Marie was sitting alone under the striped awning which covered the end
of the terrace behind their country house in Surrey. The flap at the end
was open, and from the bushes beyond came the hot, languid scent of the
lilacs, the hot, languid murmur of the bees as they shouldered
themselves into the clubs and clusters of the blossoms, the busy chirrup
of sparrows intent on some infinitesimal occupation demanding a great
deal of discussion. Unseen on the lawn below, a mowing-machine was
making its clicking journeys up and down the grass, but no other sound
marked the passage of the hot afternoon; no breeze stirred in the level
fans of the cedar nor ruffled the lake, where the unwavering reflections
of the trees were spread as sharp-cut and immobile as if they had been
painted on a silver shield. On Marie's lap lay an unopened book, and she
was as motionless as the mirroring lake.
A week had passed since her scene with Jack on the evening of the
thunderstorm, and she had left London three days after in obedience to
an instinct which she felt she could not disobey. That scene had
unfocused her; she had to adjust herself to a new view of things, and
the need to go away and be alone for a day or two had been
overmastering. For the one thing which she had always regarded as
impossible had happened to her: the snowflake--herself--was supposed to
have melted. And, from the fact that this slander affected her so
deeply, she knew, for the first time fully, how utterly different she
was to the rest of the world. Some months ago she had heard Lady
Ardingly say in her slow, sensible voice: "Ah, my dear, there are so
many people who can lose their reputation, but so few who know how
valuable the loss is! They were perfectly capable of valuing it when it
existed, but they cannot appreciate its loss at the proper figure." At
the time she had laughed, as she would have laughed at any outrageous
piece of cynicism in some modern play. Now she choked at it; it was gall
to her.
So, then, according to the world's view, she was in the position of many
women who held their heads high, and thought of the world generally as
their playground, the place kindly provided for the amusement of their
spare time, of which they had twenty-four hours every day. Whether the
disrepute of all these was as reliable as that which she had herself
just gained was not the immediate point to be considered; but certainly,
if one took a man like Arthur Naseby into a corner, he would, with no
encouragement at all, tell an intimate and abominable history of half
the folk he knew. For herself, she was not in the habit of taking this
stout and poisonous gentleman into corners. Scandalous stories did not
amuse her, particularly if they were true, and immorality she thought to
be a thing not only wicked, but vulgar. Wickedness, as she had once
said, seemed to the world in which she lived merely an obsolete term,
describing a moral condition which had no appreciable existence; and
sometimes she wondered whether vulgarity was not passing into the
category of words without significance. And now it appeared that people
were saying about her what they said about so many others, with no sense
of condemnation, but--and here lay the nausea of the thing--with
amusement. She could almost hear Arthur's voice stridently declaiming:
"After all, poor thing, why shouldn't she amuse herself like everybody
else? It was the one thing wanted to make her perfectly charming. But I
think we shall hear less about the stupidity and vulgarity of the world.
Artistically speaking, she ought to have modulated the change more. Just
a shade too abrupt--a little Wagnerian in its change of key;" and roars
of laughter would follow.
But this new condition in her life had by no means constituted the sum
of these three days' meditation in the country. With the elasticity
inherent in human nature, the moment the new condition had been made,
her mental fibres set themselves automatically to adjust themselves to
it. Doctors say that any patient adjusts himself to the most fatal
sentence in twenty-four hours; the thing becomes a part of life. It was
so with her, and now she felt, though not reconciled, at any rate used
to the thing. Though highly introspective, she was not, in the ordinary
sense of the word, self-conscious, and she no longer believed that the
changed glances of the world at her would affect her very seriously.
Surely she could manage to take them at their correct and worthless
valuation. At first the thought of that had seemed intolerable; but
after three days she was beginning to feel she cared very appreciably
less.
