§ 3
And all the while that the first attempts to consolidate, to gather
one's life together into a purpose and a plan of campaign, are going on
upon the field of the young man's life, there come and go and come again
in the sky above him the threatening clouds, the ethereal cirrus, the
red dawns and glowing afternoons of that passion of love which is the
source and renewal of being. There are times when that solicitude
matters no more than a spring-time sky to a runner who wins towards the
post, there are times when its passionate urgency dominates every fact
in his world.
§ 4
One must have children and love them passionately before one realizes
the deep indignity of accident in life. It is not that I mind so much
when unexpected and disconcerting things happen to you or your sisters,
but that I mind before they happen. My dreams and anticipations of your
lives are all marred by my sense of the huge importance mere chance
encounters and incalculable necessities will play in them. And in
friendship and still more here, in this central business of love,
accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you
will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly
as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the
pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to
drive again. In other schoolrooms and nurseries, in slum living-rooms
perhaps or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the
earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying
their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands,
who someday will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous
and irrational and irresistible. They will break the limits of your
concentrating self, call you out to the service of beauty and the
service of the race, sound you to your highest and your lowest, give you
your chance to be godlike or filthy, divine or utterly ignoble, react
together with you upon the very core and essence of your being. These
unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will in extreme intimacy
love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that
interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will
be spent.
And who they may chance to be and their peculiar quality and effect is
haphazard, utterly beyond designing.
Law and custom conspire with the natural circumstances of man to
exaggerate every consequence of this accumulating accident, and make it
definite and fatal....
I find it quite impossible now to recall the steps and stages by which
this power of sex invaded my life. It seems to me now that it began very
much as a gale begins, in catspaws upon the water and little rustlings
among the leaves, and then stillness and then a distant soughing again
and a pause, and then a wider and longer disturbance and so more and
more, with a gathering continuity, until at last the stars were hidden,
the heavens were hidden; all the heights and depths of life were
obscured by stormy impulses and passionate desires. I suppose that
quite at the first there were simple curiosities; no doubt they were
vivid at the time but they have left scarcely a trace; there were vague
first intimations of a peculiar excitement. I do remember more
distinctly phases when there was a going-out from myself towards these
things, these interests, and then a reaction of shame and concealment.
And these memories were mixed up with others not sexual at all, and
particularly with the perception of beauty in things inanimate, with
lights seen at twilight and the tender mysteriousness of the dusk and
the confused disturbing scents of flowers in the evening and the
enigmatical serene animation of stars in the summer sky....
I think perhaps that my boyhood was exceptionally free from vulgarizing
influences in this direction. There were few novels in my father's house
and I neither saw nor read any plays until I was near manhood, so that I
thought naturally about love and not rather artificially round and about
love as so many imaginative young people are trained to do. I fell in
love once or twice while I was still quite a boy. These earliest
experiences rarely got beyond a sort of dumb awe, a vague, vast,
ineffectual desire for self-immolation. For a time I remember I
worshipped Lady Ladislaw with all my being. Then I talked to a girl in a
train--I forget upon what journey--but I remember very vividly her quick
color and a certain roguish smile. I spread my adoration at her feet,
fresh and frank. I wanted to write to her. Indeed I wanted to devote all
my being to her. I begged hard, but there was someone called Auntie who
had to be considered, an Atropos for that thread of romance.
Then there was a photograph in my father's study of the Delphic Sibyl
from the Sistine Chapel, that for a time held my heart, and--Yes, there
was a girl in a tobacconist's shop in the Harbury High Street. Drawn by
an irresistible impulse I used to go and buy cigarettes--and sometimes
converse about the weather. But afterwards in solitude I would meditate
tremendous conversations and encounters with her. The cigarettes
increased the natural melancholy of my state and led to a reproof from
old Henson. Almost always I suppose there is that girl in the
tobacconist's shop....
I believe if I made an effort I could disinter some dozens of such
memories, more and more faded until the marginal ones would be
featureless and all but altogether effaced. As I look back at it now I
am struck by an absurd image; it is as if a fish nibbled at this bait
and then at that.
