It was the history that kept them apart. Their philosophy had been
uniformly good; Mr Cuggy was filled with pride and wrote to
congratulate them all: whereat they wondered what would have happened
if they had continued to cling to that philosophic rock, the Absolute.
Yet it was nice of him to write. That was the worst of Cuggy: you
couldn't dislike him.
From an Oxford of glaring streets and searching, irresistible dust
Martin went up to London to seek his fortune at Burlington House.
Later he remembered that August as a month of blazing heat and tired
hands and aching head. He remembered a gloomy place shaped like a
theatre where morose men asked him if he had a buff book and tore his
papers from under his pen when time was up. There were days of solid
labour and nights of anxiety spent with the text-books for to-morrow's
exams: and there were unforgettable crowds of candidates sitting upon
the steps before each paper and going over their notes for a last time
with feverish futility. He remembered hating the people from Wren's as
he had hated the Grammar School boys in his scholarship exams,
jealously loathing and dreading their preparedness and notes and iron
methods. He remembered the filthy temper he was in and his contempt
for the scrubby little man who sat next to him and muttered to himself
incessantly. Martin had crammed Blankney's notes on the Attic
constitution because he had heard a rumour that Blankney was examining,
and he remembered a ceaseless effort to display knowledge which he did
not possess and to scrape up marks, marks, marks....
But the exams brought him also to Freda.
He found her pale and tired and more fragile than ever: he found her
working from ten to six and idling despondently in the evenings. Quite
obviously she was not the woman he had known in Devonshire.
Then she was strong and at her ease, full of mysterious confidence,
rejoicing in life and her ability to cope with it. He had been to her
merely an undergraduate, nicely foolish, he had amused her and she had
read his letters, even answered them. He had chattered of affection
and she had laughed him gently to scorn.
Now he came to her as a man in a world where men were scarce and men
were needed. But it was Freda who had changed, not Martin. The
transformation of the boy into the man was due to the heat of summer
and the click of typewriters. To one deafened with the city's roar
Martin brought memories of perfect woods and lonely pines that stood
out against emptiness, starkly black. They used to go out together in
the evenings, to Richmond, to Putney Heath, to Hampstead. They went
where the others went because they were as the others, hard-worked,
tired-out, desperately needing one another. There was no glory of
passion in their evenings. Street lamps did not flame as flowers of
the East, trees did not tower like giants luring them with soft voices,
water was still water. Earth and sky had not altered for them: it had
not altered for the others who wandered in the same places.
One Monday at half-past five Martin hurried out of Burlington House
after his second paper in English Literature. Never in his life had he
written more in six hours: he had drained his soul of platitude and
pretence, discreetly praising and blaming men whom he had never read,
never, thank God, would read, all the remoter 'C's,' Cowley, Cowper,
Crabbe.
His nerves were all frayed. He hated the statues of Liebnitz and Locke
and Plato ... what had Platonism to do with that sordid spot? He hated
the Burlington Arcade with its lingering odour of stale scent: a woman
smiled at him horribly and he hated her. He hated Piccadilly because
it was dusty and deserted, and he hated the tea he drank because it was
too hot and there were flies on the table. He hated himself for not
remembering a quotation. How plain it all seemed now, and yet he had
missed it.
He met Freda at half-past six at Waterloo and they went down to Thames
Ditton. The river was crowded with punts and canoes and boats of every
kind, but they joined the press. As darkness fell lights began to
glitter like jewels across the water. Here and there a Chinese lantern
swung on a prow, the glowing end of a cigarette flickered and was gone.
Ripples of laughter floated from a nook where people supped, the
popping of a cork, the tinkling of distant music. But if there was not
solitude or silence, there was at least a breeze that shook the parched
leaves and whispered in bough and rush. Martin found a vacant berth
deeply curtained with bushes and low-hanging trees and there they made
fast the punt and lingered.
They talked a little of his exam and of his prospects. And then they
talked of her prospects.
"You're too fine for it," he said suddenly. It was what he had said so
often before, but now she was no longer maternal or cheerily scornful
of his protests. She yielded alike to his thought and to his touch.
