"And tell me what you would do to conquer the world for me?" she asked.
I cannot remember now a word of all the vague threatenings against the
sundering universe with which I replied. Her hand was on my shoulder as
she listened....
But I do know that even on this first morning she left me with a sense
of beautiful unreality, of having dipped for some precious moments into
heroic gossamer. All my world subjugation seemed already as evanescent
as the morning haze and the vanishing dews as I stood, a little hidden
in the shadows of the Killing Wood and ready to plunge back at the first
hint of an observer, and watched her slender whiteness flit
circumspectly towards the house.
§ 3
Our next three or four meetings are not so clearly defined. We did not
meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too
punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same
place. But there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different
mood. We had met at the sham ruins at the far end of the great
shrubbery, a huge shattered Corinthian portico of rather damaged stucco
giving wide views of the hills towards Alfridsham between its three
erect pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. It was an
overcast morning, I remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of
twilight clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees
between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. And we were at
cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that Mary did not
mean to marry me, that she dreaded making any promise to me for the
future, that all the heroic common cause I wanted with her, was quite
alien to her dreams.
"But Mary," I said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don't you
love me? Don't you want me?"
"You know I love you, Stevenage," she said. "You know."
"But if two people love one another, they want to be always together,
they want to belong to each other."
She looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning.
"Stevenage," she said after one of those steadfast pauses of hers, "I
want to belong to myself."
"Naturally," I said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then
paused.
"Why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?"
she asked. "Why must it be like that?"
I do not remember how I tried to meet this extraordinary idea. "One
loves," I may have said. The subtle scepticisms of her mind went
altogether beyond my habits of thinking; it had never occurred to me
that there was any other way of living except in these voluntary and
involuntary mutual servitudes in which men and women live and die. "If
you love me," I urged, "if you love me---- I want nothing better in all
my life but to love and serve and keep you and make you happy."
She surveyed me and weighed my words against her own.
"I love meeting you," she said. "I love your going because it means
that afterwards you will come again. I love this--this slipping out to
you. But up there, there is a room in the house that is _my_
place--me--my own. Nobody follows me there. I want to go on living,
Stevenage, just as I am living now. I don't want to become someone's
certain possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. No, not
even to you."
"But if you love," I cried.
"To you least of all. Don't you see?--I want to be wonderful to you,
Stevenage, more than to anyone. I want--I want always to make your heart
beat faster. I want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating
faster. Always and always I want it to be like that. Just as it has been
on these mornings. It has been beautiful--altogether beautiful."
"Yes," I said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues I had
never faced before.
"It isn't," I said, "how people live."
"It is how I want to live," said Mary.
"It isn't the way life goes."
"I want it to be. Why shouldn't it be? Why at any rate shouldn't it be
for me?"
§ 4
I made some desperate schemes to grow suddenly rich and powerful, and I
learnt for the first time my true economic value. Already my father and
I had been discussing my prospects in life and he had been finding me
vague and difficult. I was full of large political intentions, but so
far I had made no definite plans for a living that would render my
political ambitions possible. It was becoming apparent to me that for a
poor man in England, the only possible route to political distinction is
the bar, and I was doing my best to reconcile myself to the years of
waiting and practice that would have to precede my political début.
My father disliked the law. And I do not think it reconciled him to the
idea of my being a barrister that afterwards I hoped to become a
politician. "It isn't in our temperament, Stephen," he said. "It's a
pushing, bullying, cramming, base life. I don't see you succeeding
there, and I don't see myself rejoicing even if you do succeed. You have
to shout, and Strattons don't shout; you have to be smart and tricky and
there's never been a smart and tricky Stratton yet; you have to snatch
opportunities and get the better of the people and misrepresent the
realities of every case you touch. You're a paid misrepresenter. They
say you'll get a fellowship, Stephen. Why not stay up, and do some
thinking for a year or so. There'll be enough to keep you. Write a
little."
"The bar," I said, "is only a means to an end."
"If you succeed."
"If I succeed. One has to take the chances of life everywhere."
"And what is the end?"
"Constructive statesmanship."
"Not in that way," said my father, pouring himself a second glass of
port, and turned over my high-sounding phrase with a faint hint of
distaste; "Constructive Statesmanship. No. Once a barrister always a
barrister. You'll only be a party politician.... Vulgar men....
