, spent almost the whole of his time with his wife. In all
outward and visible signs they were lovers again, but the inward and
spiritual grace was a bit vapoury. They went on excursions together, to
Fontainebleau, Melun, Passy. One day they wandered about the forest
of Vincennes and he kissed her beneath the trees as he used to do at
Bordighera. They had gay, laughing meals together at little riverside
restaurants. He was passionate in his expressions of endearment and in
his delight at her beauty. With the negative tact of passion, he avoided
all subjects that could jar upon her. For three days he was the Thornton
of their honeymoon.
Clytie at first could not understand this sudden change. She asked him
the reason tremulously.
“Can't you see, you silly girl,” he replied with masterful frankness,
“that I love you and we have only three more days' idleness?”
And then she let the spell come over her again and surrendered herself
to his mood. But now, instead of entering with spontaneous joy a world
of laughter whose magic gates lay open before her, she crossed the
threshold with deliberate step. She had to choose whether to laugh or
cry. She was young, she wanted to love her husband; so she chose to
laugh. It was an act of reason. But woe to love when reason has to find
its argument!
By Whitsuntide they were in London, installed in their house in
the Cromwell Road. The three days' passion had cooled down, and the
atmosphere was colder than before. But Clytie for several weeks was
so busy that she had not time for much consideration of troubling
questions. First, the house required her attention. There was much
supplementary furniture to be chosen, many minor schemes of decoration
to be carried out in accordance with her own artistic tastes.
Thornton gave her a free hand in these matters, and, beyond taking it
for granted that the house should be fitly arranged, never troubled
himself about details. He attended two or three picture sales with
Clytie, where he bought a few pictures on her recommendation, ordered
some great leather armchairs for his smoking-room, and then transferred
his attention to concerns of more serious interest. So Clytie, left
unhampered, succeeded in arranging the house to her own satisfaction.
This occupied a great portion of her time; the rest was almost entirely
devoted to her social duties.
She found herself in some small position in society, as the artistic
wife of a distinguished soldier of fortune with a considerable income,
and it was Thornton's special ambition for the time being that this
position should be maintained and secured, in furtherance of his own
personal projects. Whilst contemplating marriage, or rather after he
had, in his fierce impetuous way, decided upon it, he had sought around
after some practical interest in his new life. He had forsworn Africa,
with a virtuous sense of self-sacrifice. What remained worthy of a man's
serious attention? He did not consult Clytie. It scarcely occurred to
him that the subject concerned her. Of the few careers that presented
themselves he selected two, the turf and politics, and wavered for some
time in his choice. At last he tossed up for it, as he had often done at
the fork of two paths in the forest. The coin came down with the Queen's
head uppermost--and that meant politics. He was a Tory of the fiercer
school. Even if family and professional tradition had not influenced
him, a lengthy course of despotic authority enforced by the halter and
the butt end of a musket is not favourable to the cultivation of Liberal
suavities and amenities. And again, the “type” is almost always Tory.
He was even out of touch with the broader Conservativism of our
day, between which and modern Liberalism he failed to appreciate the
distinction. In fact his political ideals, such as they were, belonged
to the beginning instead of the end of the century, but he expressed
them with a fervour that left no doubt as to their genuineness.
He had no difficulty in setting at work the machinery of social
influence, and the result was the offer of a private-secretaryship on
the part of an under-secretary of state. He accepted it. It would not
only afford him an insight into the practical working of politics, but
would give him an opportunity of making himself known to the chiefs of
the Conservative party and securing their influence when he should seek
to enter Parliament. When everything was settled he informed Clytie
casually in Paris of his new ambitions. She, too, had wondered what
outlet this man of restless action would find for his energies, and,
shrinking from inquiry, had been filled with vague uneasiness. Now
she felt that he had made a worthy choice and in spite of dubious
encouragement strove to identify herself with his interests. True, she
contemplated with a little dismay the abandonment of her own pet
social theories, which tended towards an advanced and somewhat inchoate
Radicalism, and the espousal of a cause forming part of a scheme of life
against which she had so passionately rebelled. But she wilfully, almost
desperately, shut her eyes against all this. She would give her heart
and soul to Thornton's glory, and the sacrifice of principle on her part
would only accentuate the triumph. But this sacrifice Thornton did not
concern himself to realise. Very few men ever do. As we have seen, he
laughed at it.