So far her solitude had been successful, but beyond that it had been a
complete failure. For the larger of the two reasons which had induced
her to come here remained, and she could not even now conjecture what in
the future should be her attitude to Jim. With this problem she had
wrestled and struggled in vain, and it seemed to her, in these first
days of her consciousness as to her essential relations to him, that all
her life-long consistency of thought and habit on such a point were
cancelled and worthless. The truth was that she had not known at all
before that she was really capable of passion. Her nature, including
something far deeper and stronger than mere physical nature, had till
quite lately been dormant; she had been ignorant all her life of what
the longing for another meant; all her life she had judged men and women
by a blind standard which did not really measure that to which it was
applied. All her life she had labelled immorality as vulgar, and, as
such, she shrugged her shoulders at it and passed by. But now it was
beginning to be burned into her that it was not her fastidiousness that
labelled things vulgar, but her ignorance. She had thought Blanche
Devereux vulgar because she herself had not understood. Now she was
afraid she was beginning to understand, and with the gradual
comprehension came growing bewilderment. And step by step with the
bewilderment marched an inward tumult of ecstasy, of which she had not
known herself capable. A sort of horrified wonder at herself was there,
and withal a singing in her heart. It had awoke, and, like the roar of
the sea which drowns the idle clatter of the Corniche road, it made a
huge soft tumult.
This, then, was the problem she had brought unsolved from London, and
which, she was afraid, she would bring back there without solution. The
knowledge of it had burst upon her on the evening when Jack had told her
what he had heard said of her, and her first conscious utterance that
showed she knew of its existence was when that involuntary cry, "Ah,
don't touch me!" came uninvited to her lips. Her long and gradual
estrangement from her husband had immeasurably widened at that moment.
In an instant his figure had leaped to remote horizons, and she had but
to turn her head to see how close beside her stood another, he of whom
her husband had spoken. This she had not known before; but the knowledge
had come in a flash, staining backwards, as it were, through the past
pages of her life, so that it seemed to her that she had loved him since
the time when they were boy and girl together, and it made her view her
married life with an incredulous horror. And by what sinister revelation
had she gained this knowledge? For it was the fact that people spoke of
Jim as her lover that had made her definitely aware she loved him. And
it had been Jack through whom this knowledge was conveyed.
It was this knowledge that made her distrust herself as utterly as if
her own soul and spirit had just been introduced to her among a crowd of
strangers. She had thought she had known herself, and now this thing had
started out upon her as if she had been asleep in a dark room, and had
been wakened to find the chamber blazing with lights. Whether she had
the will or the strength to resist she did not yet know; the purpose
alone she could utterly answer for. But she realized that if again she
saw him in such sort as she had seen him on the Sunday afternoon by the
river, or on that afternoon when she had told him of her conversation
with Maud Brereton, it would be a more difficult task to make him keep
silence. She felt she could scarcely answer for her own silence. How
much less, then, for her power of stopping the speech which a word from
her would have even then brought to utterance! And now----
She rose, feeling that the only hope of victory lay in turning away from
thoughts like these, and not, under the specious pretext of consciously
fighting them, in reality making them familiar to her mind; for
familiarity in such things breeds, not contempt, but acquiescence, half
contemptuous it may be, but half consenting, and she knew that in face
of certain temptations it is cowardice not to run away. The sun was
already off the lawn, and a cooler breeze had begun to stir the intense
heat of the afternoon. Tea had long been waiting for her under the
cedar, and she walked slowly along the terrace and down the ten steps
which led on to the lawn. This terrace had been an expensive whim of
Jack's grandfather; it ran the length of the house, and was paved and
balustraded with rose-coloured Numidian marble; urns, wreathed in
delicate creepers which spilt splashes of vivid colour, stood at
intervals along it; and below it blossomed a superb riband flower-bed
bordering the lawn where stood the cedar.
On this restful velvet she walked up and down, again taken up and
possessed by the absorption of that which lay before her. Her pride
shied and jibbed at the thought of refusing to see any more of Jim
Spencer because some slanderous tongue had started a vile falsehood
about her, and she told herself that to do this would but confirm these
inventions in the minds of such people as could ever have entertained
them. She knew well enough the form the story would take. It would be
supposed that the report had got to Jack's ears, and that he forbade her
to see him. This would be intolerable; intolerable also was the thing
itself, that she should not see him. So much she confessed frankly to
herself. But one thing, one thing above all, was certain, and the
thought brought to her the glow which is inseparable from all honest
endeavour. She had been slandered in a way that touched her with deep
resentment, but never should she give that lie a moment's harbourage,
even on the threshold of her thoughts. The vileness of it, indeed, was
a safeguard, and she could not without shuddering picture herself
touching the subject-matter of it.
