Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began
a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my
part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making
soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to
convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural
insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our
minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs
who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The
impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of
impossible utterances. It was with a real quality of rescue that our
hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table,
and to introduce me to mine. "You shall have him again on your other
side," she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me
as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider I was.
We talked very little at dinner. Both of us I think were quite unequal
to the occasion. Whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of
us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting
hour side by side. I began to remember old happenings with an
astonishing vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand I had
kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed
off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. Was she too
remembering? But I perhaps had changed altogether....
"Why did you go away as you did?" she asked abruptly, when for a moment
we were isolated conversationally. "Why did you never write?"
She had still that phantom lisp.
"What else could I do?"
She turned away from me and answered the man on her left, who had just
addressed her....
When the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent
things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent of
unspoken intimacies. We discussed something; I think Lady Tarvrille's
flowers and the Cape Flora and gardens. She told me she had a Japanese
garden with three Japanese gardeners. They were wonderful little men to
watch. "Humming-bird gardeners," she called them. "They wear their
native costume."
"We are your neighbors in Surrey," she said, going off abruptly from
that. "We are quite near to your father."
She paused with that characteristic effect of deliberation in her
closed lips. Then she added: "I can see the trees behind your father's
house from the window of my room."
"Yes," I said. "You take all our southward skyline."
She turned her face to me with the manner of a great lady adding a new
acquaintance to her collection. But her eyes met mine very steadily and
intimately. "Mr. Stratton," she said--it was the first time in her life
she had called me that--"when we come back to Surrey I want you to come
and see me and tell me of all the things you are going to do. Will you?"
§ 3
That meeting, that revival, must have been late in November or early in
December. Already by that time I had met your mother. I write to you,
little son, not to you as you are now, but to the man you are someday to
be. I write to understand myself, and, so far as I can understand, to
make you understand. So that I want you to go back with me for a time
into the days before your birth, to think not of that dear spirit of
love who broods over you three children, that wise, sure mother who
rules your life, but of a young and slender girl, Rachel More, younger
then than you will be when at last this story comes into your hands. For
unless you think of her as being a girl, if you let your present
knowledge of her fill out this part in our story, you will fail to
understand the proportions of these two in my life. So I shall write of
her here as Rachel More, as if she were someone as completely
dissociated from yourself as Lady Mary; as if she were someone in the
story of my life who had as little to do with yours.
I had met her in September. The house my father lived in is about twelve
miles away from your mother's home at Ridinghanger, and I was taken over
by Percy Restall in his motor-car. Restall had just become a convert to
this new mode of locomotion, and he was very active with a huge,
malignant-looking French car that opened behind, and had a kind of poke
bonnet and all sorts of features that have since disappeared from the
automobile world. He took everyone that he could lay hands upon for
rides,--he called it extending their range, and he called upon everyone
else to show off the car; he was responsible for more introduction and
social admixture in that part of Surrey than had occurred during the
previous century. We punctured in the Ridinghanger drive, Restall did
his own repairs, and so it was we stayed for nearly four hours and
instead of a mere caller I became a familiar friend of the family.
Your mother then was still not eighteen, a soft white slip of being,
tall, slender, brown-haired and silent, with very still deep dark eyes.
She and your three aunts formed a very gracious group of young women
indeed; Alice then as now the most assertive, with a gay initiative and
a fluent tongue; Molly already a sun-brown gipsy, and Norah still a
pig-tailed thing of lank legs and wild embraces and the pinkest of swift
pink blushes; your uncle Sidney, with his shy lank moodiness, acted the
brotherly part of a foil. There were several stray visitors, young men
and maidens, there were always stray visitors in those days at
Ridinghanger, and your grandmother, rosy and bright-eyed, maintained a
gentle flow of creature comforts and kindly but humorous observations. I
do not remember your grandfather on this occasion; probably he wasn't
there.
There was tea, and we played tennis and walked about and occasionally
visited Restall, who was getting dirtier and dirtier, and crosser and
crosser at his repairs, and spreading a continually more remarkable
assemblage of parts and instruments over the grass about him. He looked
at last more like a pitch in the Caledonian market than a decent country
gentleman paying an afternoon call. And then back to more tennis and
more talk. We fell into a discussion of Tariff Reform as we sat taking
tea. Two of the visitor youths were strongly infected by the new
teachings which were overshadowing the outlook of British Imperialism.
