I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off of our
engagement and Marion’s surrender. But I recall now the sharpness of my
emotion, the concentrated spirit of tears and laughter in my throat as
I read the words of her unexpected letter—“I have thought over
everything, and I was selfish....” I rushed off to Walham Green that
evening to give back all she had given me, to beat her altogether at
giving. She was extraordinarily gentle and generous that time, I
remember, and when at last I left her, she kissed me very sweetly.
So we were married.
We were married with all the customary incongruity. I gave—perhaps
after a while not altogether ungrudgingly—and what I gave, Marion took,
with a manifest satisfaction. After all, I was being sensible. So that
we had three livery carriages to the church (one of the pairs of horses
matched) and coachmen—with improvised flavour and very shabby silk
hats—bearing white favours on their whips, and my uncle intervened with
splendour and insisted upon having a wedding breakfast sent in from a
caterer’s in Hammersmith. The table had a great display of
chrysanthemums, and there was orange blossom in the significant place
and a wonderful cake. We also circulated upwards of a score of wedges
of that accompanied by silver-printed cards in which Marion’s name of
Ramboat was stricken out by an arrow in favour of Ponderevo. We had a
little rally of Marion’s relations, and several friends and friends’
friends from Smithie’s appeared in the church and drifted vestry-ward.
I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of two. The effect in that
shabby little house was one of exhilarating congestion. The side-board,
in which lived the table-cloth and the “Apartments” card, was used for
a display of the presents, eked out by the unused balance of the
silver-printed cards.
Marion wore the white raiment of a bride, white silk and satin, that
did not suit her, that made her seem large and strange to me; she
obtruded bows and unfamiliar contours. She went through all this
strange ritual of an English wedding with a sacramental gravity that I
was altogether too young and egotistical to comprehend. It was all
extraordinarily central and important to her; it was no more than an
offensive, complicated, and disconcerting intrusion of a world I was
already beginning to criticise very bitterly, to me. What was all this
fuss for? The mere indecent advertisement that I had been passionately
in love with Marion! I think, however, that Marion was only very
remotely aware of my smouldering exasperation at having in the end
behaved “nicely.” I had played—up to the extent of dressing my part; I
had an admirably cut frock—coat, a new silk hat, trousers as light as I
could endure them—lighter, in fact—a white waistcoat, night tie, light
gloves. Marion, seeing me despondent had the unusual enterprise to
whisper to me that I looked lovely; I knew too well I didn’t look
myself. I looked like a special coloured supplement to _Men’s Wear_, or
_The Tailor and Cutter_, Full Dress For Ceremonial Occasions. I had
even the disconcerting sensations of an unfamiliar collar. I felt
lost—in a strange body, and when I glanced down myself for reassurance,
the straight white abdomen, the alien legs confirmed that impression.
My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker—a little banker—in
flower. He wore a white rose in his buttonhole. He wasn’t, I think,
particularly talkative. At least I recall very little from him.
“George” he said once or twice, “this is a great occasion for you—a
very great occasion.” He spoke a little doubtfully.
You see I had told him nothing about Marion until about a week before
the wedding; both he and my aunt had been taken altogether by surprise.
They couldn’t, as people say, “make it out.” My aunt was intensely
interested, much more than my uncle; it was then, I think, for the
first time that I really saw that she cared for me. She got me alone, I
remember, after I had made my announcement. “Now, George,” she said,
“tell me everything about her. Why didn’t you tell—ME at least—before?”
I was surprised to find how difficult it was to tell her about Marion.
I perplexed her.
“Then is she beautiful?” she asked at last.
“I don’t know what you’ll think of her,” I parried. “I think—”
“Yes?”
“I think she might be the most beautiful person in the world.”
“And isn’t she? To you?”
“Of course,” I said, nodding my head. “Yes. She IS...”
And while I don’t remember anything my uncle said or did at the
wedding, I do remember very distinctly certain little things, scrutiny,
solicitude, a curious rare flash of intimacy in my aunt’s eyes. It
dawned on me that I wasn’t hiding anything from her at all. She was
dressed very smartly, wearing a big-plumed hat that made her neck seem
longer and slenderer than ever, and when she walked up the aisle with
that rolling stride of hers and her eye all on Marion, perplexed into
self-forgetfulness, it wasn’t somehow funny. She was, I do believe,
giving my marriage more thought than I had done, she was concerned
beyond measure at my black rage and Marion’s blindness, she was looking
with eyes that knew what loving is—for love.
In the vestry she turned away as we signed, and I verily believe she
was crying, though to this day I can’t say why she should have cried,
and she was near crying too when she squeezed my hand at parting—and
she never said a word or looked at me, but just squeezed my hand....