She had not walked long before a servant came out and approached her.
"Mr. Spencer wants to know if your ladyship will see him," he said.
Marie paused, feeling suddenly that this had happened before, but was
unable to recollect what came next.
"Mr. Spencer?" she repeated.
"Yes, my lady."
Marie turned away from the man without replying, and walked a pace or
two from him. Her mind seemed to be making itself up without any
volition on her part. Then, without turning her head, "Ask him to come
out," she answered, and the sound of the utterly commonplace words
conveyed to her the nature of her own decision; for she had yielded, and
knew it, not to be the imperative demand of her pride, which insisted
that she should show not the smallest change of behaviour towards him,
just because people had lied about her, but to her imperative desire to
see the man.
She walked back to where the tea-table still stood, with the shining
points of sunlight that filtered through the cedar making stars on the
silver, and sat there a moment listening with a sort of incredulous
wonder to the hammer of her pulse, and observing with the same
incapacity for belief that these were her hands which trembled. But the
interval was a short one, for in a moment his step sounded crisp on the
terrace, and then became noiseless on the lawn. She was sitting with her
back to the quarter of advance, but turned her head as he approached.
"Where in the world have you sprung from?" she asked. "Have some tea,
Jim, or whisky-and-soda? I am delighted to see you, though it was not in
my programme to see anybody."
"I am an intruder then, I fear," said he. "No sugar, thanks."
"Yes, but not unwelcome. I left London three days ago, and am going back
to-morrow. I am eccentric, as you know, and, what is more useful, I have
the reputation of being so. Thus, nobody wonders if I disappear for a
few days."
To her great relief and her hardly less surprise, Marie found not the
slightest difficulty in assuming a perfectly natural manner, and even
mentally classed it under the heading of phenomena which show that
ordinary people in trying circumstances for the most part behave
normally. It was natural to her, in fact, to be natural. But even as she
drew these comforting conclusions, she had leisure to observe that Jim,
too, was in the grip of some inward struggle. Its nature she did not try
to guess, but continued talking under a sense of stress, a fear of
silences.
"You know my gospel, do you not?" she said, "or, rather, I am sure you
do not, as I have only formulated it to myself during this last day or
two. There are two halves to the world, which make the whole, and each
is the antidote to the other. One half is people; the other half is
things. Now, the country is the place of things, and London of people.
Cows, flowers, hay, all these are a certain antidote to the poisoning
which unmixed people give one. In the same way, one flies from the
country to town to take the antidote to the poison, a narcotic one, of
things. Dipsomaniacs, so to speak, live entirely in London. They die
young; it is a quick poison. The opposite dipsomaniacs live entirely in
the country; it is a slow poison, and they live, or, at any rate, do not
die, until a very advanced age. But oh, Jim, what a difference there is
between living and not dying! They sound the same thing, but there is
all the difference in the world between them."
Jim stirred his sugarless tea slowly, then drank it quickly and put down
the cup. Being a man, airy nothings were not part of his stock in trade,
a deficiency from a merely social standpoint.
"And so you have been poisoned with people?" he said directly. "I feel
uncomfortable; I am afraid I have interrupted the cure."
"Not a bit. The treatment is over, and I am going back to London
to-morrow. You are the junction, so to speak, where some one gets in,
where one first sees the smoke and the sea of houses. But who told you I
was here?"
"Jack told me," he said. "Why?"
On his words Marie suddenly became conscious that definite drama had
entered. From this point she saw herself as she might see a character in
a play, with a feeling of irresponsibility. The author of the play was
responsible. It was, in fact, overwhelmingly interesting to know the
manner in which Jack had said this.
"When did you see him?" she asked.
"This morning only, and by accident. He suggested I should come here, in
fact, and escort you back to London."
"But I am not going to-day," said Marie.
"No; he expects you back to-morrow. He suggested I should spend the
night here, and come back with you then."
"Ah, that is charming!" said she. "You have told them you are stopping?"
"But I am not. I must get back to-night."