Never had she so yielded before. For Martin the world became a great,
black silence: the only thing he knew was the closeness of her. That
she trusted him, and wanted him was joy: that she was there, beside
him, his, was magic. Because she for the first time yielded, he for
the first time forgot. Never before had he quite escaped from himself,
from considering the impression that he was likely to be making, from
worrying fears and self-conscious timidity. Now he was free. He was
aware only of the intangible fragrance of her hair, the warmth and
movement of her body, the curve and rhythm of her limbs, the instant
claim of her fragility. Everything became different.
At the end of the month Freda had a fortnight's holiday and went to an
aunt in Yorkshire. Martin had arranged to meet Lawrence and Rendell at
Seatoller in the Lakes. He went in a bitter mood, hungry for Freda,
physically stale, and hopeless. But the traditional rain never came
and soon they knew every crag of Honister and Grey Knotts, of
Glaramara, of The Gables and the Scawfells, of the Langdale Pikes. The
challenge of wind and weather on the hills and the flaming splendour of
Borrowdale in autumn drove apprehension and despair from his soul. He
learned that in some places a man cannot be morbid.
On an evening of late September they were playing three-handed auction.
A telegram arrived from Devonshire. The commissioners had sent the
result to his home address, it seemed.
Martin put down his hand and tore open the envelope. He had passed
fifty-first on the list.
"Looks like India," he said quietly.
Neither Rendell nor Lawrence knew what to say. He had wanted the Home
service, they knew, and fifty-first would not get that for him. They
muttered congratulations self-consciously.
Martin took up his hand once more. It was solidly black.
"Five hearts?" he said. "Five royals."
The opposition collapsed and he made his tricks.
They played late, thinking only of the cards. Martin's career was
settled, his life mapped out, his whole future determined by that
message, and they talked of rubbers and pence. If he had miraculously
passed in first or failed altogether they would have discussed it, but,
because he had achieved the expected mediocrity, by tacit convention
they were silent. The cards were really more important.
VIII
As Martin lay in bed that night it occurred to him with all the
violence of a real discovery that he was, under certain conditions, the
destined ruler and administrator of a nation far vaster and more
ancient than his own, a nation of whose religion, ideals and practical
needs he knew nothing whatever. He was equally ignorant of its
population, products and methods of life, though of course he had a
year in which to learn about these things. Incredible that he, Martin,
twenty-two, boyish and superficial, should be a guardian of this
people, a pro-consul in the making! And perhaps more strange was his
apathy. In addition to his complete ignorance about India he cared
nothing for the place, for how can a man, temperamentally inclined to
Nationalism rather than to Imperialism, care for a nation which he only
knows by a red blob on the map or by finding its stamps in collections
restricted to the British Empire. India meant nothing to Martin. He
had read Kipling, and certainly no tales of his had, despite the magic
of their narrative, made him responsive to the call of the East. He
still took it for granted that British rulers there would be as British
rulers elsewhere, bigoted, snobbish, and unexpectedly effectual:
corrupt, perhaps, fooling the poor and honouring the rich, bungling and
lying and making money. That, he felt, was the attitude of the men he
met, exaggerated, no doubt, but based on fact. But as he lay gazing at
the cracks in the old ceiling above him his thoughts went back to the
sheer bulk and beauty of The Gable, to Holywell at dusk, to the woods
around The Steading and the cult of his uncle's deity. About the
Oriental world he neither knew nor cared. He couldn't believe in it,
so remote and unimportant it still seemed.
At Oxford during his Indian year he found that the future civilians
took little interest in the place to which they were going. They
wanted the pay and perhaps, though not admittedly, the possibility of a
knighthood and a row of letters after their names. Certainly no one
was concerned about the White Man's Burden. Naturally he did not blame
these people: like himself, they were only seeking for a reasonable
livelihood. But he was sickened by the cant he discovered in speeches
and papers, the froth about self-sacrifice and noble callings: the work
might, he acknowledged, be good and useful, it might promote the
welfare of mankind and bring the peace of Caesar to a troubled world,
but no one was giving anything away in going to do it.