If I had not been so grim in spirit, I think I should have found much
of my wedding amusing. I remember a lot of ridiculous detail that still
declines to be funny in my memory. The officiating clergyman had a
cold, and turned his “n’s” to “d’s,” and he made the most mechanical
compliment conceivable about the bride’s age when the register was
signed. Every bride he had ever married had had it, one knew. And two
middle-aged spinsters, cousins of Marion’s and dressmakers at Barking,
stand out. They wore marvellously bright and gay blouses and dim old
skirts, and had an immense respect for Mr. Ramboat. They threw rice;
they brought a whole bag with them and gave handfuls away to unknown
little boys at the church door and so created a Lilliputian riot; and
one had meant to throw a slipper. It was a very warm old silk slipper,
I know, because she dropped it out of a pocket in the aisle—there was a
sort of jumble in the aisle—and I picked it up for her. I don’t think
she actually threw it, for as we drove away from the church I saw her
in a dreadful, and, it seemed to me, hopeless, struggle with her
pocket; and afterwards my eye caught the missile of good fortune lying,
it or its fellow, most obviously mislaid, behind the umbrella-stand in
the hall....
The whole business was much more absurd, more incoherent, more human
than I had anticipated, but I was far too young and serious to let the
latter quality atone for its shortcomings. I am so remote from this
phase of my youth that I can look back at it all as dispassionately as
one looks at a picture—at some wonderful, perfect sort of picture that
is inexhaustible; but at the time these things filled me with
unspeakable resentment. Now I go round it all, look into its details,
generalise about its aspects. I’m interested, for example, to square it
with my Bladesover theory of the British social scheme. Under stress of
tradition we were all of us trying in the fermenting chaos of London to
carry out the marriage ceremonies of a Bladesover tenant or one of the
chubby middling sort of people in some dependent country town. There a
marriage is a public function with a public significance. There the
church is to a large extent the gathering-place of the community, and
your going to be married a thing of importance to every one you pass on
the road. It is a change of status that quite legitimately interests
the whole neighbourhood. But in London there are no neighbours, nobody
knows, nobody cares. An absolute stranger in an office took my notice,
and our banns were proclaimed to ears that had never previously heard
our names. The clergyman, even, who married us had never seen us
before, and didn’t in any degree intimate that he wanted to see us
again.
Neighbours in London! The Ramboats did not know the names of the people
on either side of them. As I waited for Marion before we started off
upon our honeymoon flight, Mr. Ramboat, I remember, came and stood
beside me and stared out of the window.
“There was a funeral over there yesterday,” he said, by way of making
conversation, and moved his head at the house opposite. “Quite a smart
affair it was with a glass ’earse....”
And our little procession of three carriages with white-favour-adorned
horses and drivers, went through all the huge, noisy, indifferent
traffic like a lost china image in the coal-chute of an ironclad.
Nobody made way for us, nobody cared for us; the driver of an omnibus
jeered; for a long time we crawled behind an unamiable dust-cart. The
irrelevant clatter and tumult gave a queer flavour of indecency to this
public coming together of lovers. We seemed to have obtruded ourselves
shamelessly. The crowd that gathered outside the church would have
gathered in the same spirit and with greater alacrity for a street
accident....
At Charing Cross—we were going to Hastings—the experienced eye of the
guard detected the significance of our unusual costume and he secured
us a compartment.
“Well,” said I, as the train moved out of the station, “_That’s_ all
over!” And I turned to Marion—a little unfamiliar still, in her
unfamiliar clothes—and smiled.
She regarded me gravely, timidly.
“You’re not cross?” she asked.
“Cross! Why?”
“At having it all proper.”
“My dear Marion!” said I, and by way of answer took and kissed her
white-gloved, leather-scented hand....
I don’t remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it was of
undistinguished time—for we were both confused and a little fatigued
and Marion had a slight headache and did not want caresses. I fell into
a reverie about my aunt, and realised as if it were a new discovery,
that I cared for her very greatly. I was acutely sorry I had not told
her earlier of my marriage.
But you will not want to hear the history of my honeymoon. I have told
all that was needed to serve my present purpose. Thus and thus it was
the Will in things had its way with me. Driven by forces I did not
understand, diverted altogether from the science, the curiosities and
work to which I had once given myself, I fought my way through a tangle
of traditions, customs, obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself,
limited myself, gave myself to occupations I saw with the clearest
vision were dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end of
purblind Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far
short of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms.
V
Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people,
the weakening of first this bond and then that of that complex contact?
Least of all can one of the two participants. Even now, with an
interval of fifteen years to clear it up for me, I still find a mass of
impressions of Marion as confused, as discordant, as unsystematic and
self-contradictory as life. I think of this thing and love her, of that
and hate her—of a hundred aspects in which I can now see her with an
unimpassioned sympathy. As I sit here trying to render some vision of
this infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierce
estrangement, moments of clouded intimacy, the passage of transition
all forgotten. We talked a little language together whence were
“friends,” and I was “Mutney” and she was “Ming,” and we kept up such
an outward show that till the very end Smithie thought our household
the most amiable in the world.