Vulgar.... If you succeed that is...."
He criticized me but he did not oppose me, and already in the beginning
of the summer we had settled that I should be called to the bar.
Now suddenly I wanted to go back upon all these determinations. I began
to demand in the intellectual slang of the time "more actuality," and to
amaze my father with talk about empire makers and the greatness of Lord
Strathcona and Cecil Rhodes. Why, I asked, shouldn't I travel for a year
in search of opportunity? At Oxford I had made acquaintance with a son
of Pramley's, the big Mexican and Borneo man, and to him I wrote,
apropos of a half-forgotten midnight talk in the rooms of some common
friend. He wrote back with the suggestion that I should go and talk to
his father, and I tore myself away from Mary and went up to see that
great exploiter of undeveloped possibilities and have one of the most
illuminating and humiliating conversations in the world. He was, I
remember, a little pale-complexioned, slow-speaking man with a humorous
blue eye, a faint, just perceptible northern accent and a trick of
keeping silent for a moment after you had finished speaking, and he
talked to me as one might talk to a child of eight who wanted to know
how one could become a commander-in-chief. His son had evidently
emphasized my Union reputation, and he would have been quite willing, I
perceived, to give me employment if I had displayed the slightest
intelligence or ability in any utilizable direction. But quite
dreadfully he sounded my equipment with me and showed me the emptiness
of my stores.
"You want some way that gives you a chance of growing rich rapidly," he
said. "Aye. It's not a bad idea. But there's others, you know, have
tried that game before ye.
"You don't want riches just for riches but for an end. Aye! Aye! It's
the spending attracts ye. You'd not have me think you'd the sin of
avarice. I'm clear on that about ye.
"Well," he explained, "it's all one of three things we do, you
know--prospecting and forestalling and--just stealing, and the only
respectable way is prospecting. You'd prefer the respectable way, I
suppose?... I knew ye would. Well, let's see what chances ye have."
And he began to probe my practical knowledge. It was like an unfit man
stripping for a medical inspection. Did I know anything of oil, of
rubber, of sugar, of substances generally, had I studied mineralogy or
geology, had I any ideas of industrial processes, of technical
chemistry, of rare minerals, of labor problems and the handling of alien
labor, of the economics of railway management or of camping out in dry,
thinly populated countries, or again could I maybe speak Spanish or
Italian or Russian? The little dons who career about Oxford afoot and
awheel, wearing old gowns and mortarboards, giggling over Spooner's
latest, and being tremendous "characters" in the intervals of concocting
the ruling-class mind, had turned my mind away from such matters
altogether. I had left that sort of thing to Germans and east-end Jews
and young men from the upper-grade board schools of Sheffield and
Birmingham. I was made to realize appalling wildernesses of
ignorance....
"You see," said old Pramley, "you don't seem to know anything whatever.
It's a deeficulty. It'll stand in your way a little now, though no
doubt you'd be quick at the uptake--after all the education they've
given ye.... But it stands in your way, if ye think of setting out to do
something large and effective, just immediately...."
Moreover it came out, I forget now how, that I hadn't clearly grasped
the difference between cumulative and non-cumulative preference
shares....
I remember too how I dined alone that evening in a mood between frantic
exasperation and utter abasement in the window of the Mediated
Universities Club, of which I was a junior member under the
undergraduate rule. And I lay awake all night in one of the austere club
bedrooms, saying to old Pramley a number of extremely able and
penetrating things that had unhappily not occurred to me during the
progress of our interview. I didn't go back to Burnmore for several
days. I had set my heart on achieving something, on returning with some
earnest of the great attack I was to make upon the separating great
world between myself and Mary. I am far enough off now from that angry
and passionate youngster to smile at the thought that my subjugation of
things in general and high finance in particular took at last the form
of proposing to go into the office of Bean, Medhurst, Stockton, and
Schnadhorst upon half commission terms. I was awaiting my father's reply
to this startling new suggestion when I got a telegram from Mary. "We
are going to Scotland unexpectedly. Come down and see me." I went home
instantly, and told my father I had come to talk things over with him. A
note from Mary lay upon the hall-table as I came in and encountered my
father. "I thought it better to come down to you," I said with my
glance roving to find that, and then I met his eye. It wasn't altogether
an unkindly eye, but I winced dishonestly.