Given but the slightest aid from accidental circumstances and any of
those slight attractions might have become a power to deflect all my
life.
The day of decision arrived when, the Lady Mary Christian came smiling
out of the sunshine to me into the pavilion at Burnmore. With that the
phase of stirrings and intimations was over for ever in my life. All
those other impressions went then to the dusty lumber room from which I
now so slightingly disinter them.
§ 5
We five had all been playmates together. There were Lord Maxton, who was
killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by
nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about
eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days,
and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, apparently on
account of some early linguistic efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his
best to avenge his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of
limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better
read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of Indians and
warfare and exploration in which we passed our long days together. When
the Christians were at Burnmore, and they usually spent three or four
months in the year there, I had a kind of standing invitation to be with
them. Sometimes there would also be two Christian cousins to swell our
party, and sometimes there would be a raid of the Fawney children with a
detestable governess who was perpetually vociferating reproaches, but
these latter were absent-minded, lax young persons, and we did not
greatly love them.
It is curious how little I remember of Mary's childhood. All that has
happened between us since lies between that and my present self like
some luminous impenetrable mist. I know we liked each other, that I was
taller than she was and thought her legs unreasonably thin, and that
once when I knelt by accident on a dead stick she had brought into an
Indian camp we had made near the end of the west shrubbery, she flew at
me in a sudden fury, smacked my face, scratched me and had to be
suppressed, and was suppressed with extreme difficulty by the united
manhood of us three elder boys. Then it was I noted first the blazing
blueness of her eyes. She was light and very plucky, so that none of us
cared to climb against her, and she was as difficult to hold as an eel.
But all these traits and characteristics vanished when she was
transformed.
For what seems now a long space of time I had not seen her or any of the
family except Philip; it was certainly a year or more, probably two;
Maxton was at a crammer's and I think the others must have been in
Canada with Lord Ladislaw. Then came some sort of estrangement between
him and his wife, and she returned with Mary and Guy to Burnmore and
stayed there all through the summer.
I was in a state of transition between the infinitely great and the
infinitely little. I had just ceased to be that noble and potent being,
that almost statesmanlike personage, a sixth form boy at Harbury, and I
was going to be an Oxford undergraduate. Philip and I came down together
by the same train from Harbury, I shared the Burnmore dog-cart and
luggage cart, and he dropped me at the rectory. I was a long-limbed
youngster of seventeen, as tall as I am now, and fair, so fair that I
was still boyish-faced while most of my contemporaries and Philip (who
favored his father) were at least smudgy with moustaches. With the
head-master's valediction and the grave elder-brotherliness of old
Henson, and the shrill cheers of a little crowd of juniors still echoing
in my head, I very naturally came home in a mood of exalted gravity, and
I can still remember pacing up and down the oblong lawn behind the
rockery and the fig-tree wall with my father, talking of my outlook with
all the tremendous _savoir faire_ that was natural to my age, and noting
with a secret gratification that our shoulders were now on a level. No
doubt we were discussing Oxford and all that I was to do at Oxford; I
don't remember a word of our speech though I recall the exact tint of
its color and the distinctive feeling of our measured equal paces in the
sunshine....
I must have gone up to Burnmore House the following afternoon. I went up
alone and I was sent out through the little door at the end of the big
gallery into the garden. In those days Lady Ladislaw had made an Indian
pavilion under the tall trees at the east end of the house, and here I
found her with her cousin Helena Christian entertaining a mixture of
people, a carriageful from Hampton End, the two elder Fawneys and a man
in brown who had I think ridden over from Chestoxter Castle. Lady
Ladislaw welcomed me with ample graciousness--as though I was a
personage. "The children" she said were still at tennis, and as she
spoke I saw Guy, grown nearly beyond recognition and then a shining
being in white, very straight and graceful, with a big soft hat and
overshadowed eyes that smiled, come out from the hurried endearments of
the sunflakes under the shadows of the great chestnuts, into the glow of
summer light before the pavilion.
