The first time I saw Essie was a few weeks before her marriage with my
brother Ted. I knew beforehand that she would certainly be very pretty
for the simple reason that Ted would never have been attracted by a
plain woman. For him plain women did not exist, except as cooks,
governesses, caretakers and charwomen.
Ted is the best fellow in the world, and when he brought her to see me I
instantly realised why he had chosen her; but I found myself wondering
why she had chosen him--she was charming, lovely, shy, very young and
diffident, and with the serenest temperament I have ever seen. She was
evidently fond of him, and grateful to him. Later on I learned--from
her, never from him--the distress and anxiety from which he had released
her and her mother. There was a disreputable brother, and other
entanglements, and complicated money difficulties.
Ted simply swooped down, and rescued her, and ordered her to marry him,
which she did.
"She is a cut above me, Essie is," he used to say rubbing his hands, and
looking at her with joyful pride. It was true. Essie looked among us
like a race horse among cart horses. She belonged, not by birth, but by
breeding to a higher social plane than that on which we Hopkinses had
our boisterous being. I was resentfully on the alert to detect the least
sign of arrogance on her part. I expected it. But gradually the
sleepless suspicion of the great middle class to which Ted and I
belonged was lulled to rest. I had to own to myself that Essie was a
simple, humble, and rather timid creature.
I went to stay with them a few months after their marriage in their new
home in Kensington. Ted was outrageously happy, and she seemed well
content, amused by him, rather in the same way that a child is amused by
a large dog.
He had actually suggested before he met Essie that I should keep house
for him, but I told him I preferred to call my soul my own. Essie
apparently did not want to call anything her own. She let him have his
way in everything, and it was a benevolent and sensible way, but it had
evidently never struck him that she might have tastes and wishes even if
she did not put them forward. He was absolutely autocratic, and without
imagination.
Before they had been married a month he had prevailed on her to wear
woollen stockings instead of silk ones, because he always wore woollen
socks himself.
He chose the wallpapers of the house without any reference to her,
though of course she accompanied him everywhere. He chose the chintzes
for the drawing-room, and the curtains, and very good useful materials
they were, not ugly, but of a garish cheerfulness. Indeed, he furnished
the whole house without a qualm, and made it absolutely conventional. It
is strange how very conventional people press towards the mark, how they
struggle to be conventional, when it is only necessary to drift to
become so.
Ted exerted himself, and Essie laughed, and said she liked what he
liked. If she had not been so very pretty her self-effacement would have
seemed rather insipid, but somehow she was not insipid. She liked to see
him happy in his own prosaic efficient inartistic way, and I don't think
she had it in her power to oppose him if she had wanted to, or indeed
anyone. She was by nature yielding, a quality which men like Ted always
find adorable.
I remember an American once watching Ted disporting himself on the
balcony, pushing aside all Essie's tubs of flowering tulips to make room
for a dreadful striped hammock.
"The thing I can't understand about you English women," said the visitor
to Essie, "is why you treat your men as if they were household pets."
"What an excellent description of an English husband," said Essie.
"That is just what he is."
"What's that? What's that?" said Ted, rushing in from the balcony, but
as he never waited for an answer Essie seldom troubled to give him one.
Perhaps I should never have known Essie if I had not fallen ill in her
house. Ted and she were kindness itself, but as I slowly climbed the
hill of convalescence I saw less of him and more of her. He was
constantly away, transacting business in various places, and I must own
a blessed calm fell upon the house when the front door slammed, and he
was creating a lucrative turmoil elsewhere. The weather was hot, and we
sat out evening after evening in the square garden. Gradually, very
gradually, a suspicion had arisen in my mind that there was another
Essie whose existence Ted and I had so far never guessed. I saw that she
did--perhaps by instinct--what wise women sometimes do of set purpose.
She gave to others what they wanted from her, not necessarily the best
she had to give. Ted had received from her exactly what he hoped and
desired, and--he was happy.
The evening came when I made a sudden demand on her sympathy. In the
quiet darkness of the square garden I told her of a certain agonising
experience of my own which in one year had pushed me from youth into
middle age, and had turned me not to stone, but into a rolling stone.
"I imagined it was something of that kind that was the matter with you,"
she said in her gentle rather toneless voice.
"You guessed it," I said amazed. I had thought I was a closed book to
the whole world. "You never spoke of your idea to Ted?"
"Never. Why should I?"
There was a long silence.
The noise of Kensington High Street reached us like the growl of some
tired animal. An owl came across from Holland Park and alighted in a
tree near us.
"You should have married him," said Essie at last.
"Married him!" I exclaimed, "but you don't understand." And I went over
the whole dreadful story again--at full length. Love affairs are never
condensed. If they are told at all they are recounted in full.
"I don't see that any of those things matter," she said when I had
finished, or rather when I paused.
"Where is he now?"
"In Turkistan, I believe."
"Why not go to Turkistan?" She spoke as if it were just round the
corner.
"Turkistan!"
"Well, it's somewhere on the map, I suppose. What does it matter where
it is."
"And perhaps when I got there I might find he had set up a harem of
Turkistan women."