He entered upon his political duties as soon as they returned to London,
led a busy life of work and pleasure, throwing into both the energy of
his strong vitality. He was not a man to wait. Social position, power,
must be wrested from the world by force of arms. The sooner the struggle
began and the fiercer it was fought the sooner would come success. It
behoved Clytie, therefore, to enter upon it with him at once. Before she
could realise herself as mistress of a large house, as cut off from the
old habits that had invested London with earnest charm, as sundered from
Kent and Winifred, as deprived of her art and her dreams and ambition,
she found herself caught up in the whirl of London society, bidden to
cultivate its conventions, flatter its weaknesses, intrigue, gossip,
dance, drive, rush, without a moment's pause to think.
And thus began her new life. It was not the one she had dreamed of. In
fact she hardly recognised herself in her deliberate subordination to a
nature dominating hers. She let herself drift, abandoning herself to
the current, clutching hold of her love towards her husband as the only
plank saving her from destruction.
Winifred she saw occasionally. She had no time for anything beyond a
half hour's gossip, and then she forgot her own hopes and fears in the
happiness of her friend, who had just become engaged to Treherne. She
saw nothing of Kent. A feeling she could not analyse restrained her
from writing to him, ever so formally. It was analogous to the whimsical
shrinking from sketching his portrait when she had first met him. She
heard of him, however, through Winifred. He came down to the studio
still occasionally, and chatted over the teacups--“chiefly about you,
dear,” said Winifred, “and the old days and your present life.”
“And is he changed at all?” asked Clytie. “It seems centuries since
those same old days. I feel almost like asking whether he has a gray
head and carries his years well!”
“It does seem a long time,” said Winifred reflectively. “But it really
isn't, you know, and Kent is just the same as ever. His trip abroad
has done him so much good. Do you know, dear, except Victor--and Mr.
Hammerdyke, of course--I think he is the best man in all the world.”
Her brown cheeks flushed as she spoke, and Clytie bent down and kissed
them.
“Oh, Winnie darling, I wish everybody were as true and loyal as you,”
she said.
A great sob was in her heart, and she would have given much to have
buried her face in Winnie's lap and let the tears come how they would.
But she mastered herself, and before the other had time to hear the echo
of the chord that was struck she went on:
“Tell me, Winnie, how is his great work getting on?”
“Rapidly, I believe,” answered Winifred. “He seems to have nothing else
to live for now. I think he misses you, dear, and plunges into it as a
kind of consolation. He has had a great compliment paid him--have you
heard? He met a great Austrian scientist, Herr --------, I can't
remember his name--it doesn't matter. Anyhow, he showed this professor
his work, and talked to him about the difficulties of publishing,
expense, and all that, and a few days ago he received an offer from the
University of Vienna to translate what was already done into German and
publish it there. He says it is a most distinguished honour.”
“I am so glad, dear,” said Clytie. “I feel proud of him, and I wish I
could see him--to give him my congratulations. You will tell him that I
asked after him, won't you, Winnie?”
“Why, of course!” said Winifred. “Don't we always talk of you?”
Mrs. Blather was anxious that Clytie and her husband should come to
Durdleham to stay there after the season in town was over. But Clytie
replied evasively to the affectionate invitation. She shrank from
Durdleham even more than from herself. Mrs. Blather, now that the
soreness as regards the wedding had worn off, was delighted at the
brilliant match--just the very marriage one could have wished for
Clytie, as she remarked over the Durdleham tea tables. Besides, it
was definite settling down for Clytie, saving them from that shadow of
scandal that had always seemed liable to be cast over them through her
unprincipled behaviour. There were no longer any fears. And Mrs. Blather
had her own little triumph in another way. She remembered now she had
prophesied years ago that Clytie's desire to live her art life in London
was a craze that would not last long--like Janet's transient enthusiasm
for cookery classes. Both Janet and herself took it for granted that
Clytie viewed her past errors with the same indulgent retrospective
smile, and wrote her complacent letters based on this assumption. And
Clytie found it harder than ever to write to them naturally, to answer
these letters in the same tone. If her sisters had failed to understand
her when to her her young, earnest self was brightly intelligible, how
could they do it now when she saw herself vaguely, dimly, wrapped in
impenetrable vapours? A visit to Durdleham, under the circumstances,
seemed almost an ordeal. Yet Thornton's presence there might make some
difference.
She spoke to him very little on the subject. He broached it himself one
day at breakfast, almost the only time now, except late at night, that
she saw him alone. It was nearing the end of July and the session of
Parliament was on the eve of closing.
“When are you going to see your people, Clytie?” he asked, looking over
his paper.
“I thought I had told you. They want us to come for a week as soon as we
can leave town.”