Some mean phrase about not conquering Africa for the German bagman, some
ugly turn of thought that at a touch brought down Empire to the level of
a tradesman's advantage, fell from one of them, and stirred me to sudden
indignation. I began to talk of things that had been gathering in my
mind for some time.
I do not know what I said. It was in the vein of my father's talk no
doubt. But I think that for once I may have been eloquent. And in the
midst of my demand for ideals in politics that were wider and deeper
than artful buying and selling, that looked beyond a vulgar aggression
and a churl's dread and hatred of foreign things, while I struggled to
say how great and noble a thing empire might be, I saw Rachel's face.
This, it was manifest, was a new kind of talk to her. Her dark eyes were
alight with a beautiful enthusiasm for what I was trying to say, and
for what in the light of that glowing reception I seemed to be.
I felt that queer shame one feels when one is taken suddenly at the full
value of one's utmost expressions. I felt as though I had cheated her,
was passing myself off for something as great and splendid as the Empire
of my dreams. It is hard to dissociate oneself from the fine things to
which one aspires. I stopped almost abruptly. Dumbly her eyes bade me go
on, but when I spoke again it was at a lower level....
That look in Rachel's eyes remained with me. My mind had flashed very
rapidly from the realization of its significance to the thought that if
one could be sure of that, then indeed one could pitch oneself high.
Rachel, I felt, had something for me that I needed profoundly, without
ever having known before that I needed it. She had the supreme gifts of
belief and devotion; in that instant's gleam it seemed she held them out
to me.
Never before in my life had it seemed credible to me that anyone could
give me that, or that I could hope for such a gift of support and
sacrifice. Love as I had known it had been a community and an alliance,
a frank abundant meeting; but this was another kind of love that shone
for an instant and promised, and vanished shyly out of sight as I and
Rachel looked at one another.
Some interruption occurred. Restall came, I think, blackened by
progress, to drink a cup of tea and negotiate the loan of a kitchen
skewer. A kitchen skewer it appeared was all that was needed to complete
his reconstruction in the avenue. Norah darted off for a kitchen skewer,
while Restall drank. And then there was a drift to tennis, and Rachel
and I were partners. All this time I was in a state of startled
attention towards her, full of this astounding impression that something
wonderful and unprecedented had flowed out from her towards my life,
full too of doubts now whether that shining response had ever occurred,
whether some trick of light and my brain had not deceived me. I wanted
tremendously to talk to her, and did not know how to begin in any
serious fashion. Beyond everything I wanted to see again that deep onset
of belief....
"Come again," said your grandmother to me, "come again!" after she had
tried in vain to make Restall stay for an informal supper. I was all for
staying, but Restall said darkly, "There are the Lamps."
"But they will be all right," said Mrs. More.
"I can't trust 'em," said Restall, with a deepening gloom. "Not after
_that_." The motor-car looked self-conscious and uncomfortable, but said
nothing by way of excuse, and Restall took me off in it like one whose
sun has set for ever. "I wouldn't be surprised," said Restall as we went
down the drive, "if the damned thing turned a somersault. It might
do--anything." Those were the brighter days of motoring.
The next time I went over released from Restall's limitations, and
stayed to a jolly family supper. I found remarkably few obstacles in my
way to a better acquaintance with Rachel. You see I was an entirely
eligible and desirable young man in Mrs. More's eyes....
§ 4
When I recall these long past emotions again, I am struck by the
profound essential difference between my feelings for your mother and
for Mary. They were so different that it seems scarcely rational to me
that they should be called by the same name. Yet each was love,
profoundly deep and sincere. The contrast lies, I think, in our relative
ages, and our relative maturity; that altered the quality of all our
emotions. The one was the love of a man of six-and-twenty, exceptionally
seasoned and experienced and responsible for his years, for a girl still
at school, a girl attractively beautiful, mysterious and unknown to him;
the other was the love of coevals, who had been playmates and intimate
companions, and of whom the woman was certainly as capable and wilful as
the man.
