Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An' let poor damned bodies be:
I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie
Ev'n to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me
An' hear us squeal.
HE returned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay.
She held out her hand to him.
"What a strange man you are! Couldn't you sleep?"
"No. I couldn't sleep.
"Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully."
Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had
driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance
that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed
her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.
Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun
came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she
glowed in her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature
to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her,
who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of
him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in
the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how
happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would
never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that
soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to
lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and
stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at
the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented
triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could
he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:
"A--a--ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet,
lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!"
He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on.
She said:
"René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it
you."
He answered:
"Peace."
"Peace? Isn't this peace?"
Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him
every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away
from her.
"Can there ever be peace," he asked, "between a man and a woman?"
"What do you mean?"
He made no reply.
"Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you
mean." And she dodged aside into phrases--the war of the sexes, the
difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the
feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of
abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless
difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and
the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him
amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.
"I meant you and me," he said, biting out his words.
"Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us.
We couldn't be more wonderful. Could we?"
"I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can't help thinking of those
damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said:
'How wonderful we are!'"
That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and
jumped to her feet.
"Oh, I never thought----"
She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the
sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out
behind her. He came up to her.
"What did you never think?"
"That on our second day you would be satirical."
He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the
saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:
"I said what I felt. Mayn't I do that? I didn't think it would hurt
you, really, I didn't. Linda, I----
"Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more
than you can say. And you don't know how uncomfortable it is."
She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in
himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood
pondering it.
"I can't help it," he said slowly, "I'm made like that. I can't be
comfortable."
Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to
bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.
"I know you can't," she said, "but I can, and you mustn't spoil it for
me."
He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her
and cried:
"Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would----"
"What would you do?"
"I don't know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to
you."
"I believe you would, and that makes me love you."
He weakened to her will, and not again during their honeymoon did he
let slip in expression or gesture the tiniest hint of the storm let
loose in him. Small periods of solitude he could procure at night when
she had retired for her astonishingly lengthy toilette. Then in
suppression of his fire and rebellion, in the effort to keep a tight
control on it even within himself, he became aware of a strength, a
firmness that, out of all that he had lost of youth and ease and
pleasant happiness and the charm of living, emerged as gain. Yet it
was not in his nature to count it up nor to hoard. He could find much
to rejoice over, the splendor of the night, the keen winds, the huge
waves splashing under the wind, and all he would take to his wife for
her to turn into charm. And she would weave her spells round him. Her
tone, her eyes, her warmth, that was so like tenderness as almost to
deceive him into acquiescence, all said to him: "Forget! Forget!" But
every fiber of his will was stretched in the effort to remember and
gain knowledge--to remember how this thing had come about, that he
should have so much and so little love for this woman, by what
blindness he had come to it, and what in all his slow growth to
manhood should have brought him to such sweet mockery of it. These
were not his words. He was groping beyond words, beyond actions; his
captured force was searching through his life to find forces to
sustain it, to urge it on, to release that slow-moving stream that had
brought him thus far to be chained and confined. He who had realized
so little was struggling to realize himself, to find within himself
the power that should break this woman in her complacent dwelling in
the pleasure of their love and set him free and her. For he had begun
dimly to perceive that she too was to be thought of, and in his effort
he was gentle with her. This was hard, for against his gentleness she
chafed. She wanted turbulence, upheaval, suspected not the stirring in
his depths and was forever agitating the surface of his being. Once or
twice she did call forth the anger, and then she reveled in her
delicious fright and was so quiet as to alarm him and drive him back
into his gentleness. Out of this she stirred him. It was to her only
an odious sluggishness.
It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing
but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an
originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself
were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a
woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption
in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old
fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her
choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in
her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her
pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes
she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he
had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that
they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to
fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little
less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but his
admiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how
little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to
it.
Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end
of their stay:
"I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a
woman." (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) "A man
must have his work."
"I've been thinking," said René, "that we never know what we want but
when we have it."
"How true!" She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of
flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.
And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the
rocky coast-line, and murmured:
"It will be something to remember. It _is_ a pretty place."
For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had
ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but
the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to
beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.
The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the
profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable
superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had
collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He
was committed to her, isolated with her. The loneliness of that day
upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.
Linda was immediately busy organizing her household, buying, buying
all day long; visiting, receiving visitors; she had crowds of friends
and gushing acquaintances, and they easily assimilated her husband,
were interested in him as they were interested in her wall-papers, her
furniture, her plans for the little garden, her gowns, her china. He
used to watch eagerly, almost hungrily, for a sign that they
recognized his existence apart from hers, but no sign ever came. To
the women he was something belonging to dear Linda, and therefore to
be admired since she was reputed to get the best of everything; to the
men, hard-headed, commercial gentry, he seemed to be baffling and
ominous, for they either fished nervously and falteringly for his
views or left him in the silence to which their geniality reduced him.
He resumed his work at the school where he had not yet learned to
disengage himself from his schoolboy's sensations--dread of the
headmaster, an inclination to run along the corridors when the bell
sounded, a desire to smack cheeky little boys over the head,
reluctance to attend prayers in the morning. At the end of the year a
vacancy occurred on the staff of the university and he was appointed
to fill it.
His first tussle with Linda came with his assertion of a desire to be
alone in his study when he was working. She had made a practice of
settling down with him in the evening with her sewing, or some
clerical work connected with one of the various committees to which
she had had herself appointed--social and rescue work, Arts and
Crafts, the University Musical Society, the Thrigsby Amateur Dramatic
Club, the Goethe Society, etc. She had learned to be silent, but by
the plying of her needle or the scratching of her pen she disturbed
and distracted him. He put up with it for some time, but at last it
was too strong for him, and he protested.