"Steve arrived!" she cried, and waved a welcoming racquet.
I do not remember what I said to her or what else she said or what
anyone said. But I believe I could paint every detail of her effect. I
know that when she came out of the brightness into the shadow of the
pavilion it was like a regal condescension, and I know that she was
wonderfully self-possessed and helpful with her mother's hospitalities,
and that I marvelled I had never before perceived the subtler sweetness
in the cadence of her voice. I seem also to remember a severe internal
struggle for my self-possession, and that I had to recall my exalted
position in the sixth form to save myself from becoming tongue-tied and
abashed and awkward and utterly shamed.
You see she had her hair up and very prettily dressed, and those
aggressive lean legs of hers had vanished, and she was sheathed in
muslin that showed her the most delicately slender and beautiful of
young women. And she seemed so radiantly sure of herself!
After our first greeting I do not think I spoke to her or looked at her
again throughout the meal. I took things that she handed me with an
appearance of supreme indifference, was politely attentive to the elder
Miss Fawney, and engaged with Lady Ladislaw and the horsey little man in
brown in a discussion of the possibility of mechanical vehicles upon the
high road. That was in the early nineties. We were all of opinion that
it was impossible to make a sufficiently light engine for the purpose.
Afterwards Mary confessed to me how she had been looking forward to our
meeting, and how snubbed I had made her feel....
Then a little later than this meeting in the pavilion, though I am not
clear now whether it was the same or some subsequent afternoon, we are
walking in the sunken garden, and great clouds of purple clematis and
some less lavish heliotrope-colored creeper, foam up against the ruddy
stone balustrading. Just in front of us a fountain gushes out of a
grotto of artificial stalagmite and bathes the pedestal of an absurd
little statuette of the God of Love. We are talking almost easily. She
looks sideways at my face, already with the quiet controlled
watchfulness of a woman interested in a man, she smiles and she talks of
flowers and sunshine, the Canadian winter--and with an abrupt
transition, of old times we've had together in the shrubbery and the
wilderness of bracken out beyond. She seems tremendously grown-up and
womanly to me. I am talking my best, and glad, and in a manner scared at
the thrill her newly discovered beauty gives me, and keeping up my
dignity and coherence with an effort. My attention is constantly being
distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never
noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her
voice before.
We agree about the flowers and the sunshine and the Canadian
winter--about everything. "I think so often of those games we used to
invent," she declares. "So do I," I say, "so do I." And then with a
sudden boldness: "Once I broke a stick of yours, a rotten stick you
thought a sound one. Do you remember?"
Then we laugh together and seem to approach across a painful,
unnecessary distance that has separated us. It vanishes for ever. "I
couldn't now," she says, "smack your face like that, Stephen."
That seems to me a brilliantly daring and delightful thing for her to
say, and jolly of her to use my Christian name too! "I believe I
scratched," she adds.
"You never scratched," I assert with warm conviction. "Never."
"I did," she insists and I deny. "You couldn't."
"We're growing up," she cries. "That's what has happened to us. We shall
never fight again with our hands and feet, never--until death do us
part."
"For better, or worse," I say, with a sense of wit and enterprise beyond
all human precedent.
"For richer, or poorer," she cries, taking up my challenge with a
lifting laugh in her voice.
And then to make it all nothing again, she exclaims at the white lilies
that rise against masses of sweet bay along the further wall....
How plainly I can recall it all! How plainly and how brightly! As we
came up the broad steps at the further end towards the tennis lawn, she
turned suddenly upon me and with a novel assurance of command told me to
stand still. "_There_," she said with a hand out and seemed to survey me
with her chin up and her white neck at the level of my eyes. "Yes. A
whole step," she estimated, "and more, taller than I. You will look down
on me, Stephen, now, for all the rest of our days."
"I shall always stand," I answered, "a step or so below you."
"No," she said, "come up to the level. A girl should be smaller than a
man. You are a man, Stephen--almost.... You must be near six feet....
Here's Guy with the box of balls."