Now it is exceptional for men to love women of their own age, it is the
commoner thing that they should love maidens younger and often much
younger than themselves. This is true more particularly of our own
class; the masculine thirties and forties marry the feminine twenties,
all the prevailing sentiment and usage between the sexes rises naturally
out of that. We treat this seniority as though it were a virile
characteristic; we treat the man as though he were a natural senior, we
expect a weakness, a timid deference, in the girl. I and Mary had loved
one another as two rivers run together on the way to the sea, we had
grown up side by side to the moment when we kissed; but I sought your
mother, I watched her and desired her and chose her, very tenderly and
worshipfully indeed, to be mine. I do not remember that there was any
corresponding intention in my mind to be hers. I do not think that that
idea came in at all. She was something to be won, something playing an
inferior and retreating part. And I was artificial in all my attitudes
to her, I thought of what would interest her, what would please her, I
knew from the outset that what she saw in me to rouse that deep, shy
glow of exaltation in her face was illusion, illusion it was my business
to sustain. And so I won her, and long years had to pass, years of
secret loneliness and hidden feelings, of preposterous pretences and
covert perplexities, before we escaped from that crippling tradition of
inequality and looked into one another's eyes with understanding and
forgiveness, a woman and a man.
I made no great secret of the interest and attraction I found in Rachel,
and the Mores made none of their entire approval of me. I walked over on
the second occasion, and Ridinghanger opened out, a great flower of
genial appreciation that I came alone, hiding nothing of its dawning
perception that it was Rachel in particular I came to see.
Your grandmother's match-making was as honest as the day. There was the
same salad of family and visitors as on the former afternoon, and this
time I met Freshman, who was destined to marry Alice; there was tea,
tennis, and, by your grandmother's suggestion, a walk to see the sunset
from the crest of the hill. Rachel and I walked across the breezy
moorland together, while I talked and tempted her to talk.
What, I wonder, did we talk about? English scenery, I think, and African
scenery and the Weald about us, and the long history of the Weald and
its present and future, and at last even a little of politics. I had
never explored the mind of a girl of seventeen before; there was a
surprise in all she knew and a delight in all she didn't know, and about
herself a candor, a fresh simplicity of outlook that was sweeter than
the clear air about us, sweeter than sunshine or the rising song of a
lark. She believed so gallantly and beautifully, she was so perfectly,
unaffectedly and certainly prepared to be a brave and noble person--if
only life would let her. And she hadn't as yet any suspicion that life
might make that difficult....
I went to Ridinghanger a number of times in the spring and early summer.
I talked a great deal with Rachel, and still I did not make love to her.
It was always in my mind that I would make love to her, the heavens and
earth and all her family were propitious, glowing golden with consent
and approval, I thought she was the most wonderful and beautiful thing
in life, and her eyes, the intonation of her voice, her hurrying color
and a hundred little involuntary signs told me how she quickened at my
coming. But there was a shyness. I loved her as one loves and admires a
white flower or a beautiful child--some stranger's child. I felt that I
might make her afraid of me. I had never before thought that to make
love is a coarse thing. But still at high summer when I met Mary again
no definite thing had been said between myself and Rachel. But we knew,
each of us knew, that somewhere in a world less palpable, in fairyland,
in dreamland, we had met and made our vows.
§ 5
You see how far my imagination had gone towards readjustment when Mary
returned into my life. You see how strange and distant it was to meet
her again, changed completely into the great lady she had intended to
be, speaking to me with the restrained and practised charm of a woman
who is young and beautiful and prominent and powerful and secure. There
was no immediate sense of shock in that resumption of our broken
intercourse, it seemed to me that night simply that something odd and
curious had occurred. I do not remember how we parted that evening or
whether we even saw each other after dinner was over, but from that hour
forth Mary by insensible degrees resumed her old predominance in my
mind. I woke up in the night and thought about her, and next day I found
myself thinking of her, remembering things out of the past and recalling
and examining every detail of the overnight encounter. How cold and
ineffective we had been, both of us! We had been like people resuming a
disused and partially forgotten language. Had she changed towards me?
Did she indeed want to see me again or was that invitation a mere
demonstration of how entirely unimportant seeing me or not seeing me had
become?
