“Not exactly a student. I—”
“Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I’m a student
myself at the Consolidated Technical Schools.”
I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled her in
a conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the fact that,
out of deference to our fellow-readers, we were obliged to speak in
undertones. And I have no doubt that in substance it was singularly
banal. Indeed I have an impression that all our early conversations
were incredibly banal. We met several times in a manner
half-accidental, half furtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn’t
take hold of her. I never did take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I
now know all too clearly, was shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only—even
to this day—I don’t remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could
see quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real social
status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art school
and a little ashamed that she wasn’t. She came to the museum to “copy
things,” and this, I gathered, had something to do with some way of
partially earning her living that I wasn’t to inquire into. I told her
things about myself, vain things that I felt might appeal to her, but
that I learnt long afterwards made her think me “conceited.” We talked
of books, but there she was very much on her guard and secretive, and
rather more freely of pictures. She “liked” pictures. I think from the
outset I appreciated and did not for a moment resent that hers was a
commonplace mind, that she was the unconscious custodian of something
that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that she embodied the hope
of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of a physical quality
that had turned my head like strong wine. I felt I had to stick to our
acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should get through these
irrelevant exterior things, and come to the reality of love beneath.
I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful,
worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were together, we would come
on silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feast
on her, and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtain—her
superficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold
of certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness
of skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a
certain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn’t indeed beautiful to
many people—these things are beyond explaining. She had manifest
defects of form and feature, and they didn’t matter at all. Her
complexion was bad, but I don’t think it would have mattered if it had
been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited,
extraordinarily painful, desires. I longed intolerably to kiss her
lips.
V
The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don’t remember
that in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back at all.
It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirely more
critical than I had for her, that she didn’t like my scholarly
untidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style. “Why do you
wear collars like that?” she said, and sent me in pursuit of
gentlemanly neckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly
one day to come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her
father and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my
hitherto unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she
desired me to make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the
Sunday after, to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I
bought a silk hat, and had my reward in the first glance of admiration
she ever gave me. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I
was, you see, abandoning all my beliefs, my conventions unasked. I was
forgetting myself immensely. And there was a conscious shame in it all.
Never a word—did I breathe to Ewart—to any living soul of what was
going on.
Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people,
and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its black and
amber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths, and the age and
irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers.
The windows were fortified against the intrusive eye by cheap lace
curtains and an “art pot” upon an unstable octagonal table. Several
framed Art School drawings of Marion’s, bearing official South
Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a black
and gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped
mirrors over all the mantels, and above the sideboard in the
dining-room in which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father,
villainously truthful after the manner of such works. I couldn’t see a
trace of the beauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow
contrived to be like them both.
These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three Great
Women in my mother’s room, but they had not nearly so much social
knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I remarked, they did
it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, for
the kindness to their daughter in the matter of the ‘bus fare, and so
accounted for anything unusual in their invitation. They posed as
simple gentlefolk, a little hostile to the rush and gadding-about of
London, preferring a secluded and unpretentious quiet.
When Marion got out the white table-cloth from the sideboard-drawer for
tea, a card bearing the word “APARTMENTS” fell to the floor. I picked
it up and gave it to her before I realised from her quickened colour
that I should not have seen it; that probably had been removed from the
window in honour of my coming.
Her father spoke once in a large remote way of he claims of business
engagements, and it was only long afterwards I realised that he was a
supernumerary clerk in the Walham Green Gas Works and otherwise a
useful man at home. He was a large, loose, fattish man with
unintelligent brown eyes magnified by spectacles; he wore an
ill-fitting frock-coat and a paper collar, and he showed me, as his
great treasure and interest, a large Bible which he had grangerised
with photographs of pictures. Also he cultivated the little garden-yard
behind the house, and he had a small greenhouse with tomatoes. “I wish
I ’ad ’eat,” he said. “One can do such a lot with ’eat. But I suppose
you can’t ’ave everything you want in this world.”
Both he and Marion’s mother treated her with a deference that struck me
as the most natural thing in the world. Her own manner changed, became
more authoritative and watchful, her shyness disappeared. She had taken
a line of her own I gathered, draped the mirror, got the second-hand
piano, and broken her parents in.
Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular features
and Marion’s hair without its lustre, but she was thin and careworn.
The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally shy person very like
her brother, and I don’t recall anything she said on this occasion.
To begin with there was a good deal of tension, Marion was frightfully
nervous and every one was under the necessity of behaving in a
mysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became talkative and made
a certain ease and interest. I told them of the schools, of my
lodgings, of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship days. “There’s a lot of
this Science about nowadays,” Mr. Ramboat reflected; “but I sometimes
wonder a bit what good it is?”
I was young enough to be led into what he called “a bit of a
discussion,” which Marion truncated before our voices became unduly
raised. “I dare say,” she said, “there’s much to be said on both
sides.”
I remember Marion’s mother asked me what church I attended, and that I
replied evasively. After tea there was music and we sang hymns. I
doubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but that was held to
be a trivial objection, and I found sitting close beside the sweep of
hair from Marion’s brow had many compensations. I discovered her mother
sitting in the horsehair armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I
went for a walk with Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was
more singing and a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr.
Ramboat and I smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the
import of her sketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a
friend of hers whom she spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original
business in a sort of tea-gown garment which she called a Persian Robe,
a plain sort of wrap with a gaily embroidered yoke, and Marion went
there and worked in the busy times. In the times that weren’t busy she
designed novelties in yokes by an assiduous use of eyes and note-book
in the museum, and went home and traced out the captured forms on the
foundation material. “I don’t get much,” said Marion, “but it’s
interesting, and in the busy times we work all day. Of course the
workgirls are dreadfully common, but we don’t say much to them. And
Smithie talks enough for ten.”