After all, Susie was married before her eldest sister; for Aggie had to
wait till Arthur's salary rose. He thought it was going to rise at
midsummer, or if not at midsummer, then at Michaelmas. But midsummer and
Michaelmas passed, Christmas and Easter, too, and Arthur's salary showed
no sign of rising. He daren't tell Aggie that he had been obliged to leave
off reading Latin in the evenings, and was working feverishly at shorthand
in order to increase his efficiency. His efficiency increased, but not his
salary.
Meanwhile he spent all his holidays at Queningford, and Aggie had been
twice to town. They saw so little of each other that every meeting was a
divine event, a spiritual adventure. If each was not exactly an
undiscovered country to the other, there was always some territory left
over from last time, endlessly alluring to the pilgrim lover. Whenever
Arthur found in Aggie's mind a little bare spot that needed cultivating,
he planted there a picture or a poem, that instantly took root, and began
to bloom as it had never (to his eyes) bloomed in any other soil. Aggie,
for her part, yielded all the treasure of her little kingdom as tribute to
the empire that had won her.
Many things were uncertain, the rise of Arthur's salary among them; but of
one thing they were sure, that they would lead the intellectual life
together. Whatever happened, they would keep it up.
They were keeping it up as late as August, when Arthur came down for the
Bank Holiday. He was still enthusiastic, but uncertainty had dimmed his
hope. Marriage had become a magnificent phantasm, superimposed upon a
dream, a purely supposititious rise of salary. The prospect had removed
itself so far in time that it had parted with its substance, like an
object retired modestly into space.
They were walking together in the Queningford fields, when Arthur stopped
suddenly and turned to her.
"Aggie," he said, "supposing, after all, we can never marry?"
"Well," said Aggie, calmly, "if we don't we shall still lead our real life
together.
"But how, if we're separated?"
"It would go on just the same. But we sha'n't be separated. I shall get
something to do in town and live there. I'll be a clerk, or go into a
shop--or something."
"My darling, that would never do."
"Wouldn't it, though!"
"I couldn't let you do it."
"Why ever not? We should see each other every evening, and every Saturday
and Sunday. We should always be learning something new, and learning it
together. We should have a heavenly time."
But Arthur shook his head sadly. "It wouldn't work, my sweetheart. We
aren't made like that."
"I am," said Aggie, stoutly, and there was silence.
"Anyhow," she said, presently, "whatever happens, we're not going to let
it drop."
"Rather not," said he, with incorruptible enthusiasm.
Then, just because he had left off thinking about it, he was told that in
the autumn of that year he might expect a rise.
And in the autumn they were married.
Aggie left the sweet gardens, the white roads and green fields of
Queningford, to live in a side street in Camden Town, in a creaking little
villa built of sulphurous yellow brick furred with soot.
They had come back from their brilliant fortnight on the south coast, and
were standing together in the atrocious bow-window of their little sitting
room looking out on the street. A thick gray rain was falling, and a
dust-cart was in sight.
"Aggie," he said, "I'm afraid you'll miss the country."
She said nothing; she was lost in thought.
"It looks rather a brute of a place, doesn't it? But it won't be so bad
when the rain clears off. And you know, dear, there are the museums and
picture-galleries in town, and there'll be the concerts, and lectures on
all sorts of interesting subjects, two or three times a week. Then there's
our Debating Society at Hampstead--just a few of us who meet together to
discuss big questions. Every month it meets, and you'll get to know all
the intellectual people--"
Aggie nodded her head at each exciting item of the programme as he reeled
it off. His heart smote him; he felt that he hadn't prepared her properly
for Camden Town. He thought she was mourning the first perishing of her
illusions.
His voice fell, humbly. "And I really think, in time, you know, you won't
find it quite so bad."
She turned on him the face of one risen rosy from the embraces of her
dream. She put a hand on each of his shoulders, and looked at him with
shining eyes.
"Oh, Arthur, _dear_, it's all too beautiful. I couldn't say anything,
because I was so happy. Come, and let's look at everything all over
again."
And they went, and looked at everything all over again, reviving the
delight that had gone to the furnishing of that innocent interior. She
cried out with joy over the cheap art serges, the brown-paper backgrounds,
the blue-and-gray drugget, the oak chairs with their rush bottoms, the
Borne-Jones photogravures, the "Hope" and the "Love Leading Life," and the
"Love Triumphant." Their home would be the home of a material poverty, but
to Aggie's mind it was also a shrine whose austere beauty sheltered the
priceless spiritual ideal.
Their wedded ardor flamed when he showed her for the tenth time his
wonderful contrivance for multiplying bookshelves, as their treasures
accumulated year by year. They spoke with confidence of a day when the
shelves would reach from floor to ceiling, to meet the inevitable
expansion of the intellectual life.
They went out that very evening to a lecture on "Appearance and Reality,"
an inspiring lecture. They lived in it again (sitting over their cocoa in
the tiny dining-room), each kindling the other with the same sacred flame.
She gazed with adoration at his thin, flushed face, as, illumined by the
lecture, he developed with excitement his theory of life.
[Illustration: "Over their cocoa he developed his theory of life"]
"Only think," he said, "how people wreck their lives just because they
don't know the difference between appearance and reality! Now we do know.
We're poor; but we don't care a rap, because we know, you and I, that that
doesn't matter. It's the immaterial that matters."
Spiritually he flamed.
"I wouldn't change with my boss, though he's got five thousand a year.
He's a slave--a slave to his carriage and horses, a slave to his house, a
slave to the office--"
"So are you. You work hard enough."
"I work harder than he does. But I keep myself detached."
"Some more cocoa, dearie?"
"Rather. Yes, three lumps, please. Just think what we can get out of life,
you and I, with our tiny income. We get what we put into it--and that's
something literally priceless, and we mustn't let it go. Whatever happens
we must stick to it."
"Nothing can take it away from us," said Aggie, rapt in her dream.
"No; no outside thing can. But, Aggie--we can take it from each other, if
we let ourselves get slack. Whatever we do," he said, solemnly, "we
mustn't get slack. We must keep it up."
"Yes," said Aggie, "we must keep it up."
They had pledged themselves to that.