A few days after, old Mr Durant died. Miss Louisa saw Alfred once more,
but he was stiff before her now, treating her not like a person, but as
if she were some sort of will in command and he a separate, distinct
will waiting in front of her. She had never felt such utter steel-plate
separation from anyone. It puzzled her and frightened her. What had
become of him? And she hated the military discipline—she was
antagonistic to it. Now he was not himself. He was the will which obeys
set over against the will which commands. She hesitated over accepting
this. He had put himself out of her range. He had ranked himself
inferior, subordinate to her. And that was how he would get away from
her, that was how he would avoid all connection with her: by fronting
her impersonally from the opposite camp, by taking up the abstract
position of an inferior.
She went brooding steadily and sullenly over this, brooding and
brooding. Her fierce, obstinate heart could not give way. It clung to
its own rights. Sometimes she dismissed him. Why should he, inferior,
trouble her?
Then she relapsed to him, and almost hated him. It was his way of
getting out of it. She felt the cowardice of it, his calmly placing her
in a superior class, and placing himself inaccessibly apart, in an
inferior, as if she, the sensient woman who was fond of him, did not
count. But she was not going to submit. Dogged in her heart she held on
to him.
V
In six months’ time Miss Mary had married Mr Massy. There had been no
love-making, nobody had made any remark. But everybody was tense and
callous with expectation. When one day Mr Massy asked for Mary’s hand,
Mr Lindley started and trembled from the thin, abstract voice of the
little man. Mr Massy was very nervous, but so curiously absolute.
“I shall be very glad,” said the vicar, “but of course the decision
lies with Mary herself.” And his still feeble hand shook as he moved a
Bible on his desk.
The small man, keeping fixedly to his idea, padded out of the room to
find Miss Mary. He sat a long time by her, while she made some
conversation, before he had readiness to speak. She was afraid of what
was coming, and sat stiff in apprehension. She felt as if her body
would rise and fling him aside. But her spirit quivered and waited.
Almost in expectation she waited, almost wanting him. And then she knew
he would speak.
“I have already asked Mr Lindley,” said the clergyman, while suddenly
she looked with aversion at his little knees, “if he would consent to
my proposal.” He was aware of his own disadvantage, but his will was
set.
She went cold as she sat, and impervious, almost as if she had become
stone. He waited a moment nervously. He would not persuade her. He
himself never even heard persuasion, but pursued his own course. He
looked at her, sure of himself, unsure of her, and said:
“Will you become my wife, Mary?”
Still her heart was hard and cold. She sat proudly.
“I should like to speak to mama first,” she said.
“Very well,” replied Mr Massy. And in a moment he padded away.
Mary went to her mother. She was cold and reserved.
“Mr Massy has asked me to marry him, mama,” she said. Mrs Lindley went
on staring at her book. She was cramped in her feeling.
“Well, and what did you say?”
They were both keeping calm and cold.
“I said I would speak to you before answering him.”
This was equivalent to a question. Mrs Lindley did not want to reply to
it. She shifted her heavy form irritably on the couch. Miss Mary sat
calm and straight, with closed mouth.
“Your father thinks it would not be a bad match,” said the mother, as
if casually.
Nothing more was said. Everybody remained cold and shut-off. Miss Mary
did not speak to Miss Louisa, the Reverend Ernest Lindley kept out of
sight.
At evening Miss Mary accepted Mr Massy.
“Yes, I will marry you,” she said, with even a little movement of
tenderness towards him. He was embarrassed, but satisfied. She could
see him making some movement towards her, could feel the male in him,
something cold and triumphant, asserting itself. She sat rigid, and
waited.
When Miss Louisa knew, she was silent with bitter anger against
everybody, even against Mary. She felt her faith wounded. Did the real
things to her not matter after all? She wanted to get away. She thought
of Mr Massy. He had some curious power, some unanswerable right. He was
a will that they could not controvert.—Suddenly a flush started in her.
If he had come to her she would have flipped him out of the room. He
was never going to touch _her_. And she was glad. She was glad that her
blood would rise and exterminate the little man, if he came too near to
her, no matter how her judgment was paralysed by him, no matter how he
moved in abstract goodness. She thought she was perverse to be glad,
but glad she was. “I would just flip him out of the room,” she said,
and she derived great satisfaction from the open statement.