And he was lonely now. He had rooms in narrow Ship Street, and there
he spent solitary days and nights craving the society of the Push:
sometimes one of them would come down for a week-end, but otherwise
there was scarcely anyone to whom he could talk. The winter crept on
dismally, and Martin studied Bengali or rode on horseback over Shotover
and Port meadow. But there was something wrong about Oxford: he felt
old and alien and the college, when he entered it, seemed to be
bubbling over with freshmen, all amazingly young and innocent and
happy. He was vaguely jealous of them, uncharitably hostile. Were
they not talking as he had talked, idling as he had idled? One friend
he had, a poet in his third year, discreet and practical. From time to
time Martin dined with him and forgot about India.
Most of all Freda mattered. Now that he was alone and despondent, he
relied on her letters and his memories and thoughts of her to make life
easier, even more tolerable. He retraced the whole course of their
friendship, trying to reshape their relations. He remembered her first
as an arguer, a friend to whom he had talked and talked: and then as a
martyr, the sufferer for whom he had felt with a genuine, unstinting
pity. And at last ... well, at last as a woman, as a person who had
the power of making life different, of turning London into an enchanted
fairyland and India into a vision of cool beauty, a person of infinite
tenderness and understanding, a person whose presence and sympathy
could stop things hurting. What rendered him most happy was his
ability to meet her on equal terms. Hitherto she had been
self-supporting, he a pampered undergraduate. He had had prospects but
no certainty, and he had shrunk, even on that summer night upon the
river, from saying things that he wanted to say, because he felt that
it wasn't fair. One couldn't honourably say these things until one was
'a made man': one couldn't decently make women expect things unless you
had some reasonable basis for hopes. With girls like May Williams it
didn't matter what one said, because he had been just a 'fellow,' she
just a 'girl.' Such affairs had their agreeable conventions. But with
Freda it had been different, because there was no such tacit agreement:
she might, she would expect him to take her out of her toil and
weariness. And now he was free to say and do as it pleased him. He
was 'made' and had position, for only by great folly and stupidity
could he lose his opportunity.
At the end of term he went up to London. He told the Berrisfords that
he had to go to a riding test at Woolwich and wanted to see the varsity
rugger match. It is odd that a young man should be instinctively
ashamed of love: he will tell his companions of his bodily desires
gladly and even proudly, but he will hesitate before he confesses a
craving for sympathy. He did ride, it is true, and he went to Queen's
Club, where he caught an occasional glimpse of Cambridge three-quarters
running abominably fast. It was one of the 'slump' years in Oxford
football, the reaction after the reign of the immortals at Iffley Road,
when the whole city and university trooped down to watch six elusive
Internationals playing with the opposition's defence. Now Cambridge
was doing the same and avenging those past defeats. Humiliating to
watch those Tabs waving hats and yelling and ultimately carrying their
captain from the field of glory! Comforting to reflect that when
Oxford won they won soberly and with restraint, as though victory were
for them the normal and accustomed thing! Only Tabs would behave like
that. With such thoughts he tried to soothe his anger and disgust.
In the evening, because Freda had a headache, Martin dined with
Lawrence and became expensively drunk: later he had memories of a
crowded music hall, of distant singers and dancers flitting incessantly
before white scenery: they worried him and he shouted at them to go
away, but seemingly they refused. There were recollections of drinks
with an old Elfreyan and the toasting of the school, of an elaborate
conversation in French with a woman who only spoke Cockney, of a speech
to the Indian nation begun on the crowded promenade and ended
magnificently from the fountain at Piccadilly Circus. Probably there
was supper somewhere and more noise and then he must have walked miles,
for suddenly he became sober and found himself far down the Fulham
Road. He picked up a taxi, and managed to get into bed more or less
successfully about half-past three.
Freda, too, had spent a dull autumn. She had spoken the truth when she
said that she was just too good for dull toil and not good enough for
real work. The system was gradually devouring her and she had long ago
reached the stage at which the one thing in life that matters is six
o'clock, the hour of release from the drudgery and sordid gloom of the
office. She lived for her leisure and on her leisure she had nothing
to spend. There were friends whom she saw at intervals, but their
intimacy had limitations and was only close enough to drive home the
need for real companionship.