"Talking is better for all sorts of things," said my father, and wanted
to know if the weather had been as hot in London as it had been in
Burnmore.
Mary's note was in pencil, scribbled hastily. I was to wait after eleven
that night near the great rose bushes behind the pavilion. Long before
eleven I was there, on a seat in a thick shadow looking across great
lakes of moonlight towards the phantom statuary of the Italianate garden
and the dark laurels that partly masked the house. I waited nearly an
hour, an hour of stillness and small creepings and cheepings and goings
to and fro among the branches.
In the bushes near by me a little green glow-worm shared my vigil.
And then, wrapped about in a dark velvet cloak, still in her white
dinner dress, with shining, gleaming, glancing stones about her dear
throat, warm and wonderful and glowing and daring, Mary came flitting
out of the shadows to me.
"My dear," she whispered, panting and withdrawing a little from our
first passionate embrace, "Oh my dear!... How did I come? Twice before,
when I was a girl, I got out this way. By the corner of the conservatory
and down the laundry wall. You can't see from here, but it's easy--easy.
There's a tree that helps. And now I have come that way to you.
_You!..._
"Oh! love me, my Stephen, love me, dear. Love me as if we were never to
love again. Am I beautiful, my dear? Am I beautiful in the moonlight?
Tell me!...
"Perhaps this is the night of our lives, dear! Perhaps never again will
you and I be happy!...
"But the wonder, dear, the beauty! Isn't it still? It's as if nothing
really stood solid and dry. As if everything floated....
"Everyone in all the world has gone to sleep to-night and left the world
to us. Come! Come this way and peep at the house, there. Stoop--under
the branches. See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and
its eyes shut. One window is open, _my_ little window, Stephen! but that
is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black.
"Along here a little further is night-stock. Now--Now! Sniff, Stephen!
Sniff! The scent of it! It lies--like a bank of scented air.... And
Stephen, there! Look!... A star--a star without a sound, falling out of
the blue! It's gone!"
There was her dear face close to mine, soft under the soft moonlight,
and the breath of her sweet speech mingled with the scent of the
night-stock....
That was indeed the most beautiful night of my life, a night of
moonlight and cool fragrance and adventurous excitement. We were
transported out of this old world of dusty limitations; it was as if for
those hours the curse of man was lifted from our lives. No one
discovered us, no evil thing came near us. For a long time we lay close
in one another's arms upon a bank of thyme. Our heads were close
together; her eyelashes swept my cheek, we spoke rarely and in soft
whispers, and our hearts were beating, beating. We were as solemn as
great mountains and as innocent as sleeping children. Our kisses were
kisses of moonlight. And it seemed to me that nothing that had ever
happened or could happen afterwards, mattered against that happiness....
It was nearly three when at last I came back into my father's garden. No
one had missed me from my room and the house was all asleep, but I could
not get in because I had closed a latch behind me, and so I stayed in
the little arbor until day, watching the day break upon long beaches of
pale cloud over the hills towards Alfridsham. I slept at last with my
head upon my arms upon the stone table, until the noise of shooting
bolts and doors being unlocked roused me to watch my chance and slip
back again into the house, and up the shuttered darkened staircase to my
tranquil, undisturbed bedroom.
§ 5
It was in the vein of something evasive in Mary's character that she let
me hear first of her engagement to Justin through the _Times_. Away
there in Scotland she got I suppose new perspectives, new ideas; the
glow of our immediate passion faded. The thing must have been drawing in
upon her for some time. Perhaps she had meant to tell me of it all that
night when she had summoned me to Burnmore. Looking back now I am the
more persuaded that she did. But the thing came to me in London with the
effect of an immense treachery. Within a day or so of the newspaper's
announcement she had written me a long letter answering some argument of
mine, and saying nothing whatever of the people about her. Even then
Justin must have been asking her to marry him. Her mind must have been
full of that question. Then came a storm of disappointment, humiliation
and anger with this realization. I can still feel myself writing and
destroying letters to her, letters of satire, of protest. Oddly enough I
cannot recall the letter that at last I sent her, but it is eloquent of
the weak boyishness of my position that I sent it in our usual furtive
manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of
our relationship. "No," she scribbled back, "you do not understand. I
cannot write. I must talk to you."
