“Only as a matter of design. I’ve got to do an old beast’s tomb.
“Wholesale grocer. I’ll put it on his corners,—four mustard pots. I
dare say he’d be glad of a mustard plaster now to cool him, poor devil,
where he is. But anyhow,—here goes!”
V
It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone for
this great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing statements of
my problem and imagined myself delivering them to her—and she,
goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine, simply-worded judgment.
“You see, it’s just to give one’s self over to the Capitalistic
System,” I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; “it’s
surrendering all one’s beliefs. We _may_ succeed, we _may_ grow rich,
but where would the satisfaction be?”
Then she would say, “No! That wouldn’t be right.”
“But the alternative is to wait!”
Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me
frankly and nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out. “No,” she
would say, “we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever touch us.
We love one another. Why wait to tell each other that, dear? What does
it matter that we are poor and may keep poor?”
But indeed the conversation didn’t go at all in that direction. At the
sight of her my nocturnal eloquence became preposterous and all the
moral values altered altogether. I had waited for her outside the door
of the Parsian-robe establishment in Kensington High Street and walked
home with her thence. I remember how she emerged into the warm evening
light and that she wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not
only beautiful but pretty.
“I like that hat,” I said by way of opening; and she smiled her rare
delightful smile at me.
“I love you,” I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on the
pavement.
She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled. Then—“Be
sensible!”
The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for conversation and
we were some way westward before we spoke again.
“Look here,” I said; “I want you, Marion. Don’t you understand? I want
you.”
“Now!” she cried warningly.
I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate lover, an
immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam of positive
hatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene self-complacency of
that “_Now!_” It vanished almost before I felt it. I found no warning
in it of the antagonisms latent between us.
“Marion,” I said, “this isn’t a trifling matter to me. I love you; I
would die to get you.... Don’t you care?”
“But what is the good?”
“You don’t care,” I cried. “You don’t care a rap!”
“You know I care,” she answered. “If I didn’t—If I didn’t like you very
much, should I let you come and meet me—go about with you?”
“Well then,” I said, “promise to marry me!”
“If I do, what difference will it make?”
We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between us
unawares.
“Marion,” I asked when we got together again, “I tell you I want you to
marry me.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We can’t marry—in the street.”
“We could take our chance!”
“I wish you wouldn’t go on talking like this. What is the good?”
She suddenly gave way to gloom. “It’s no good marrying” she said.
“One’s only miserable. I’ve seen other girls. When one’s alone one has
a little pocket-money anyhow, one can go about a little. But think of
being married and no money, and perhaps children—you can’t be sure....”
She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type in
jerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with discontented eyes
towards the westward glow—forgetful, it seemed, for a moment even of
me.
“Look here, Marion,” I said abruptly, “what would you marry on?”
“What _is_ the good?” she began.
“Would you marry on three hundred a year?”
She looked at me for a moment. “That’s six pounds a week,” she said.
“One could manage on that, easily. Smithie’s brother—No, he only gets
two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting girl.”
“Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?”
She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.
“_If!_” she said.
I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. “It’s a bargain,” I
said.
She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. “It’s silly,” she
remarked as she did so. “It means really we’re—” She paused.
“Yes?” said I.
“Engaged. You’ll have to wait years. What good can it do you?”
“Not so many years.” I answered.
For a moment she brooded.
Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful, that has
stuck in my memory for ever.
“I like you!” she said. “I shall like to be engaged to you.”
And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured “dear!”
It’s odd that in writing this down my memory passed over all that
intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I’m Marion’s boyish
lover taking great joy in such rare and little things.