X
So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and
went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who was waiting for me
in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform,
a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk
over the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense of
relief where at last the stresses of separation were over, but now I
found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the
profoundest persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk and somber Marion
were so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to hold
myself to my own plans, to remember that I must keep faith with Effie,
with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no guarantees, but flung
herself into my hands.
We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of
deepening gold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always, very
close, glancing up ever and again at my face.
Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no joyful
reunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy. Extraordinarily,
she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time together
did she say an adverse word of Marion....
She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me
with the same instinctive skill that some women will show with the
trouble of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and
handmaid; she forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of
it all Marion remained, stupid and tearful and infinitely distressful,
so that I was almost intolerably unhappy for her—for her and the dead
body of my married love.
It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into these
remote parts, these rarely visited uplands and lonely tares of memory,
and it seems to me still a strange country. I had thought I might be
going to some sensuous paradise with Effie, but desire which fills the
universe before its satisfaction, vanishes utterly like the going of
daylight—with achievement. All the facts and forms of life remain
darkling and cold. It was an upland of melancholy questionings, a
region from which I saw all the world at new angles and in new aspects;
I had outflanked passion and romance.
I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time in
my life, at least so it seems to me now in this retrospect, I looked at
my existence as a whole.
Since this was nothing, what was I doing? What was I for?
I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay—the business I had taken up to
secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our intimate
separation—and snatching odd week-ends and nights for Orpington, and
all the while I struggled with these obstinate interrogations. I used
to fall into musing in the trains, I became even a little inaccurate
and forgetful about business things. I have the clearest memory of
myself sitting thoughtful in the evening sunlight on a grassy hillside
that looked toward Seven Oaks and commanded a wide sweep of country,
and that I was thinking out my destiny. I could almost write my thought
down now, I believe, as they came to me that afternoon. Effie, restless
little cockney that she was, rustled and struggled in a hedgerow below,
gathering flowers, discovering flowers she had never seen before. I
had. I remember, a letter from Marion in my pocket. I had even made
some tentatives for return, for a reconciliation; Heaven knows now how
I had put it! but her cold, ill-written letter repelled me. I perceived
I could never face that old inconclusive dullness of life again, that
stagnant disappointment. That, anyhow, wasn’t possible. But what was
possible? I could see no way of honour or fine living before me at all.
“What am I to do with life?” that was the question that besieged me.
I wondered if all the world was even as I, urged to this by one motive
and to that by another, creatures of chance and impulse and unmeaning
traditions. Had I indeed to abide by what I had said and done and
chosen? Was there nothing for me in honour but to provide for Effie, go
back penitent to Marion and keep to my trade in rubbish—or find some
fresh one—and so work out the residue of my days? I didn’t accept that
for a moment. But what else was I to do? I wondered if my case was the
case of many men, whether in former ages, too, men had been so
guideless, so uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life. In
the Middle Ages, in the old Catholic days, one went to a priest, and he
said with all the finality of natural law, this you are and this you
must do. I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I should have
accepted that ruling without question.
I remember too very distinctly how Effie came and sat beside me on a
little box: that was before the casement window of our room.
“Gloomkins,” said she.
I smiled and remained head on hand, looking out of the window forgetful
of her.
“Did you love your wife so well?” she whispered softly.
“Oh!” I cried, recalled again; “I don’t know. I don’t understand these
things. Life is a thing that hurts, my dear! It hurts without logic or
reason. I’ve blundered! I didn’t understand. Anyhow—there is no need to
go hurting you, is there?”
And I turned about and drew her to me, and kissed her ear....
Yes, I had a very bad time—I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from
a sort of _ennui_ of the imagination. I found myself without an object
to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively.
I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this
retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned
aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen
only the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all
but my impulse. Now I found myself _grouped_ with a system of appetites
and satisfactions, with much work to do—and no desire, it seemed, left
in me.
There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life appeared
before me in bleak, relentless light, a series of ignorances, crude
blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologians
call a “conviction of sin.” I sought salvation—not perhaps in the
formula a Methodist preacher would recognise but salvation
nevertheless.
Men find their salvation nowadays in many ways. Names and forms don’t,
I think, matter very much; the real need is something that we can hold
and that holds one. I have known a man find that determining factor in
a dry-plate factory, and another in writing a history of the Manor. So
long as it holds one, it does not matter. Many men and women nowadays
take up some concrete aspect of Socialism or social reform. But
Socialism for me has always been a little bit too human, too set about
with personalities and foolishness. It isn’t my line. I don’t like
things so human. I don’t think I’m blind to the fun, the surprises, the
jolly little coarsenesses and insufficiency of life, to the “humour of
it,” as people say, and to adventure, but that isn’t the root of the
matter with me. There’s no humour in my blood. I’m in earnest in warp
and woof. I stumble and flounder, but I know that over all these merry
immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene,
very high, beautiful things—the reality. I haven’t got it, but it’s
there nevertheless. I’m a spiritual guttersnipe in love with
unimaginable goddesses. I’ve never seen the goddesses nor ever
shall—but it takes all the fun out of the mud—and at times I fear it
takes all the kindliness, too.
But I’m talking of things I can’t expect the reader to understand,
because I don’t half understand them myself. There is something links
things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something
there was in Marion’s form and colour, something I find and lose in
Mantegna’s pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make. (You
should see X2, my last and best!)
I can’t explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, that
I am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond my merits.
Naturally I resist that as a complete solution. Anyhow, I had a sense
of inexorable need, of distress and insufficiency that was unendurable,
and for a time this aeronautical engineering allayed it....
In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I
idealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay the
salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to these
things I would give myself.
I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness, clutching
at a new resolve for which he had groped desperately and long.
I came into the inner office suddenly one day—it must have been just
before the time of Marion’s suit for restitution—and sat down before my
uncle.
“Look here,” I said, “I’m sick of this.”
“Hul_lo!_” he answered, and put some papers aside.
“What’s up, George?”
“Things are wrong.”
“As how?”
“My life,” I said, “it’s a mess, an infinite mess.”
“She’s been a stupid girl, George,” he said; “I partly understand. But
you’re quit of her now, practically, and there’s just as good fish in
the sea—”
“Oh! it’s not that!” I cried. “That’s only the part that shows. I’m
sick—I’m sick of all this damned rascality.”
“Eh? Eh?” said my uncle. “_What_—rascality?”
“Oh, _you_ know. I want some _stuff_, man. I want something to hold on
to. I shall go amok if I don’t get it. I’m a different sort of beast
from you. You float in all this bunkum. _I_ feel like a man floundering
in a universe of soapsuds, up and downs, east and west. I can’t stand
it. I must get my foot on something solid or—I don’t know what.”