We had a secret meeting.
With Beatrice Normandy's connivance she managed to get away for the
better part of the day, and we spent a long morning in argument in the
Botanical Gardens--that obvious solitude--and afterwards we lunched upon
ham and ginger beer at a little open-air restaurant near the Broad Walk
and talked on until nearly four. We were so young that I think we both
felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of
romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. There is
something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too,
naïvely noble and adventurous. I can never determine if older people are
less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. I still recall the
autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which I
had never been before, and which I have never revisited--a memory of
walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial
channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going
nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly
decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon
a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of
conservatory.
I must have been resentful and bitter in the beginning of that talk. I
do not remember that I had any command of the situation or did anything
but protest throughout that day. I was too full of the egotism of the
young lover to mark Mary's moods and feelings. It was only afterwards
that I came to understand that she was not wilfully and deliberately
following the course that was to separate us, that she was taking it
with hesitations and regrets. Yet she spoke plainly enough, she spoke
with a manifest sincerity of feeling. And while I had neither the grasp
nor the subtlety to get behind her mind I perceive now as I think things
out that Lady Ladislaw had both watched and acted, had determined her
daughter's ideas, sown her mind with suggestions, imposed upon her a
conception of her situation that now dominated all her thoughts.
"Dear Stephen," reiterated Mary, "I love you. I do, clearly, definitely,
deliberately love you. Haven't I told you that? Haven't I made that
plain to you?"
"But you are going to marry Justin!"
"Stephen dear, can I possibly marry you? Can I?"
"Why not? Why not make the adventure of life with me? Dare!"
She looked down on me. She was sitting upon a parapet of the brickwork
and I was below her. She seemed to be weighing possibilities.
"Why not?" I cried. "Even now. Why not run away with me, throw our two
lives together? Do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of
things! Let us go somewhere together----"
"But Stephen," she asked softly, "_where_?"
"Anywhere!"
She spoke as an elder might do to a child. "No! tell me where--exactly.
Where would it be? Where should we go? How should we live? Tell me. Make
me see it, Stephen."
"You are too cruel to me, Mary," I said. "How can I--on the spur of the
moment--arrange----?"
"But dear, suppose it was somewhere very grimy and narrow!
Something--like some of those back streets I came through to get here.
Suppose it was some dreadful place. And you had no money. And we were
both worried and miserable. One gets ill in such places. If I loved you,
Stephen--I mean if you and I--if you and I were to be together, I should
want it to be in sunshine, I should want it to be among beautiful
forests and mountains. Somewhere very beautiful...."
"Why not?"
"Because--to-day I know. There are no such places in the world for us.
Stephen, they are dreams."
"For three years now," I said, "I have dreamed such dreams.
"Oh!" I cried out, stung by my own words, "but this is cowardice! Why
should we submit to this old world! Why should we give up--things you
have dreamed as well as I! You said once--to hear my voice--calling in
the morning.... Let us take each other, Mary, now. _Now!_ Let us take
each other, and"--I still remember my impotent phrase--"afterwards count
the cost!"
"If I were a queen," said Mary. "But you see I am not a queen." ...
So we talked in fragments and snatches of argument, and all she said
made me see more clearly the large hopelessness of my desire. "At
least," I urged, "do not marry Justin now. Give me a chance. Give me
three years, Mary, three short years, to work, to do something!"
She knew so clearly now the quality of her own intentions.
"Dear Stephen," she explained, "if I were to come away with you and
marry you, in just a little time I should cease to be your lover, I
should be your squaw. I should have to share your worries and make your
coffee--and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred
ways. Think! Should I be any good as a squaw? How can one love when one
knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover
indigestion? And I don't _want_ to be your squaw. I don't want that at
all. It isn't how I feel for you. I don't _want_ to be your servant and
your possession."
"But you will be Justin's--squaw, you are going to marry him!"
"That is all different, Stevenage. Between him and me there will be
space, air, dignity, endless servants----"
"But," I choked. "You! He! He will make love to you, Mary."
"You don't understand, Stephen."
"He will make love to you, Mary. Mary! don't you understand? These
things---- We've never talked of them.... You will bear him children!"
"No," she said.
"But----"
"No. He promises. Stephen,--I am to own myself."
"But--He marries you!"