"But Mrs. Smallman sits with her husband every evening."
"He may be used to it, and she has a capacity for doing nothing which
you do not share."
"But it's so absurd to have two fires lit in the evening."
"I'd rather not work then, and come and sit with you."
"But you must work. You never say anything."
"Then I must work alone."
"Why must you?"
"Because I can't work any other way."
"What is it disturbs you? I won't do it if you'll tell me."
"I can't tell you. It's just having you there."
"Then you-- Then you-- Oh, well! There's nothing more to say if you
feel like that about me."
"Linda, don't be silly. It isn't about you."
She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very
slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.
Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood
of tears and a fierce hunger for possession and to be possessed by him
compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This
brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the
desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his
position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the
existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers,
no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation.
Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year
married:
"The room over the study--that would be the best for the nursery when
we want one."
"But, René," she answered, after a pause, "we don't want to have
children yet, do we?"
Despair seized him. He could not look at her.
"No. No. Of course, it is as you please."
She smiled awry:
"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean you to take it like that. It sounded
horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be
possible----"
He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of "modern men and
women," as though some change had come over human nature.
"I sometimes think," he said, "that no single word has the same
meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not
my Yes, your No is not mine."
"Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me.
Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem
to know more than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don't
seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you
. . . Oh, I don't know what to do with you! Can't we be just happy?"
"Just happy! . . . I suppose we can."
"We have been . . . Haven't we?"
"We have been," he said, but the words in his mind were: "No more than
happy."
To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much
introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now
he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as
good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired.
She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be
taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find
his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped
into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small
two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the
little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to
drive.
That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René
was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism.
"But what shall I do if it breaks down?"
"It can't break down," said Kurt. "The magneto can't go wrong. If she
stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or
the jet."
René tried to read a book about motor-cars, but could not apply its
technicalities to his own machine. He spent some days in and about and
under the car, tracing out the principles on which it worked, and
following its transmission of energy from cylinder to clutch, from
clutch to gear, gear to back-axle. When he had done that he felt some
confidence in driving, came to know the moods of his engine, and to
take an extraordinary pleasure in handling it. Every week-end he made
some excursion with Kurt or Linda, and sometimes alone. He explored
the country for fifty miles round Thrigsby, and discovered to his
dismay the vastness of the network of industrial towns, and, to his
delight, the loveliness of the still uncontaminated country.
At first the change produced the effect Linda had desired. He had a
new energy which enabled him to take the dull work of the week
lightly. He seemed to have caught some of Kurt's enthusiasm together
with a little of his good humor and tolerance. But these qualities he
could not assume without the frankness that nourished them. Soon he
was no longer deceived by the counterfeit he had evolved for his
wife's satisfaction, and could not evade the fact that his excursions
were desired chiefly as an escape from it. Their two habitual lives
were organized effectively enough; it was when their lives met that
there was insufficiency, fumbling, distrust, evasion. He could not
altogether conceal from her the disgust and almost horror that he felt
on being faced with the deception he had practiced on himself, and
through himself on her. She saw his distress, could not altogether
understand, felt that she was giving him too many opportunities to
escape from her, and in her turn began to counterfeit an interest in
his enthusiasms and to insist on occupying a seat in the car whenever
he went away, whether Kurt was with him or not. Kurt had an
affectionate pampering way with her, a mere expedient for striking
harmony between their different natures, which René as usual, taking
seriously, misread as contempt. This, unknown to himself, encouraged
the growth of the hatred which he had never allowed to rear its head.
. . . And Linda, a little wearied by now of the part of the lover, had
begun to play the part of the devoted, settled wife, to throw up round
herself as bulwarks her advantages--her charming house, her ample
means, her distinguished husband, a man of learning and culture in a
commercial atmosphere, leisure among the unleisured. It was only an
experiment on her part, but she gave it a thorough trial. When it
failed she had her moments of despair. She had felt her husband's
withdrawal from her, at least the removal of the deceit which covered
it. She was enraged, determined to break him into submission, flung
the whole force of her nature into the effort and failed again. Then,
to escape boredom, she began to amuse herself with her sufferings. She
would lead him on to talk in his inarticulate fashion of what he felt
and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own
charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness
in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world,
and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that,
after all, since he could produce nothing definitely superior to her
desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in
their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy--charm and
excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard
for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on
turned to bitterness in his mouth.
He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him
on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the
omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was
to enter. She said:
"She is a dear old woman, your mother."
In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed,
he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he
remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:
"Linda Brock has no back to her mind."
It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her
to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded,
brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: "See!
This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of
it." If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was
often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as
far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far
estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes,
that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her
womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.
And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He
had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly
that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the
machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him
down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: "He is a boy
of whom the school will one day be proud." And she had been so elated
by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it
take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it
for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him
things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now
speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so
easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of
education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same
kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient,
himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the
other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the
pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of
resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another.
Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if
he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his
domestic life.
He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people
liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him
pleasure, and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel
her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously
active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he
wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever
brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her
pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to
herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming
and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a
hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman
become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music--so far as
one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimental
_lieder_, colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in
the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the
sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume.
That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and
post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young
men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.
He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them,
but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.
At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found
an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one
marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying.
She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their
grace, and he liked the skill with which she clothed herself to give
every one of her attractions free play.
It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent
appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the
excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came
into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for
her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive
him of it.
At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him
for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:
"You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from
abominations."
"Ah!" She too was angry now. "What else is it?"
"By God!" he said. "I thought it led to love."
And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on
hearing his father's cynicism.
For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext--wished
to have some of the rooms papered--and went to stay with her mother.