I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that
life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That life of
intimate emotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs
from an ugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are
sometimes almost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down
little things and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate
those essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make
clear. Some readers will understand—to others I shall seem no more than
an unfeeling brute who couldn’t make allowances.... It’s easy to make
allowances now; but to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to
see one’s married life open before one, the life that seemed in its
dawn a glory, a garden of roses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and
heart throbs and wonderful silences, and to see it a vista of
tolerations and baby-talk; a compromise, the least effectual thing in
all one’s life.
Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every
poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful succession
of grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one of
aesthetic sensibility.
I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that
time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It’s the pettiest thing
to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It
was her idea, too, to “wear out” her old clothes and her failures at
home when “no one was likely to see her”—“no one” being myself. She
allowed me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly
memories....
All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed about
furniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court Road, and she
chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,—sweeping
aside my suggestions with—“Oh, _you_ want such queer things.” She
pursued some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal—that excluded
all other possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was
draped, our sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled
glass, we had lamps on long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in
grog-tubs. Smithie approved it all. There wasn’t a place where one
could sit and read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in
the dining-room recess. And we had a piano though Marion’s playing was
at an elementary level.
You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my
restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had
insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change;
she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her
peculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was right in
drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of
life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense
unimaginative inflexibility—as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a
beaver makes its dam.
Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation. I
might tell of waxings and waning of love between us, but the whole was
waning. Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair
of slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the
things were absurd. She ran our home and our one servant with a hard,
bright efficiency. She was inordinately proud of house and garden.
Always, by her lights, she did her duty by me.
Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into
the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This
she did not like; it left her “dull,” she said, but after a time she
began to go to Smithie’s again and to develop an independence of me. At
Smithie’s she was now a woman with a position; she had money to spend.
She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talk
interminably of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent
weekender with us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with
the minor arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses.
She called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green—her
father severed his connection with the gas-works—and came to live in a
small house I took for them near us, and they were much with us.
Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of
life are embittered! My father-in-law was perpetually catching me in
moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated me
beyond measure.
“You think too much,” he would say. “If you was to let in a bit with a
spade, you might soon ’ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers.
That’s better than thinking, George.”
Or in a torrent of exasperation, “I CARN’T think, George, why you don’t
get a bit of glass ’ere. This sunny corner you c’d do wonders with a
bit of glass.”
And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort of
conjuring trick in the hall, and taking cucumbers and tomatoes from
unexpected points of his person. “All out o’ MY little bit,” he’d say
in exemplary tones. He left a trail of vegetable produce in the most
unusual places, on mantel boards, sideboards, the tops of pictures.
Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato could annoy me!...
It did much to widen our estrangement that Marion and my aunt failed to
make friends, became, by a sort of instinct, antagonistic.
My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was really
anxious to know Marion. At first she would arrive like a whirlwind and
pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She dressed already with
that cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalised her accession to
fortune, and dressed her best for these visits.
She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion occult
secrets about the way I wore out my boots and how I never could think
to put on thicker things in cold weather. But Marion received her with
that defensive suspiciousness of the shy person, thinking only of the
possible criticism of herself; and my aunt, perceiving this, became
nervous and slangy...
“She says such queer things,” said Marion once, discussing her. “But I
suppose it’s witty.”
“Yes,” I said; “it _is_ witty.”
“If I said things like she does—”
The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things she
didn’t say. I remember her in our drawing-room one day, and how she
cocked her eye—it’s the only expression—at the India-rubber plant in a
Doulton-ware pot which Marion had placed on the corner of the piano.
She was on the very verge of speech. Then suddenly she caught my
expression, and shrank up like a cat that has been discovered looking
at the milk.
Then a wicked impulse took her.
“Didn’t say an old word, George,” she insisted, looking me full in the
eye.
I smiled. “You’re a dear,” I said, “not to,” as Marion came lowering
into the room to welcome her. But I felt extraordinarily like a
traitor—to the India-rubber plant, I suppose—for all that nothing had
been said...
“Your aunt makes Game of people,” was Marion’s verdict, and,
open-mindedly: “I suppose it’s all right... for her.”
Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and once or
twice to dinner. My aunt did her peculiar best to be friends, but
Marion was implacable. She was also, I know, intensely uncomfortable,
and she adopted as her social method, an exhausting silence, replying
compactly and without giving openings to anything that was said to her.
The gaps between my aunt’s visits grew wider and wider.
My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in the
broad expanse of interests in which I was living. I went about the
world; I met a great number of varied personalities; I read endless
books in trains as I went to and fro. I developed social relationships
at my uncle’s house that Marion did not share. The seeds of new ideas
poured in upon me and grew in me. Those early and middle years of one’s
third decade are, I suppose, for a man the years of greatest mental
growth. They are restless years and full of vague enterprise.
Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow,
and unattractive—and Marion less beautiful and more limited and
difficult—until at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic.
She gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirely
apathetic. I never asked myself then what heartaches she might hide or
what her discontents might be.