She flitted about the tennis court before me, playing with Philip
against Guy and myself. She punished some opening condescensions with a
wicked vigor--and presently Guy and I were straining every nerve to save
the set. She had a low close serve I remember that seemed perfectly
straightforward and simple, and was very difficult to return.
§ 6
All that golden summer on the threshold of my manhood was filled by
Mary. I loved her with the love of a boy and a man. Either I was with
Mary or I was hoping and planning to be with Mary or I was full of some
vivid new impression of her or some enigmatical speech, some pregnant
nothing, some glance or gesture engaged and perplexed my mind. In those
days I slept the profound sweet sleep of youth, but whenever that deep
flow broke towards the shallows, as I sank into it at night and came out
of it at morning, I passed through dreams of Mary to and from a world of
waking thought of her.
There must have been days of friendly intercourse when it seemed we
talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we
had our eyes on one another. And afterwards I would spend long hours in
recalling and analyzing those nothings, questioning their nothingness,
making out of things too submerged and impalpable for the rough drags of
recollection, promises and indications. I would invent ingenious things
to say, things pushing out suddenly from nothingness to extreme
significance. I rehearsed a hundred declarations.
It was easy for us to be very much together. We were very free that
summer and life was all leisure. Lady Ladislaw was busied with her own
concerns; she sometimes went away for two or three days leaving no one
but an attenuated governess with even the shadow of a claim to interfere
with Mary. Moreover she was used to seeing me with her children at
Burnmore; we were still in her eyes no more than children.... And also
perhaps she did not greatly mind if indeed we did a little fall in love
together. To her that may have seemed a very natural and slight and
transitory possibility....
One afternoon of warm shadows in the wood near the red-lacquered Chinese
bridge, we two were alone together and we fell silent. I was trembling
and full of a wild courage. I can feel now the exquisite surmise, the
doubt of that moment. Our eyes met. She looked up at me with an
unwonted touch of fear in her expression and I laid my hands on her. She
did not recoil, she stood mute with her lips pressed together, looking
at me steadfastly. I can feel that moment now as a tremendous
hesitation, blank and yet full of light and life, like a clear sky in
the moment before dawn....
She made a little move towards me. Impulsively, with no word said, we
kissed.
§ 7
I would like very much to give you a portrait of Mary as she was in
those days. Every portrait I ever had of her I burnt in the sincerity of
what was to have been our final separation, and now I have nothing of
her in my possession. I suppose that in the files of old illustrated
weeklies somewhere, a score of portraits must be findable. Yet
photographs have a queer quality of falsehood. They have no movement and
always there was a little movement about Mary just as there is always a
little scent about flowers. She was slender and graceful, so that she
seemed taller than she was, she had beautifully shaped arms and a
brightness in her face; it seemed to me always that there was light in
her face, more than the light that shone upon it. Her fair, very
slightly reddish hair--it was warm like Australian gold--flowed with a
sort of joyous bravery back from her low broad forehead; the color under
her delicate skin was bright and quick, and her mouth always smiled
faintly. There was a peculiar charm for me about her mouth, a
whimsicality, a sort of humorous resolve in the way in which the upper
lip fell upon the lower and in a faint obliquity that increased with
her quickening smile. She spoke with a very clear delicate intonation
that made one want to hear her speak again; she often said faintly
daring things, and when she did, she had that little catch in the
breath--of one who dares. She did not talk hastily; often before she
spoke came a brief grave pause. Her eyes were brightly blue except when
the spirit of mischief took her and then they became black, and there
was something about the upper and lower lids that made them not only the
prettiest but the sweetest and kindliest eyes in the world. And she
moved with a quiet rapidity, without any needless movements, to do
whatever she had a mind to do....
But how impossible it is to convey the personal charm of a human being.
I catalogue these things and it is as if she moved about silently behind
my stumbling enumeration and smiled at me still, with her eyes a little
darkened, mocking me. That phantom will never be gone from my mind. It
was all of these things and none of these things that made me hers, as I
have never been any other person's....
We grew up together. The girl of nineteen mingles in my memory with the
woman of twenty-five.