"Yes. Because he--he admires me. He cannot live without me. He loves my
company. He loves to be seen with me. He wants me with him to enjoy all
the things he has. Can't you understand, Stephen?"
"But do you mean----?"
Our eyes met.
"Stephen," she said, "I swear."
"But---- He hopes."
"I don't care. He has promised. I have his promise. I shall be free. Oh!
I shall be free--free! He is a different man from you, Stephen. He isn't
so fierce; he isn't so greedy."
"But it parts us!"
"Only from impossible things."
"It parts us."
"It does not even part us, Stevenage. We shall see one another! we shall
talk to one another."
"I shall lose you."
"I shall keep you."
"But I--do you expect me to be content with _this_?"
"I will make you content. Oh! Stephen dear, can't there be love--love
without this clutching, this gripping, this carrying off?"
"You will be carried altogether out of my world."
"If I thought that, Stephen, indeed I would not marry him."
But I insisted we should be parted, and parted in the end for ever, and
there I was the wiser of the two. I knew the insatiable urgency within
myself. I knew that if I continued to meet Mary I should continue to
desire her until I possessed her altogether.
§ 6
I cannot reproduce with any greater exactness than this the quality and
gist of our day-long conversation. Between us was a deep affection, and
instinctive attraction, and our mental temperaments and our fundamental
ideas were profoundly incompatible. We were both still very young in
quality, we had scarcely begun to think ourselves out, we were greatly
swayed by the suggestion of our circumstances, complex, incoherent and
formless emotions confused our minds. But I see now that in us there
struggled vast creative forces, forces that through a long future, in
forms as yet undreamt of, must needs mould the destiny of our race. Far
more than Mary I was accepting the conventions of our time. It seemed to
me not merely reasonable but necessary that because she loved me she
should place her life in my youthful and inexpert keeping, share my
struggles and the real hardships they would have meant for her, devote
herself to my happiness, bear me children, be my inspiration in
imaginative moments, my squaw, helper and possession through the whole
twenty-four hours of every day, and incidentally somehow rear whatever
family we happened to produce, and I was still amazed in the depths of
my being that she did not reciprocate this simple and comprehensive
intention. I was ready enough I thought for equivalent sacrifices. I was
prepared to give my whole life, subordinate all my ambitions, to the
effort to maintain our home. If only I could have her, have her for my
own, I was ready to pledge every hour I had still to live to that
service. It seemed mere perversity to me then that she should turn even
such vows as that against me.
"But I don't want it, Stevenage," she said. "I don't want it. I want you
to go on to the service of the empire, I want to see you do great
things, do all the things we've talked about and written about. Don't
you see how much better that is for you and for me--and for the world
and our lives? I don't want you to become a horrible little specialist
in feeding and keeping me."
"Then--then _wait_ for me!" I cried.
"But--I want to live myself! I don't want to wait. I want a great house,
I want a great position, I want space and freedom. I want to have
clothes--and be as splendid as your career is going to be. I want to be
a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now,
dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her
light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your
honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and
years--unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything
that is worth having between us in order just to get me."
"But I want _you_, Mary," I cried, drumming at the little green table
with my fist. "I want you. I want nothing else in all the world unless
it has to do with you."
"You've got me--as much as anyone will ever have me. You'll always have
me. Always I will write to you, talk to you, watch you. Why are you so
greedy, Stephen? Why are you so ignoble? If I were to come now and marry
you, it wouldn't help you. It would turn you into--a wife-keeper, into
the sort of uninteresting preoccupied man one sees running after and
gloating over the woman he's bought--at the price of his money and his
dignity--and everything.... It's not proper for a man to live so for a
woman and her children. It's dwarfish. It's enslaving. It's--it's
indecent. Stephen! I'd hate you so." ...
§ 7
We parted at last at a cab-rank near a bridge over the Canal at the
western end of Park Village. I remember that I made a last appeal to her
as we walked towards it, and that we loitered on the bridge, careless of
who might see us there, in a final conflict of our wills. "Before it is
too late, Mary, dear," I said.
She shook her head, her white lips pressed together.
"But after the things that have happened. That night--the moonlight!"
"It's not fair," she said, "for you to talk of that. It isn't fair."
"But Mary. This is parting. This indeed is parting."
She answered never a word.