Nevertheless, perhaps she ought still to feel that Mary, on her plane,
was a higher being than herself. But then Mary was Mary, and she was
Louisa, and that also was inalterable.
Mary, in marrying him, tried to become a pure reason such as he was,
without feeling or impulse. She shut herself up, she shut herself rigid
against the agonies of shame and the terror of violation which came at
first. She _would_ not feel, and she _would_ not feel. She was a pure
will acquiescing to him. She elected a certain kind of fate. She would
be good and purely just, she would live in a higher freedom than she
had ever known, she would be free of mundane care, she was a pure will
towards right. She had sold herself, but she had a new freedom. She had
got rid of her body. She had sold a lower thing, her body, for a higher
thing, her freedom from material things. She considered that she paid
for all she got from her husband. So, in a kind of independence, she
moved proud and free. She had paid with her body: that was henceforward
out of consideration. She was glad to be rid of it. She had bought her
position in the world—that henceforth was taken for granted. There
remained only the direction of her activity towards charity and
high-minded living.
She could scarcely bear other people to be present with her and her
husband. Her private life was her shame. But then, she could keep it
hidden. She lived almost isolated in the rectory of the tiny village
miles from the railway. She suffered as if it were an insult to her own
flesh, seeing the repulsion which some people felt for her husband, or
the special manner they had of treating him, as if he were a “case”.
But most people were uneasy before him, which restored her pride.
If she had let herself, she would have hated him, hated his padding
round the house, his thin voice devoid of human understanding, his bent
little shoulders and rather incomplete face that reminded her of an
abortion. But rigorously she kept to her position. She took care of him
and was just to him. There was also a deep craven fear of him,
something slave-like.
There was not much fault to be found with his behaviour. He was
scrupulously just and kind according to his lights. But the male in him
was cold and self-complete, and utterly domineering. Weak, insufficient
little thing as he was, she had not expected this of him. It was
something in the bargain she had not understood. It made her hold her
head, to keep still. She knew, vaguely, that she was murdering herself.
After all, her body was not quite so easy to get rid of. And this
manner of disposing of it—ah, sometimes she felt she must rise and
bring about death, lift her hand for utter denial of everything, by a
general destruction.
He was almost unaware of the conditions about him. He did not fuss in
the domestic way, she did as she liked in the house. Indeed, she was a
great deal free of him. He would sit obliterated for hours. He was
kind, and almost anxiously considerate. But when he considered he was
right, his will was just blindly male, like a cold machine. And on most
points he was logically right, or he had with him the right of the
creed they both accepted. It was so. There was nothing for her to go
against.
Then she found herself with child, and felt for the first time horror,
afraid before God and man. This also she had to go through—it was the
right. When the child arrived, it was a bonny, healthy lad. Her heart
hurt in her body, as she took the baby between her hands. The flesh
that was trampled and silent in her must speak again in the boy. After
all, she had to live—it was not so simple after all. Nothing was
finished completely. She looked and looked at the baby, and almost
hated it, and suffered an anguish of love for it. She hated it because
it made her live again in the flesh, when she _could_ not live in the
flesh, she could not. She wanted to trample her flesh down, down,
extinct, to live in the mind. And now there was this child. It was too
cruel, too racking. For she must love the child. Her purpose was broken
in two again. She had to become amorphous, purposeless, without real
being. As a mother, she was a fragmentary, ignoble thing.
Mr Massy, blind to everything else in the way of human feeling, became
obsessed by the idea of his child. When it arrived, suddenly it filled
the whole world of feeling for him. It was his obsession, his terror
was for its safety and well-being. It was something new, as if he
himself had been born a naked infant, conscious of his own exposure,
and full of apprehension. He who had never been aware of anyone else,
all his life, now was aware of nothing but the child. Not that he ever
played with it, or kissed it, or tended it. He did nothing for it. But
it dominated him, it filled, and at the same time emptied his mind. The
world was all baby for him.
This his wife must also bear, his question: “What is the reason that he
cries?”—his reminder, at the first sound: “Mary, that is the
child,”—his restlessness if the feeding-time were five minutes past.
She had bargained for this—now she must stand by her bargain.