In one matter she had been fortunate. She had found a cheap room at
the top of an old house in Bloomsbury and was thus spared the necessity
of going to one of those gloomy mansions for working women. It was a
small room, high up and chilly: but it was hers, and even the gas-fire
could not rob it of real comfort.
Martin had not meant to linger in London as he had work to do. But he
soon realised the impossibility of going away. Not only did he need
Freda, but she too needed him. There was no advantage in denying the
mutual emptiness and mutual satisfaction. So he stayed, and in the
mornings and afternoons he read his Indian law and history, or wandered
about London, loitering in picture galleries or threading the ways of
Bloomsbury with many a passing glance at the house where Freda slept.
Squarely and simply it stood, with no flaunting brick-work or Victorian
embellishment: its colour was the nameless colour that a London house
should have, the sombre blending of grey and red and deepest brown. On
one side was a mean street, one of those sad thoroughfares which Chance
has brought to destitution: the houses were good and strong, but each
contained a score of people and belched out numberless squalid children
to play and quarrel in the teeming gutters. On the other side a wide
street ran straight up to a square garden and the two lines of houses
converged and faded away in a haze of smoke and branches. In the
afternoons, when Martin walked there, sunset would stain the gentle
greyness with pink or, in angrier mood, would stab dark clouds and
leave great rifts of red. It was all so strong and quiet and
dignified, seeming actually to exhale the finest quality of London.
The street, at any rate, was worthy of her.
When the long day's wait was over he would have Freda to himself. Then
London became beautiful in every line and form and colour. The lamps
were flaming jewels and the rain-soaked, glittering streets were bands
of silver: the murkiest lane threw off its squalor, and the night, with
its great glooms and shadows, its sudden bursts of iridescence and its
mystery of swiftly moving figures, made him think of Eastern jungles,
splashed with fierce colours, cavernous with infinite shade. Then a
woman, rouged and powdered and swathed in tawny fur, would sweep
majestically past: she was the tiger who burned brightly. Formerly he
hated these women, because they charmed him, challenged and held his
gaze, hated them too because they brought home to him the fact that he
had not the courage of his desires. But now he need not care. That
was the great joy of it.
So in this enchanted forest of London they walked and drove, feasted
and saw the play: not one play, but all the plays. And after the play
they feasted again and were contented. It was a forest that tended to
swallow gold rather than yield it, and Martin had to borrow on the
security of his position as a probationer in the Indian Civil Service.
But there was pleasure in the signing of the bond.
Sometimes they would sit in Martin's hotel, which had a large, deserted
lounge with sensible corners and crannies for conversation. Sometimes
he would go back with Freda to her room in Bloomsbury and wait until
she turned him out.
"I won't have you here after eleven," she told him and quoted from _The
Great Adventure_ on reputations, the coddling and neglect of them.
"But if you have me at all----" he protested.
"I'm English and I believe in compromise," she answered.
So he stayed till eleven. It was a neat place and orderly with naked
walls: he loved it as he loved its owner. When the washstand and bed
had been hidden behind their curtain, the stray shoes kicked beneath
the wardrobe, and the arm-chair drawn up to the gas-fire, there seemed
to be nothing mean or sordid in the room despite the lack of space and
the roof corner that jutted rudely in. What did it matter now if the
window looked on to a back yard and a world of chimneys?
"Why are you so wonderfully tidy?" Martin asked.
"Don't you associate tidiness with me?"
"No, you're too wild. Tidinesss is a petty virtue."
"Well I confess it hasn't anything to do with my general character. I
hope I'm not petty anyhow. It's sternly practical tidiness. I used to
be lazy and find my stockings muddled up with the spoons, but it soon
sickened me and now I have come to prefer the fag of clearing up to the
discomfort of a muddle. Besides, if I'm going to have you here it
oughtn't to be a beddy 'bed-sit,' but a sitty 'bed-sit.'"