"Then at least talk to me again for one time more."
"Afterwards," she said. "Afterwards I will talk to you. Don't make
things too hard for me, Stephen."
"If I could I would make this impossible. It's--it's hateful."
She turned to the kerb, and for a second or so we stood there without
speaking. Then I beckoned to a hansom.
She told me Beatrice Normandy's address.
I helped her into the cab. "Good-bye," I said with a weak affectation
of an everyday separation, and I turned to the cabman with her
instructions.
Then again we looked at one another. The cabman waited. "All right,
sir?" he asked.
"Go ahead!" I said, and lifted my hat to the little white face within.
I watched the cab until it vanished round the curve of the road. Then I
turned about to a world that had become very large and empty and
meaningless.
§ 8
I struggled feebly to arrest the course of events. I wrote Mary some
violent and bitter letters. I treated her as though she alone were
responsible for my life and hers; I said she had diverted my energies,
betrayed me, ruined my life. I hinted she was cold-blooded, mercenary,
shameless. Someday you, with that quick temper of yours and your power
of expression, will understand that impulse to write, to pour out a
passionately unjust interpretation of some nearly intolerable situation,
and it is not the least of all the things I owe to Mary that she
understood my passion and forgave those letters and forgot them. I tried
twice to go and see her. But I do not think I need tell you, little son,
of these self-inflicted humiliations and degradations. An angry man is
none the less a pitiful man because he is injurious. The hope that had
held together all the project of my life was gone, and all my thoughts
and emotions lay scattered in confusion....
You see, my little son, there are two sorts of love; we use one name
for very different things. The love that a father bears his children,
that a mother feels, that comes sometimes, a strange brightness and
tenderness that is half pain, at the revelation of some touching aspect
of one long known to one, at the sight of a wife bent with fatigue and
unsuspicious of one's presence, at the wretchedness and perplexity of
some wrong-doing brother, or at an old servant's unanticipated tears,
that is love--like the love God must bear us. That is the love we must
spread from those of our marrow until it reaches out to all mankind,
that will some day reach out to all mankind. But the love of a young man
for a woman takes this quality only in rare moments of illumination and
complete assurance. My love for Mary was a demand, it was a wanton claim
I scored the more deeply against her for every moment of happiness she
gave me. I see now that as I emerged from the first abjection of my
admiration and began to feel assured of her affection, I meant nothing
by her but to possess her, I did not want her to be happy as I want you
to be happy even at the price of my life; I wanted her. I wanted her as
barbarians want a hunted enemy, alive or dead. It was a flaming jealousy
to have her mine. That granted, then I was prepared for all
devotions....
This is how men love women. Almost as exclusively and fiercely I think
do women love men. And the deepest question before humanity is just how
far this jealous greed may be subdued to a more generous passion. The
fierce jealousy of men for women and women for men is the very heart of
all our social jealousies, the underlying tension of this crowded modern
life that has grown out of the ampler, simpler, ancient life of men.
That is why we compete against one another so bitterly, refuse
association and generous co-operations, keep the struggle for existence
hard and bitter, hamper and subordinate the women as they in their turn
would if they could hamper and subordinate the men--because each must
thoroughly have his own.
And I knew my own heart too well to have any faith in Justin and his
word. He was taking what he could, and his mind would never rest until
some day he had all. I had seen him only once, but the heavy and
resolute profile above his bent back and slender shoulders stuck in my
memory.
If he was cruel to Mary, I told her, or broke his least promise to her,
I should kill him.
§ 9
My distress grew rather than diminished in the days immediately before
her marriage, and that day itself stands out by itself in my memory, a
day of wandering and passionate unrest. My imagination tormented me with
thoughts of Justin as a perpetual privileged wooer.
Well, well,--I will not tell you, I will not write the ugly mockeries my
imagination conjured up. I was constantly on the verge of talking and
cursing aloud to myself, or striking aimlessly at nothing with clenched
fists. I was too stupid to leave London, too disturbed for work or any
distraction of my mind. I wandered about the streets of London all day.
In the morning I came near going to the church and making some
preposterous interruptions. And I remember discovering three or four
carriages adorned with white favors and a little waiting crowd outside
that extinguisher-spired place at the top of Regent Street, and
wondering for a moment or so at their common preoccupation, and then
understanding. Of course, another marriage! Of all devilish
institutions!