Always we were equals, or if anything she was the better of us two. I
never made love to her in the commoner sense of the word, a sense in
which the woman is conceived of as shy, unawakened, younger, more
plastic, and the man as tempting, creating responses, persuading and
compelling. We made love to each other as youth should, we were friends
lit by a passion.... I think that is the best love. If I could wish your
future I would have you love someone neither older and stronger nor
younger and weaker than yourself. I would have you have neither a toy
nor a devotion, for the one makes the woman contemptible and the other
the man. There should be something almost sisterly between you. Love
neither a goddess nor a captive woman. But I would wish you a better
fate in your love than chanced to me.
Mary was not only naturally far more quick-minded, more swiftly
understanding than I, but more widely educated. Mine was the stiff
limited education of the English public school and university; I could
not speak and read and think French and German as she could for all that
I had a pedantic knowledge of the older forms of those tongues; and the
classics and mathematics upon which I had spent the substance of my
years were indeed of little use to me, have never been of any real use
to me, they were ladders too clumsy to carry about and too short to
reach anything. My general ideas came from the newspapers and the
reviews. She on the other hand had read much, had heard no end of good
conversation, the conversation of people who mattered, had thought for
herself and had picked the brains of her brothers. Her mother had let
her read whatever books she liked, partly because she believed that was
the proper thing to do, and partly because it was so much less trouble
to be liberal in such things.
We had the gravest conversations.
I do not remember that we talked much of love, though we were very much
in love. We kissed; sometimes greatly daring we walked hand in hand;
once I took her in my arms and carried her over a swampy place beyond
the Killing Wood, and held her closely to me; that was a great event
between us; but we were shy of one another, shy even of very intimate
words; and a thousand daring and beautiful things I dreamt of saying to
her went unsaid. I do not remember any endearing names from that time.
But we jested and shared our humors, shaped our developing ideas in
quaint forms to amuse one another and talked--as young men talk
together.
We talked of religion; I think she was the first person to thaw the
private silences that had kept me bound in these matters even from
myself for years. I can still recall her face, a little flushed and
coming nearer to mine after avowals and comparisons. "But Stephen," she
says; "if none of these things are really true, why do they keep on
telling them to us? What is true? What are we for? What is Everything
for?"
I remember the awkwardness I felt at these indelicate thrusts into
topics I had come to regard as forbidden.
"I suppose there's a sort of truth in them," I said, and then more
Siddonsesquely: "endless people wiser than we are----"
"Yes," she said. "But that doesn't matter to us. Endless people wiser
than we are have said one thing, and endless people wiser than we are
have said exactly the opposite. It's _we_ who have to understand--for
ourselves.... We don't understand, Stephen."
I was forced to a choice between faith and denial. But I parried with
questions. "Don't you," I asked, "feel there is a God?"
She hesitated. "There is something--something very beautiful," she said
and stopped as if her breath had gone. "That is all I know, Stephen...."
And I remember too that we talked endlessly about the things I was to do
in the world. I do not remember that we talked about the things she was
to do, by some sort of instinct and some sort of dexterity she evaded
that, from the very first she had reserves from me, but my career and
purpose became as it were the form in which we discussed all the
purposes of life. I became Man in her imagination, the protagonist of
the world. At first I displayed the modest worthy desire for respectable
service that Harbury had taught me, but her clear, sceptical little
voice pierced and tore all those pretences to shreds. "Do some decent
public work," I said, or some such phrase.
"But is that All you want?" I hear her asking. "Is that All you want?"
I lay prone upon the turf and dug up a root of grass with my penknife.
"Before I met you it was," I said.
"And now?"
"I want you."
"I'm nothing to want. I want you to want all the world.... _Why
shouldn't you?_"
I think I must have talked of the greatness of serving the empire. "Yes,
but splendidly," she insisted. "Not doing little things for other
people--who aren't doing anything at all. I want you to conquer people
and lead people.... When I see you, Stephen, sometimes--I almost wish I
were a man. In order to be able to do all the things that you are going
to do."
"For you," I said, "for you."