Then I would find myself thinking with the utmost particularity of her
face. Had it changed at all? Was it altogether changed? I seemed to have
forgotten everything and remembered everything; that peculiar slight
thickness of her eyelids that gave her eyes their tenderness, that light
firmness of her lips. Of course she would want to talk to me, as now I
perceived I wanted to talk to her.
Was I in love with her still? It seemed to me then that I was not. It
had not been that hesitating fierceness, that pride and demand and
doubt, which is passionate love, that had made all my sensations strange
to me as I sat beside her. It had been something larger and finer,
something great and embracing, a return to fellowship. Here beside me,
veiled from me only by our transient embarrassment and the tarnish of
separation and silences, was the one person who had ever broken down the
crust of shy insincerity which is so incurably my characteristic and
talked intimately of the inmost things of life to me. I discovered now
for the first time how intense had been my loneliness for the past five
years. I discovered now that through all those years I had been hungry
for such talk as Mary alone could give me. My mind was filled with talk,
filled with things I desired to say to her; that chaos began to take on
a multitudinous expression at the touch of her spirit. I began to
imagine conversations with her, to prepare reports for her of those new
worlds of sensation and activity I had discovered since that boyish
parting.
But when at last that talk came it was altogether different from any of
those I had invented.
She wrote to me when she came down into Surrey and I walked over to
Martens the next afternoon. I found her in her own sitting-room, a
beautiful characteristic apartment with tall French windows hung with
blue curtains, a large writing-desk and a great litter of books. The
room gave upon a broad sunlit terrace with a balustrading of yellowish
stone, on which there stood great oleanders. Beyond was a flower garden
and then the dark shadows of cypresses. She was standing as I came in to
her, as though she had seen me coming across the lawns and had been
awaiting my entrance. "I thought you might come to-day," she said, and
told the manservant to deny her to other callers. Again she produced
that queer effect of being at once altogether the same and altogether
different from the Mary I had known. "Justin," she said, "is in Paris.
He comes back on Friday." I saw then that the change lay in her bearing,
that for the easy confidence of the girl she had now the deliberate
dignity and control of a married woman--a very splendidly and spaciously
married woman. Her manner had been purged of impulse. Since we had met
she had stood, the mistress of great houses, and had dealt with
thousands of people.
"You walked over to me?"
"I walked," I said. "It is nearly a straight path. You know it?"
"You came over the heather beyond our pine wood," she confirmed. And
then I think we talked some polite unrealities about Surrey scenery and
the weather. It was so formal that by a common impulse we let the topic
suddenly die. We stood through a pause, a hesitation. Were we indeed to
go on at that altitude of cold civility? She turned to the window as if
the view was to serve again.
"Sit down," she said and dropped into a chair against the light, looking
away from me across the wide green space of afternoon sunshine. I sat
down on a little sofa, at a loss also.
"And so," she said, turning her face to me suddenly, "you come back into
my life." And I was amazed to see that the brightness of her eyes was
tears. "We've lived--five years."
"You," I said clumsily, "have done all sorts of things. I hear of
you--patronizing young artists--organizing experiments in village
education."
"Yes," she said, "I've done all sorts of things. One has to. Forced,
unreal things for the most part. You I expect have done--all sorts of
things also.... But yours have been real things...."
"All things," I remarked sententiously, "are real. And all of them a
little unreal. South Africa has been wonderful. And now it is all over
one doubts if it really happened. Like that incredulous mood after a
storm of passion."
"You've come back for good?"
"For good. I want to do things in England."
"Politics?"
"If I can get into that."
Again a pause. There came the characteristic moment of deliberation that
I remembered so well.
"I never meant you," she said, "to go away.... You could have written.
You never answered the notes I sent."
"I was frantic," I said, "with loss and jealousy. I wanted to forget."
"And you forgot?"
"I did my best."
"I did my best," said Mary. "And now---- Have you forgotten?"
"Nothing."
"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you
endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together.
But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was
nothing--not worth having. You--you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You
made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man--and how little
else...."
She paused.
"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with
you.... I don't know--if you remember everything...."
She looked me in the eyes for a moment.
"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation.
"But you know, Stephen, that night---- I meant to explain. And
afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected them to go,
even the things one has planned to say. I suppose--I treated
you--disgustingly."