What was I to do with my life now? What was to become of my life? I can
still recall the sense of blank unanswerableness with which these
questions dominated my mind, and associated with it is an effect of
myself as a small human being, singular and apart, wandering through a
number of London landscapes. At one time I was in a great grey
smoke-rimmed autumnal space of park, much cut up by railings and worn by
cricket pitches, far away from any idea of the Thames, and in the
distance over the tops of trees I discovered perplexingly the clustering
masts and spars of ships. I have never seen that place since. Then the
Angel at Islington is absurdly mixed up with the distresses of this day.
I attempted some great detour thence, and found myself with a dumb
irritation returning to the place from another direction. I remember too
a wide street over which passes a thundering railway bridge borne upon
colossal rounded pillars of iron, and carrying in white and blue some
big advertisement, I think of the _Daily Telegraph_. Near there I
thought a crowd was gathered about the victim of some accident, and
thrusting myself among the people with a vague idea of help, discovered
a man selling a remedy for corns. And somewhere about this north region
I discovered I was faint with hunger, and got some bread and cheese and
beer in a gaudily decorated saloon bar with a sanded floor. I resisted
a monstrous impulse to stay in that place and drink myself into
inactivity and stupefaction with beer.
Then for a long time I sat upon an iron seat near some flower beds in a
kind of garden that had the headstones of graves arranged in a row
against a yellow brick wall. The place was flooded with the amber
sunshine of a September afternoon. I shared the seat with a nursemaid in
charge of a perambulator and several scuffling uneasy children, and I
kept repeating to myself: "By now it is all over. The thing is done."
My sense of the enormity of London increased with the twilight, and
began to prevail a little against my intense personal wretchedness. I
remember wastes of building enterprise, interminable vistas of wide dark
streets, with passing trams, and here and there at strategic corners
coruscating groups of shops. And somewhere I came along a narrow street
suddenly upon the distant prospect of a great monstrous absurd place on
a steep hill against the last brightness of the evening sky, a burlesque
block of building with huge truncated pyramids at either corner, that I
have since learnt was the Alexandra Palace. It was so queer and bulky
that it arrested and held my attention, struck on my memory with an
almost dreamlike quality, so that years afterwards I went to Muswell
Hill to see if indeed there really was such a place on earth, or whether
I had had a waking nightmare during my wanderings....
I wandered far that night, very far. Some girl accosted me, a thin-faced
ruined child younger by a year or so than myself. I remembered how I
talked to her, foolish rambling talk. "If you loved a man, and he was
poor, you'd wait," I said, "you'd stick to him. You'd not leave him
just to get married to a richer man."
We prowled talking for a time, and sat upon a seat somewhere near the
Regent's Park canal. I rather think I planned to rescue her from a
fallen life, but somehow we dropped that topic. I know she kissed me. I
have a queer impression that it came into my head to marry her. I put
all my loose money in her hands at last and went away extraordinarily
comforted by her, I know not how, leaving her no doubt wondering
greatly.
I did not go to bed that night at all, nor to the office next morning. I
never showed myself in the office again. Instead I went straight down to
my father, and told him I wanted to go to the war forthwith. I had an
indistinct memory of a promise I had made Mary to stay in England, but I
felt it was altogether unendurable that I should ever meet her again. My
father sat at table over the remains of his lunch, and regarded me with
astonishment, with the beginnings of protest.
"I want to get away," I said, and to my own amazement and shame I burst
into tears.
"My boy!" he gasped, astonished and terrified. "You've--you've not
done--some foolish thing?"
"No," I said, already wiping the tears from my face, "nothing.... But I
want to go away."
"You shall do as you please," he said, and sat for a moment regarding
his only son with unfathomable eyes.
Then he got up with a manner altogether matter-of-fact, came half-way
round the table and mixed me a whisky and soda. "It won't be much of a
war, I'm told," he said with the syphon in his hands, breaking a
silence. "I sometimes wish--I had seen a bit of soldiering. And this
seems to be an almost unavoidable war. Now, at any rate, it's
unavoidable.... Drink this and have a biscuit."
He turned to the mantelshelf, and filled his pipe with his broad back to
me. "Yes," he said, "you---- You'll be interested in the war. I hope----
I hope you'll have a good time there...."