“Us?”
“Yes; won't you come?”
“Oh, no, thanks. It would not suit me at all. You go and make an excuse
for me.”
“Things are not gay there, I know,” said Clytie, “but I should like you
to come with me.”
“It can't be done, my dear,” replied Thornton. “You had better have a
quiet time there by yourself, while I go up to Scotland----”
“I thought you would have liked me to go to Scotland with you--we have
seen so little of each other lately. You don't want to stay up there all
the autumn without me?” she added half pathetically.
“Why, my dear Clytie, you can come if you like,” said her husband,
drawing back his chair from the table. “Only you won't find much fun in
a little shooting-box in the middle of a glen in the Highlands. Look:
you go and see your people for a month, and then, if you like, you can
come and join me there--that is to say, if Carteret has any of his women
folks staying in the house, which does not seem to be quite settled yet.
If he hasn't, naturally you can't come.”
“In that case I shall not go to Durdleham--I couldn't. You would not
understand why. I shall stay in London, and mind the house.”
“I should not like you to do that,” said Thornton.
“Why not?”
“Because I had rather you did not,” he repeated, with a gathering frown.
“How long do you contemplate being away?” asked Clytie quietly.
“August and September, perhaps--I can't quite tell yet.”
“Do you propose, then, that I should go and stay in Durdleham for two
months with my people?”
He had not contemplated it, but he was irritated at her show of
opposition. He lost his temper and said sharply:
“Yes. Or with any other friends you like. I am not going to have you
remain here all by yourself.”
“Will you tell me your reasons, Thornton?” asked Clytie.
He crumpled up his paper angrily and thumped it on the table. The veins
in his forehead stood out. His face grew ugly.
“When I say a thing is to be done I mean it,” he cried, “and I am not
accustomed to be asked for my reasons!”
“I shall leave you until you have recovered yourself,” said Clytie with
dignity, and she left the room.
This was the first real quarrel between them. The blood had often rushed
hot through Clytie's veins and set her pulses tingling, but hitherto
she had restrained herself, feeling that the first revolt would mark the
beginning of the end.
She passed a miserable day. When Thornton came home in the afternoon to
dress for dinner he was in one of his light-hearted moods. He had backed
an outsider some weeks back at very long odds. The race had been run
that day and the outsider had won, bringing him a couple of
thousand pounds--a windfall that relieved him of certain temporary
embarrassments. Hence his buoyancy that afternoon. He had apparently
forgotten the morning's difference, and called Clytie “little wife”
again, and promised her a victoria to supplement the modest brougham
with which they had begun. He put his arm round her and kissed her,
praised her beautiful hair, the roundness of her arms, her dress. He
told her the gossip of the day in his bright off-hand manner, made her
laugh in spite of her weariness. But when he kissed her she shrank a
little. In the elation of his victory he did not notice her lack of
responsiveness; besides, he was not over-sensitive at any time. When
they returned home at night from the dinner-party to which they had gone
together, Thornton was still in pleasant mood. Nothing more was said
respecting the plans for August and September.
The reconciliation did not last long. Clytie strove with an earnestness
that was torture to keep the peace between them, but sometimes her
nature clamoured within her and broke out in self-assertion. Only four
months married, and already the breach between them was perceptible,
slowly widening. And it was Clytie that drifted away from her husband.
If she had been a lesser nature, she might have retained the love on
both sides. A woman of a lower type would have been able to flatter,
soothe, cajole, yield, and thus have kept Thornton at her feet. The
patronising contempt for her own needs, which lashed Clytie to the soul,
she would have treated lightly, as the natural and foolish vanity of the
superior being; and she would have found in a sudden demonstration of
passion full compensation for previous indifference. But Clytie was
not only unversed herself in the arts of seduction, but despised them
fiercely in other women. And she began also to dread Thornton's fits of
affection as much as his fits of anger.
He left her one morning quivering with mortification and suppressed
bitterness. He himself was not conscious of the slight he had inflicted,
and he went away in gay spirits. Their talk had turned upon a Cabinet
Minister named Godderich, whose influence Thornton was anxious to
acquire. Now it had so happened that this same Godderich had succeeded
in making himself vastly obnoxious to Clytie. She told her husband this,
giving him the reasons.
“I have not been accustomed to that kind of admiration,” she said, “and
I don't like it.”
But Thornton laughed his great laugh, called her “his unconventional
prude,” and went on to show her what an invaluable ally Godderich was.
