Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in my
conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in its first crude
form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more
powerfully. I argued in the laboratory with the man who shared my bench
until we quarreled and did not speak and also I fell in love.
The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly
advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of London
was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings the waves in
fast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More and more acutely and
unmistakably did my perception of beauty, form and sound, my desire for
adventure, my desire for intercourse, converge on this central and
commanding business of the individual life. I had to get me a mate.
I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the street, with
women who sat before me in trains, with girl fellow-students, with
ladies in passing carriages, with loiterers at the corners, with
neat-handed waitresses in shops and tea-rooms, with pictures even of
girls and women. On my rare visits to the theatre I always became
exalted, and found the actresses and even the spectators about me
mysterious, attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I had a
stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing
multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite of
every antagonistic force in the world, there was something in my very
marrow that insisted: “Stop! Look at this one! Think of her! Won’t she
do? This signifies—this before all things signifies! Stop! Why are you
hurrying by? This may be the predestined person—before all others.”
It is odd that I can’t remember when first I saw Marion, who became my
wife—whom I was to make wretched, who was to make me wretched, who was
to pluck that fine generalised possibility of love out of my early
manhood and make it a personal conflict. I became aware of her as one
of a number of interesting attractive figures that moved about in my
world, that glanced back at my eyes, that flitted by with a kind of
averted watchfulness. I would meet her coming through the Art Museum,
which was my short cut to the Brompton Road, or see her sitting,
reading as I thought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But
really, as I found out afterwards, she never read. She used to come
there to eat a bun in quiet. She was a very gracefully-moving figure of
a girl then, very plainly dressed, with dark brown hair I remember, in
a knot low on her neck behind that confessed the pretty roundness of
her head and harmonised with the admirable lines of ears and cheek, the
grave serenity of mouth and brow.
She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they
dressed more than she did, struck emphatic notes of colour, startled
one by novelties in hats and bows and things. I’ve always hated the
rustle, the disconcerting colour boundaries, the smart unnatural angles
of women’s clothes. Her plain black dress gave her a starkness....
I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the peculiar
appeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my work and had
finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over to the Art Museum
to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of the
Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying something from a picture that
hung high. I had just been in the gallery of casts from the antique, my
mind was all alive with my newly awakened sense of line, and there she
stood with face upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just
a little—memorably graceful—feminine.
After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive emotion at
her presence, began to imagine things about her. I no longer thought of
generalised womanhood or of this casual person or that. I thought of
her.
An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in
an omnibus staggering westward from Victoria—I was returning from a
Sunday I’d spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of
hospitality on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside
passenger. And when the time came to pay her fare, she became an
extremely scared, disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left
her purse at home.
Luckily I had some money.
She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted my
proffered payment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness that
seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked
me with an obvious affectation of ease.
“Thank you so much,” she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then less
gracefully, “Awfully kind of you, you know.”
I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn’t disposed to be
critical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm was
stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of
her body was near me. The words we used didn’t seem very greatly to
matter. I had vague ideas of getting out with her—and I didn’t.
That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awake
at night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase of our
relationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was in
the Science Library, digging something out of the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_, when she appeared beside me and placed on the open page an
evidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coins
within.
“It was so very kind of you,” she said, “the other day. I don’t know
what I should have done, Mr.—”