Marie felt and knew that the words were wrung from him, that they had
been difficult to speak. But, well as she knew it, Jim knew it
infinitely better. His tongue, so to speak, he had to tie like a
galley-slave to its oar, and it made its monotonous strokes, which,
unwilling as they were and mutinously inclined, yet moved the vessel
towards its safety in harbour. Then a pause which both dreaded was
broken by the crisp sound of the trodden terrace, and the servant again
approached Marie.
"Which room shall I put Mr. Spencer's things in, my lady?" he asked, and
again the commonplace words had a hideous momentousness.
The temptation in her mind to give him merely the number of a room was
almost overwhelming, for she felt morally certain that, had she done so,
Jim would have said nothing. Furthermore, Jack had suggested his coming,
and within herself she bore the conscious witness of her own rectitude.
Only--and this was the reason for her decision--she knew that her desire
that he should stop, that events should then take their course, was
stronger than could have been accounted for by her desire to have a
companion at dinner, even the most desirable, and a companion during her
journey the next day. Further, he had come down here with the intention
of stopping. But her purpose held.
"Mr. Spencer will go back to-night," she said. "But you will stop for
dinner, Jim!"
"Thanks. I should like to. There is a train back at nine."
"Then, we must dine at eight instead of half-past. Let us have dinner on
the terrace. We often dine there when it is warm."
The man took the tea-tray and retired with it. Then Jim leaned forward
in his chair.
"Thank you," he said to Marie.
Again her hands so trembled that she had to catch hold of both arms of
her chair, lest it should be apparent. And her voice, as she felt to
her rebellious impotence, shook as she answered.
"For the dinner?" she said. "Indeed it will not be much, Jim--soup and a
cutlet, I expect."
Great emotion has its moments of calm and hurricane, like the sea. It
may lie glassy and level, though deep; again, with the speed of tropical
storm, it may have its surface lashed to mountainous billows, against
which no ship can make way, but must run before them. And the pitiless
and intentional lightness of her words made an upheaval in him of all he
was trying to suppress. He had come down here meaning to stop till the
next day, but somehow the sight of her, and some deep abiding
horror--the root of morality--of that for which his flesh cried out, had
revealed to him the grossness of, not his design, but his acquiescence.
Thus he had not even told her that he had his luggage with him; but of
this blind Fate, in the shape of a liveried servant, had informed her.
She knew as well as he what he had intended to do. And looking at her
hands as they clutched the wickerwork of her basket chair, he could see
that she, too, wrestled with, and tried to throttle, some secret enemy.
Then came her light words, interpreted by the quivering of the tense
hands, and his passion surged and overwhelmed him.
"Let me change my mind, Marie," he said, "and stop."
Again she told herself that it was perfectly right and natural that he
should do so, but again her clear, clean judgment, recognising the force
of the desire that he should, overruled her; but she was tired and
nerve-jangled from the struggle, and her voice, pitched high and
entreatingly, was no longer under her command.
"No, no, Jim!" she cried. "You must go."
The word she was afraid she would not be able to speak was spoken. The
operation was over; she had only to keep quiet and recuperate. But she
had betrayed herself to him: both knew it. A barrier had been broken
down between them; each soul in its secret place was visible to the
other, and in the awe and amazement of that the cries and strivings of
the debatable were for the moment stilled. There was no satisfaction in
the world that could equal the self-surrender that each had already
made; there was nothing that either could do or say which would not
spoil and degrade that which had passed between them. Jim, on his part,
though he knew why he had asked to change his mind and stop, could not
yet regret it, so tremendous and soul-filling was that which lay behind
her refusal; and she could not find it in her heart to blame him, since
his weakness had ended so gloriously. Thus in silence for a long moment
each looked at the other, unashamed, acknowledging by that look, without
fear or regret, the great bond that bound them indissolubly together,
the great renunciation that irrevocably divided them.
Marie reached out her hand for her ivory silver-handled stick, which had
fallen by her chair.
"Come and stroll for half an hour before dinner," she said. "See whether
I am not right about the antidote to people which one can find in the
country."
He rose, too.
"But who has been poisoning you in town?" he asked.
"Who? The six million people who live there. No, I will except you. I do
not find you are poisonous here, at least."
"Thank you. But what have you done with yourself these three days?"