"Your precious reputation," he laughed.
On another night she asked him what the Berrisfords thought about his
absence from home.
"I don't know and I don't think I care!" he answered.
"Why? They must be interested in you, and you're very fond of them."
"I dare say, but I can't think of them now." He drew her to him.
"Freda, I'm too happy to care about them. I just can't imagine that
the world has any other place but London, or any other people but you
and me. Nothing else is real; nothing counts, not India or Oxford or
anything."
She yielded herself to him, but suddenly drew back.
"You mustn't go and muddle things," she said conscientiously.
"Supposing you fail next September, what would I feel like?"
"I won't fail next September," he answered defiantly.
"I'm glad you said that. You must be confident, much, much more
confident. I'm sure you would have been happier if you had never been
afraid of things."
Ecstasy to know her gladness, to see her quick smile of confidence
because he was confident! How could he have feared and doubted? He
could not let her draw away: his arms must have her.
"I'm never going to be afraid again," he said. "I know what was wrong
now."
"Well?"
"I didn't care about anything. I didn't know what I wanted, while
everything lay in front of me. I didn't feel, though I had all the
world to feel about. I didn't love, though I had all the world to
love. I just drifted. Now I have what I want."
She was silent. Across the tumult of his soul stole things of the
senses, the pulsing of her blood, the scent of that brown witchery of
hair, the touch of her tired hand, the vision of a glistening bow of
silk on a poised foot: above all, the divine sense of his own grasping
possession, her clinging weakness.
"I know now what I want," he went on rapidly. "I want the same thing
to go on that has just begun, the thing that has brushed all the
hardness and ugliness out of the world and made the future easy.
You've done all that. I want you."
He crushed her to him roughly, almost hurting her: and he knew by her
stillness that it pleased her so to be hurt.
"You're not going back now," he whispered fiercely. "You're not going
to knock to pieces the thing you've built. India is a cool heaven now;
don't make it a fiery hell. Work is all doing and creating. Don't
make it all drudgery. Oh, I'm selfish. You're so perfect, and I can
only talk of my own work, my own troubles. Freda, I'm sorry. I----"
Still she was silent.
"Oh, say something," he begged. "Forgive me for being selfish."
"There's nothing to forgive."
"Then say--you've said you cared for me--say you love me."
In a moment he had forgotten his remorse and again was claiming,
insisting. And she, knowing that love can be, even must be, selfish
and imperious, was glad that he should claim her and obeyed his command.
Of course Martin stayed in London over Christmas and into the New Year,
living with a fullness he had never known, seeing the purpose and
fineness of things which he had despised and neglected. How strange it
was that all the world should be changed by that one weak figure,
seemingly so ineffectual! how strange that one mortal should carry for
another the keys of heaven! How trivial seemed all his philosophy with
its objectivity of this and that when he discovered how subjective all
his outlook was, how the presence or the absence of a loved one could
make or mar the colour-medley of a sunset or the beauty of a tree
against the sky.
One thing was certain: he gloried in possession. All his loneliness
was forgotten now and, as he paced the streets, he could look upon the
other couples without the pang of jealousy that once had stung him.
There would be no more glances thrown furtively at passing women, no
turning of an eager eye for bygone faces, no more emptiness and
yearning. Deep magic lay in the thought that Freda, with her smile,
and her quick mind, and her infinite grace of movement, was his to
possess, to own. He was not ashamed to glory in these proprietary
relations nor was she ashamed to accept them. She even welcomed them,
yielding to Martin with an utter abandonment of self. She wanted only
to be his, to be his loved possession, to help him and to share humbly
in his triumphs and successes.
One night indeed he repented, not of his love, but of his manner of
love. He felt the indignity of ownership.
They had gone, in a fit of intellectual enthusiasm, to see a play
called _Drift_. At a small outlying theatre two young men of ideas
were completing the noble task of self-imposed bankruptcy by giving the
British public a season of "good drama." And the public naturally
helped on the work by the easy method of staying away. The house was
barely half full when, after the hammerings customary in these circles,
the curtain went up.