“You must swallow your dislike, Clytie,” he said. “Why, God bless my
soul, if ninety-nine women out of a hundred had that chance, they would
get the eyes out of his head.”
“Would you so much desire me to be like ninety-nine women out of a
hundred, then, Thornton?”
“Oh, nonsense, Clytie; you know what I mean. Come! Don't you see that
here's a way of pushing things on a bit? What does it matter if the ass
is attentive? You can laugh at him. But keep him in hand a bit until we
want to let him loose. Do you see? Of course I trust you, and all that
sort of thing.”
“I thank you for your confidence,” she replied. “But I don't think you
will need to exercise it much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, never mind. Do you really want me, Thornton, to encourage this man
to make love to me, so as to get a hold on him for other purposes?”
“I never saw anyone like you for the dotting of i's,” said Thornton,
amused. “But that's about the size of it. Don't you see what an infernal
ass we can make of him? Well, think it over, little wife. Good-bye.”
He opened the front door,--this little conversation had taken place in
the hall,--and ran down the steps very well pleased with himself.
But Clytie's heart turned from him and she passed a wretched day--all
the more trying as she felt in honour bound to sing antistrophe of
praise of Thornton to the strophe of Mrs. Farquharson, with whom she was
lunching.
In the evening they were going out together. He came home late from
Westminster, dressed hurriedly, and went down to the drawing-room, where
Clytie was waiting. She was wearing a low-cut dress. Her arms were bare.
A tiny diamond clasp to a thin gold chain flashed on her bosom.
“By Jove! You're looking lovelier than ever!” he cried. “Come, let me
kiss you.”
He drew her to him, kissed the upper part of her arm, and then her lips.
But she made no response. She shrank, and this time he noted it. His arm
still round her waist, he held back his head and looked at her.
“Clytie!”
He spoke with loverlike reproach, and kissed her again, and again she
shrank. And then he cast her aside roughly, and stamped his foot.
“Damn it! Clytie,” he exclaimed, showing his teeth, “you are a perfect
icicle!”
Clytie made no reply, but turned to the window and buttoned her glove.
Thornton rang the bell violently, and when the footman appeared asked
him why the devil the carriage had not come round. Then he flung himself
into a chair and turned over a book. And thus they remained without
speaking until the brougham was announced. On their way to their
dinner-party they did not speak. He was in a fit of furious sulks, and
Clytie's heart was too heavy. Afterwards he went off to his club and she
drove home by herself.
And this at the end of only four months' wedded life. What would it be
at the end of four years, fourteen? Clytie strove for a little to blame
herself for supersensitiveness, egotism, coldness. But her self rose in
arms against this charge. For, like the unfolding of a horrible story,
the nature of Thornton's love for her, the nature of the place she
really occupied in his estimation, gradually broke upon her. The meaning
of light remarks, trivial jests, careless actions; the meaning of
caresses now half contemptuous, now passionate--all came to her in full
light, in all their crudity, out of the gray darkness in which she had
instinctively kept it hidden from herself. She stared at it--not in
ignorant surmise as she had done in Paris, but with a ghastly sickening
of soul.
Oh, the degradation of it! What was she to her husband but a possession,
a toy, a woman, to suffer his caresses when it so pleased him to bestow
them, a mistress whom he had taken it into his head to bind legally to
himself, so that she might serve certain purposes of his in society?
What little better was she to him than the women whom men buy,--Loulou
Mendès, for instance,--save that he reckoned,--he had told her so,--on
her fidelity to him? Things she had tried to ascribe to the careless
familiarity of love blazed insultingly before her, scorching her, making
her writhe in her abasement.
Naturally satiety had come to him. He was indifferent whether he saw
her or not for a season. Only in his absence she was to obey blindly his
caprices. If only she was his wife, she thought bitterly, in the humdrum
Durdleham way, where at least she would have had the conventional
position in their conjugal relations! Either that or the wild
independence of a Loulou Mendès, carrying her will in her hand, free to
choose her own way among the groves of the satyrs. For even there the
free path smells sweeter than the one of servitude.
Just before the session ended Clytie came to a definite understanding
with her husband. It is surprising what pain can underlie this mutual
adjustment of two intelligences.
The scene was again the breakfast-room. Each was reading the morning's
correspondence. Thornton tossed a letter across the table.
“Carteret's women folk can't come,” he said. “Devilish sensible
women--they don't see the fun of it. So it's settled. I go up as soon as
this wretched grind is over.”
“Very well,” said Clytie calmly. “I hope you will have a good time.”