"Ah, that is the secret of the country! In town one has to do things
one's self; the country does them all for you. You sit and you walk; you
pick long feathery pieces of grass, and chew them like a cow; you think
very intently for long periods, and at the end find that you have been
thinking about nothing whatever. There is nothing so restful; and I have
been wanting rest. I was a good deal worried about a certain matter
before I left town."
He looked at her.
"I will subscribe to any institution that will guarantee you freedom
from worry," he said.
"That is very kind of you, but the only way your institution could be of
use would be by giving me a painless death; and I do not wish to die at
all. No, you must spend your money some other way. Talking of that, have
you made up your mind to stand for Parliament? It looks as if I accused
you prospectively of bribery and corruption. I do not mean to."
"I wanted to talk to you about that. That was--one of the reasons why I
came down to-day. I have been asked to stand for East Surrey, but by
the Liberals."
She stopped suddenly.
"By the Liberals?" she said. "That will come as a great surprise to your
friends, will it not?"
"Possibly. Of course, rich people are as a rule Conservative; in fact,
it seems sufficient for a man that he should acquire a large fortune to
make a Conservative of him. Personally I detest party politics, though
no doubt they are a necessity. For myself, I only recognise one party
just now, whose sole object is efficiency, not effectiveness."
She resumed walking again, with a quicker pace.
"Have you told Jack?" she asked.
"Yes. He approves warmly. He added, however, that he couldn't do
anything for me, that he was bound to do all he could against me, in
fact, during the election. That must be so. He is the land-owner here
and a Conservative, and he does not see sufficient reason for ratting.
There is nowhere to rat to, he says."
"I know Jack's view. He thinks both parties are in a hopeless state,
but, belonging to one, he has no reason to join the other. Dear me,
Jim, this is news! You have a subject in South Africa; so if the
Conservatives get in, you will, I suppose, be among those who make it
warm for them."
"I have no intention of taking politics up as a recreation," he said;
"it is to be my profession, you understand." He paused a moment. "That
is, given I get in."
Instantly her woman's pride in the man awoke.
"Of course you will get in!" she said; and not till she had said it did
she know what she said, for no sense of his political fitness had
prompted it, only her love for him.
They walked on a little way in silence, past the end of the riband bed,
and into the rose-garden beyond.
"Yes, there is a cry for efficiency," he said. "John Bull is touched in
his tender point, which is his purse. The tax-payer wants to know what
he is getting for his increased income-tax, and the fact that he puts
only one lump of sugar instead of two into his two instead of three cups
of tea. He accepts the necessity, I believe, quite willingly; but as a
shareholder in that very large concern, the British Empire, he wishes to
see the balance-sheet, with explanations. So many millions for the
South African War seem to him a large item. He does not dispute it, but
he wants to have details given him, and through the mouths of his
representatives he proposes to see that he gets them."
"That is called an unpatriotic attitude," remarked Marie with singular
acidity.
"Ah, you are a Liberal, too! Of course Jack is."
"Certainly, if you take the utterance of the Conservative leaders as
official. Jack, for instance, looks upon the Boer War as a war with a
Power that was no Power at all, but the Government officially alludes to
it as 'the great Boer War.' There is the party note. Oh, there is no
such strong Conservative as the man who has once been a Radical!
Conversion is always followed by exaggeration."
Marie stopped, plucked a couple of tea-roses and pinned them into the
front of her dress. Then, looking up, she saw his eyes fixed on her
face, and though they both had been speaking honestly about a subject
that honestly interested them, she knew how superficial their talk had
been; speeches had been made correctly, but automatically--no more. She
was glad to know about his future plans; he, on his side, liked to speak
of them, for, as he said, he was going to make a profession of politics.
But they had both been talking "shop"; and as she raised her eyes to
his, "shop" became suddenly impossible.
"Another rose," he said, "and give it me."
She did not answer. Then she drew one from the two she had fastened in
her dress.
"Flowers to a friend," she said, holding it out to him. "It is an
Italian proverb, Jim. Do you know the response?"
"You will tell it me."
"And honour from the friend," she replied.
He was cut to the quick, yet a phantom of self-justification was up in
arms.
"When did I not give you that?" he said.
"You have always given it me," she answered. "Give it me every hour,
Jim, until I cease entirely to deserve it."
Thereat he bent and kissed her hand.