THE NET
On Sunday, John and Ordith were much with Margaret, and even when she
contrived to be alone she found she could not exclude them from her
mind. To think of either was disquieting, and she needed peace. She
felt that John was watching her. He knew how she needed help and was
eager to render it would she but indicate a means. Her failure to
indicate it was being interpreted by him as a lack of trust for which
he blamed himself. He could not understand, his eyes said continually,
what he had done or left undone that repelled her confidence. And that
he should attribute her silence to a fault in himself added to her
uneasiness. She could not speak her mind to him; she could not ask him
to help her with a problem the terms of which were not yet clear to
herself. She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and reproaching
himself with some dullness or hardness that, as he imagined, was
sealing her lips. Several times she tried to speak--if only to tell him
that she was aware of his sympathy; but words would not come.
Moreover--and this itself was an element in her difficulty--was not
John weak with her own weakness? Together they were set about by forces
stronger, infinitely stronger, than themselves. There was comradeship
in that, but not help. It was as if they were two children side by side
in a darkness that contained a menace, of which both were in different
measures conscious, but which neither was able to grapple or even to
define.
For a time, while she was in church, her trouble had been less. The
air of security, of permanence, of prosperity about the place, and the
absence of any kind of tumult within it had lulled and comforted. “The
peace of God which passeth all understanding....” She had bowed her
head with the rest, mistaking the decorous silence for peace indeed.
But, as she rose from her knees, her eyes encountered Ordith’s which
seemed half-laughingly to search and accuse her; and, as if following
a suggestion of his, she began to think that the support she had
received from the service had been based, not upon faith, but upon the
extraordinary beauty of its prose. The hymns, with their redundancies
and bad rhymes, had meant nothing to her, despite their devotion,
and to the modern prayers on contemporary subjects she had given no
heed. The balance and completeness of the Litany, the Lessons’ direct
beauty, the Collects’ vigorous restraint--upon these her attention had
been concentrated. Though the matter of the Benediction had remained
unchanged, it would have brought no comfort to her if it had been
expressed differently--by the Archbishops, for example.
“Hadn’t old man Cranmer a wonderful ear for words?” Ordith said
lightly, cutting Margaret to the quick. She felt that he read her
thoughts, or--and this with a pang of fear that was reflected in the
eyes she suddenly raised--that he had imposed his thoughts upon her.
“You don’t like my saying that?” he asked, looking into her face. And
even as she moved her lips to reply, to express somehow the resentment
that was burning in her, his power asserted itself and drove her back
to say, scarcely of her own will:
“Yes; it’s quite true.”
Like a pleasing, habitual vice, Ordith frightened and controlled
her. Her father had chosen him as her husband, and her mother seemed
to acquiesce in the choice. She pictured herself saying “No” to
Ordith, and “No” to her father and mother. She would be very calm,
very determined, and then all would be over, the battle fought and
won. Surely it would be easy to say “No.” One word to be spoken, one
definite resolve to be kept--that was all. Nowadays coercion was
impossible; the time of starvation, and imprisonment, and whips was
long past. What she had to do was to look Ordith in the face, say “No,”
and stand by her decision. It sounded easy.
And, on the other side, was the tradition of obedience to her father,
hard to break she knew, for she had failed often to break it, but not
unbreakable; and there was one thing more. Of this she thought, as men
think of all things that are too vast for their imagination’s canvas,
in a concrete, limited manner: so are we compelled to picture God in
the form of man. She thought of it as Ibble’s works and yards as she
had seen them when she had gone with her mother to the launching of
ships--bare tracts of granite setts, buildings in common stock brick
that had the motley appearance of disease, sheds of corrugated iron,
cranes that groped above her head, railway-lines that tripped her feet,
cables coiled up like gigantic snakes, flames from darkness, the mutter
of machinery and the creaking of belts, the glass roofs through which
the light came blurred and thin. The foundries, where the molten metal
grumbled and spat and threw up scum on the runner-cups, had been her
childhood’s conception of hell. The whole place filled her with terror.
She had seen the workmen, with their sullen, yellow faces streaked
with machine-oil, and eyes dulled by labour into which imagination
had never entered. Her life had been overshadowed by Ibble’s, and
not her life only, but her father’s and mother’s lives. Her parents
had been omnipotent in her nursery. What power was this, then, that
stood behind _them_ and dominated _them_? She learned to think of
Ibble’s as a tyrant inexorable because unapproachable; an immovable
background against which alone the movements of life were visible, and
in contrast to whose darkness life’s colours shone out. As she grew
older she discovered that Ibble’s did not stand alone, but was a unit
in a complex system, a string in a universal net. The nature and extent
of the net itself were not clear. These facts stood out: that nearly
all the world was in its meshes; that somehow inclusion in it was
profitable; that those who thought to break it were fools and dreamers;
that at any rate, though it was delicate and fragile so that the winds
of fate blew it hither and thither, it was impossible to break. That
was the first article in a traditional faith--impossible to break.
Margaret had seen her own mother fight to get out of it, and seen her
fail. This acquiescence in the matter of Ordith was the seal upon her
failure.
This intangible, this invincible force, that swayed all she knew,
swayed Margaret also. Though she denied it to herself, saying that she
was young and her life her own, she believed it in her heart. All her
experience contributed to this belief--the house with the wonderful
attics and passages which she and her mother had wanted to buy, but
which her father had rejected because its reception-rooms were not
magnificent enough to receive the guests of Ibble and Co.; the sending
of Hugh into the Navy because, since his intellect seemed unlikely to
qualify him for inclusion in the firm, it would be as well to have a
representative among the customers of Ibble and Co. Ibble’s was their
God. Even her father, who was said to have the controlling interest,
was himself controlled, working in sickness and health, growing tired
and hollow-eyed and nervous, all for the sake of Ibble and Co. Once he
had been seriously ill.
“I wish you would retire, Walter,” her mother had said. “Surely we
have money enough? Haven’t we every material thing we want? Couldn’t
you come out of it now? Couldn’t we go back to the old days before
Ibble’s----”
“Come out of it!” her father had answered. “My dear, I can’t give in
yet. Besides, I have my duty to do by Ibble and Co.”
They had thought Margaret too young to understand, but she had
understood something of the tragedy, for already Ibble’s foundries
were her Hell; and now she remembered it. And she was to play it out
with Nick Ordith. Some day he would be, not Ordith the individual,
but Ordith’s, the firm and the tradition. Ibble and Ordith, Ordith
and Ibble.... She had read in her mother’s mind concerning the
amalgamation, and knew what was planned but not spoken of. Her marriage
likewise was planned but not spoken of.
After all, she asked herself, making a little kick within the mesh,
what had her marriage to do with Ibble’s? But what, too, had the attics
and passages in which she would have liked to play had to do with
Ibble’s? She had but to say “No” to Ordith, she repeated--one word, one
resolve. Often, when her thoughts returned to this point, she would
laugh at herself as we laugh when we know we have uttered an empty
boast; and sometimes while she laughed there were tears in her eyes.