“Thanks,” he replied in his careless way. “It will be like old times
again. And you will put in a good, quiet couple of months with your
people.”
Clytie bit her lip. Her heart beat a little faster. She was going to set
herself in opposition to him. She glanced at him before she spoke; he
hardly seemed to expect an answer, but continued reading another letter.
He looked kind and frank, she thought, a husband for any woman to be
proud of. In his morning freshness, clean-shaven, groomed, trimmed,
he seemed handsomer than ever. His close brown hair had not a touch of
gray; scarcely a line showed on his forehead or beneath his eyes; and
the dark rich colour was visible beneath the bronze on his cheek. He
broke into a laugh, buoyant and careless, over his letter, and looked up
at Clytie. Then, his glance meeting hers, his face grew more serious.
“What are you gazing at me for with those great blue eyes of yours,
Clytie?”
She bent forward, rested her cheek on her hand.
“In regard to what you have just said--my going to Durdleham--I am not
going for many reasons. I told you so, Thornton, the other day.”
“I am quite aware of it,” said Thornton. “But you are going.”
He looked her full in the face, and she returned his gaze calmly and
unflinchingly.
“Don't let us quarrel, Thornton,” she said. “It is so sordid and petty.
Let us try quietly to understand one another.”
His glance fell first, and he threw himself back in his chair with a
laugh and unfolded his paper.
“All right--we'll bar scenes. Only don't say anything too severe or
you'll spoil my breakfast.”
“Thornton,” she said, not changing her attitude, “I think I know what
my duty is towards you, and I try to perform it. Has it ever struck you
that you may have some duties towards me?”
“I can't say it has,” he replied.
“I don't think you understand me, Thornton. I will try to make it
clearer to you. As far as you will let me take an interest in your
life, I do so. I am more than willing to make any sacrifices--to give
up everything for you. But when you do not want me, as this autumn, I
surely may remember that I have a life of my own to lead.”
“And suppose that life does not suit me?”
“That is the point, Thornton. If you wished me, out of love for you, to
do anything, I would do it. But this is a matter in which love has no
place. Provided I am scrupulous in all my duties towards you, I have
a right to my own life, to my own antipathies, to my own favourite
pursuits--in fact to myself as an individual, and it is your duty
towards me to recognise it.”
“I don't quite see what you are driving at,” said Thornton. “You can
dislike sweet champagne and paint pictures and read Schopenhauer if you
like. Who is preventing you? But in certain matters, as you are my wife,
you have got to do what I tell you.”
“To take an extreme case, by way of argument: Suppose the fancy seized
you to order me to remain in my bedroom all day--you would expect me to
obey you?”
“By God! I should think I would!” cried Thornton, starting to his feet,
with blazing eyes and the veins standing out on his forehead.
“It seems, Thornton,” she said very quietly, “you have married the wrong
woman.”
Then she rose, too, from the table, moved towards him, and laid her hand
on his arm. He shook it off with an impatient oath, and turned away,
fuming, to stare out of the window. She was too well accustomed to his
fits of passion to resent the indignity. She mechanically picked off
some withering leaves from some flowers on the mantelpiece, and waited
for him to speak. At last he turned round again, and asked her sullenly:
“Have you any other pretty remarks to make?”
“If you will listen to them quietly.”
“Well, what do you want? I grant I was a fool to marry you. Let me hear
the consequences of my folly.”
His face was set in a sneer, an ugly expression. She had seen it several
times since that evening at the opera in Paris. The tears sprang into
her eyes as she glanced at him.
“Oh, don't speak and look like that!” she cried. “I cannot bear it. I
did not intend to say anything hard just now. I only meant that you
had mistaken me, and my needs, and my nature. I have tried to look upon
marriage from your point of view for four months, and I can't do it
any longer. You say I must obey you blindly in everything, even your
arbitrary fancies, subordinate myself absolutely to you. Thornton,
believe me, where your interests or love are concerned I will do it; but
where they are not I can't, and it will be happier for both of us that I
should tell you so frankly. If you go your way alone, I must go mine.”
“That means you set yourself in defiance to my wishes?”
Clytie checked an impulse of impatience.
“If you won't understand me, and insist on putting it that way--yes.”
They looked at each other for some time. And then Thornton ground his
teeth and glared at her.
“You can go your own way if you like, but I warn you one of these days
there will be the devil to pay!”
And he strode out of the room, cursing, and slammed the door behind him.
Clytie sat down by the window. The tears would come in spite of her
pride. She had gained the victory. But there are some victories that
have all the aching sense of defeat.