“Let’s go on talking about marriage,” she said, drawing her chair closer.
“Why should I marry? Every girl doesn’t. Why should I? Some one in the
paper said only the other day that there are many more women than men and
therefore lots of them must be single. Why shouldn’t I be one?”
“If you want to, there’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t,” I said.
“But we can’t arrange these things. At any moment you may fall in love,
and what then? Marriage has a way of following love.”
“Ye-e-s,” said Rose. “But one needn’t fall in love. Lots of people
don’t. You never did—at any rate, if you did, marriage didn’t follow
it.”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t. Nature marked me for a bachelor, and destiny
made me a vicarious father. I have been more or less of a vicarious
father, Rose, ever since I was twenty-seven, and now I’m sixty-eight:
forty-one years of it! I’ve had no time to fall in love, your mother and
you have kept me so busy. But tell me about this young warrior. Why
should he want to marry you? Have you given him any encouragement?”
“No,” said Rose. “Except to listen to him and show him steps. They all
want to talk and be shown steps.”
“It’s a country fit for heroes to dance in,” I said. “And what about the
poultry farm?”
“O he told you that, did he?” Rose asked.
“Yes, he told me that. The demand for eggs is something priceless,
what?”
“Let’s forget him,” said Rose. “Anyway,” she resumed a moment later,
“why must there always be marriage? Marriages so often go wrong. Look
at Dulcie Lenox—she’s left her husband already. Look at the divorce
cases! Why can’t two people love and get the best of life and then go
their own way again?”
“It’s for the sake of society,” I said, “the human family. We’ve all got
to help to keep that together.”
“Why should we?” Rose asked. “We didn’t ask to be born.”
“No, but being born, we must play the game. It’s part of the contract.
It’s our payment for the privilege of existing at all.”
“Just chivalry?”
“If you like to put it like that. But most of us are rather proud of the
obligation.”
“And if we say no; that we don’t care a pin about the human family; all
we care about is our own happiness, what then?”
“Well, then we’re traitors, that’s all. We’ve been found wanting.”
“It’s rather a shame, isn’t it, to force so much responsibility on people
who never asked for it?”
“Yes, I think it is. But life without responsibility wouldn’t be worth
anything. That’s a conclusion I’ve reached after sixty-eight years.”
“Oh, don’t count up! You’re much too proud of those figures. But when
did you discover it? When you were eighteen, like me?”
“No, when I was eighteen I thought more or less as you do; only not quite
so freely, because there had been no great war to break down our ideals
and set up materialism and belief in the divine right of every individual
to be selfish and anti-social.”
“Do you think that’s what we are?”
“Too many people are. But I’m quite conscious that they may be right and
the others wrong. In fact, the older I grow, the more convinced I am
that everyone, however wrong, has some right in him, and every one,
however right, some wrong.”
“Well I’m not going to marry for years and years,” said Rose. “I’m going
to paint first. Art will be my husband.”
“With a little dancing with human partners thrown in?” I suggested.
“Yes, of course.”
At this moment the bell rang, indicating that the pupil had arrived, and
for the next hour my would-be Rosa Bonheur was showing steps.
* * * * *
How few things we should do if we had time to examine carefully every
action and its possible consequences before we committed ourselves to it!
I for one, probably—but one never knows—instead of encouraging Rose in
her drawing and painting should have discouraged her; for it led straight
to London, and when your children, your own or your foster-children, get
to London, they are lost. New lives begin, with new parents—for London
is father and mother too. Careers have to be, I suppose, and leading
strings must be cut—but O! the severance of heart-strings that that
operation involves as well!
Anyway, I had taken an immense interest in Rose’s sketches, and often sat
with her while she made them, and marvelled—being a hopeless duffer at
such work—as the swift deft touches transferred the landscape to the
paper: sky and earth and water. She may not have been remarkable, but to
my eyes she was as clever as anyone sketching nature need be. Her
portraits were good too: at any rate, lifelike enough to provoke cries of
delight from the villagers as they recognized their neighbours. She was
a straightforward performer: she cubed nothing and abhorred a vortex; but
artists are curiously impressionable people, visitors to this planet
rather than dwellers upon it, and at any moment she might become as wild
as the wildest. And I am not surprised: the power to splash colour about
must naturally lead to experimentalism.
In those days, however, Rose was in the old and sober tradition, and the
desire to paint filled her soul.
* * * * *
At last the go-fever broke out. She had been to London—that promoter of
restlessness—to stay with a girl artist friend and show her work to some
experts and see the exhibitions, and she came back glowing with
excitement and plans. She returned with her hair intact too, to my great
joy. I had nursed a terror that she might bob it.
“How much money have I got?” was one of the first things she said to me
after dinner.
During the meal I had heard the story of her adventures. How she had
stayed with her friend Vera Gray in her studio at Chelsea. It was on the
Embankment, looking out on the river.
“And O!” she exclaimed, “the river is exactly what Whistler made it. I
mean—exactly how he painted it.”
I interrupted her to say that no studied compliment could ever have
pleased that painter so much as her hurried slip; but she didn’t want to
hear me; she wanted to talk and tell.
They had slept in the studio, in a little gallery up a ladder, where
there was also a bathroom. They had cooked their own breakfast, but had
gone out for other meals. I had no idea what Vera’s coffee was like!
And her cups and saucers and plates: all blue and white, from Portugal:
it cost—well, I’d never guess how cheap it was.