"You might."
"Or that he had long since left for America."
"Just so."
"Or that he did not want me."
"All these things are possible."
The owl began to call through the dusk, and, not far away, somewhere in
the square a gentle lady owl's voice answered him.
"There are things," said Essie, "which one can measure, and it is easy
to know how to act about them, and whether it is worth while to act at
all. Most things one can measure, but there are in life just a few
things, a very few, which one cannot measure, or put a value on, or pay
a certain price for, and no more, because they are on a plane where
foot-rules and weighing machines and money do not exist. Love is one of
these things. When we begin to weigh how much we will give to love, what
we are willing to sacrifice for it, we are trying to drag it down to a
mercantile basis and to lay it on the table of the money changers on
which things are bought and sold, and bartered and equivalent value
given."
"You think I don't love him," I said, cut to the quick.
"I am sure," said Essie, "that you don't love him yet, but I think you
are on the road. Who was it who said
'The ways of love are harder
Than thoroughfares of stones.'
Whoever it was, he knew what he was talking about. You have found the
thoroughfare stony, and you rebel and are angry, very angry, and desert
your fellow traveller. He, poor man, did not make the road. I expect he
is just as angry and foot-sore as you are."
"He was a year ago. I don't know what he is now. It is a year since he
wrote."
Essie knitted in silence.
At last I said desperately:
"I have told you everything. Do you think it's possible he still cares
for me?"
Essie waited a long minute before answering.
"I don't know," she said, and then added, "but I think you will
presently go to Turkistan and find out."
Reader, I went to Turkistan, and was married there, and lived there and
in Anatolia for many happy years. But that is another story. I did not
start on that voyage of discovery till several months after that
conversation. I had battered myself to pieces against the prison bars of
my misery, and health ruthlessly driven away was slow to return.
As I lived with Ted and Essie I became aware that he was becoming
enormously successful in money matters. There were mysterious
expeditions, buyings and sellings of properties, which necessitated
sudden journeys. Immense transactions passed through his competent
hands, and presently the possibility of a country house was spoken of.
He talked mysteriously of a wonderful old manor house in Essex, which he
had come upon entirely by chance, which would presently come into the
market, and which might be acquired much below its value, so anxious was
the owner--a foreign bigwig--to part with it at once.
Ted prosed away about this house from teatime till bedtime. Essie
listened dutifully, but it was I who asked all the questions.
Ted hurried away next morning, not to return for several days, one of
which he hoped to spend in Essex.
"You don't seem much interested about the country house," I said at tea
time. I was slightly irritated by the indifference which seemed to
enwrap Essie's whole existence.
"Don't you care about it? It must be beautiful from Ted's account."
"If he likes it I shall like it."
"What a model wife you are. Have you no wishes of your own, no tastes of
your own, Essie?"
She looked at me with tranquil eyes.
"I think Ted is happy," she said, "and I am so glad the children are
both exactly like him."
"Yes, but--"
"There is no _but_ in my case. Ted rescued me from an evil entanglement
and eased my mother's life. And he set his kind heart on marrying me. I
told him I could not give him much, but he did not mind. I don't think
men like Ted understand that there is anything more that--that might be
given; which makes a very wonderful happiness when it _is_ given. Our
marriage was on the buying and selling plane. We each put out our wares.
I saw very well that he would be impossible--for me at least--to live
with unless I gave way to him entirely. Dear Ted is a benevolent tyrant.
He would become a bully if he were opposed, and bullies are generally
miserable. I don't oppose him. I think he is content with his bargain,
and as fond of me as a man can be of a lay figure. My impression is that
he regards me as a model wife."
"He does, he does. He is absolutely, blissfully happy."
"He would be just as happy with another woman," said Essie, "if she were
almost inanimate. It was a comfort to me to remember that when I nearly
died three years ago."
"Yes, Ted is all right," I said, "but how about you? I used to think you
were absolutely characterless, and humdrum, but I know better now. Don't
you--miss anything?"
"No," said Essie, "nothing. You see," she added tranquilly with the
faintest spice of malice, "I lead a double life."
I gasped, staring at her open-mouthed, horror-stricken. She ignored my
crass imbecility, and went on quietly:
"I don't know when it began, but I suppose when I was about five years
old. I found my way to the enchanted forest, and I went there in my
dreams every night."
"In your dreams!" I stuttered, enormously reassured, and idiotically
hoping that she had not noticed my hideous lapse.
"In my dreams. I had an unhappy childhood, but I never was unhappy any
more after I learned the way through the forest. Directly I fell asleep
I saw the track among the tree trunks, and then after a few minutes I
reached the wonderful glade and the lake, and the little islands. One of
the islands had a temple on it. I fed the swans upon the lake. I twined
garlands of flowers. I climbed the trees, and looked into the nests. I
swung from tree to tree, and I swam from island to island. I made a
little pipe out of a reed from the lake, and blew music out of it. And
the rabbits peeped out of their holes to listen, and the squirrels came
hand by hand along the boughs, and the great kites with their golden
eyes came whirling down. Even the little moles came up out of the ground
to listen."