§ 1
It was in the early spring of 1909 that I had a letter from Mary.
By that time my life was set fully upon its present courses, Gidding and
I had passed from the stage of talking and scheming to definite
undertakings. Indeed by 1909 things were already organized upon their
present lines. We had developed a huge publishing establishment with one
big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were
studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment
of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under
the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the
broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its
streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm
had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully
edited and revised editions as we could, the whole of the English,
Spanish and French literature, and we were only waiting for the release
of machinery to attack German, Russian and Italian, and were giving each
language not only its own but a very complete series of good
translations of the classical writers in every other tongue. We had a
little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at
each important literary centre. We had, for example, more than a score
of men at work translating Bengali fiction and verse into English,--a
lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent
Englishman--and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in
Arabic. We meant to give so good and cheap a book, and to be so
comprehensive in our choice of books, excluding nothing if only it was
real and living, on account of any inferiority of quality, obscurity of
subject or narrowness of demand, that in the long run anybody, anywhere,
desiring to read anything would turn naturally and inevitably to our
lists.
Ours was to be in the first place a world literature. Then afterwards
upon its broad currents of distribution and in the same forms we meant
to publish new work and new thought. We were also planning an
encyclopædia. Behind our enterprise of translations and reprints we were
getting together and putting out a series of guide-books, gazetteers,
dictionaries, text-books and books of reference, and we were organizing
a revising staff for these, a staff that should be constantly keeping
them up to date. It was our intention to make every copy we printed bear
the date of its last revision in a conspicuous place, and we hoped to
get the whole line of these books ultimately upon an annual basis, and
to sell them upon repurchasing terms that would enable us to issue a new
copy and take back and send the old one to the pulping mill at a narrow
margin of profit. Then we meant to spread our arms wider, and
consolidate and offer our whole line of text-books, guide-books and
gazetteers, bibliographies, atlases, dictionaries and directories as a
new World Encyclopædia, that should also annually or at longest
biennially renew its youth.
So far we had gone in the creation of a huge international organ of
information, and of a kind of gigantic modern Bible of world literature,
and in the process of its distribution we were rapidly acquiring an
immense detailed knowledge of the book and publishing trade, finding
congestions here, neglected opportunities there, and devising and
drawing up a hundred schemes for relief, assistance, amalgamation and
rearrangement. We had branches in China, Japan, Peru, Iceland and a
thousand remote places that would have sounded as far off as the moon to
an English or American bookseller in the seventies. China in particular
was a growing market. We had a subsidiary company running a flourishing
line of book shops in the east-end of London, and others in New Jersey,
Chicago, Buenos Ayres, the South of France, and Ireland. Incidentally we
had bought up some thousands of miles of Labrador forest to ensure our
paper supply, and we could believe that before we died there would not
be a corner of the world in which any book of interest or value whatever
would not be easily attainable by any intelligent person who wanted to
read it. And already we were taking up the more difficult and ambitious
phase of our self-appointed task, and considering the problem of using
these channels we were mastering and deepening and supplementing for the
stimulation and wide diffusion of contemporary thought.
There we went outside the province of Alphabet and Mollentrave and into
an infinitely subtler system of interests. We wanted to give sincere and
clear-thinking writers encouragement and opportunity, to improve the
critical tribunal and make it independent of advertising interests, so
that there would be a readier welcome for luminous thinking and writing
and a quicker explosion of intellectual imposture. We sought to provide
guides and intelligencers to contemporary thought. We had already set up
or subsidized or otherwise aided a certain number of magazines and
periodicals that seemed to us independent-spirited, out-spoken and well
handled, but we had still to devise our present scheme of financing
groups of men to create magazines and newspapers, which became their own
separate but inalienable property after so many years of success.
But all this I hope you will already have become more or less familiar
with when this story reaches your hands, and I hope by the time it does
so we shall be far beyond our present stage of experiment and that you
will have come naturally to play your part in this most fascinating
business of maintaining an onward intellectual movement in the world, a
movement not simply independent of but often running counter to all
sorts of political and financial interests. I tell you this much here
for you to understand that already in 1909 and considering the business
side of my activities alone, I was a hard worker and very strenuously
employed. And in addition to all this huge network of enterprises I had
developed with Gidding, I was still pretty actively a student. I
wasn't--I never shall be--absolutely satisfied with my general ideas. I
was enquiring keenly and closely into those problems of group and crowd
psychology from which all this big publishing work has arisen, and
giving particular attention to the war-panics and outbreaks of
international hostility that were then passing in deepening waves
across Europe. I had already accumulated a mass of notes for the book
upon "Group Jealousy in Religious Persecution, Racial Conflicts and War"
which I hope to publish the year after next, and which therefore I hope
you will have read long before this present book can possibly come to
you. And moreover Rachel and I had established our home in London--in
the house we now occupy during the winter and spring--and both you and
your little sister had begun your careers as inhabitants of this earth.
Your little sister had indeed but just begun.
And then one morning at the breakfast-table I picked a square envelope
out of a heap of letters, and saw the half-forgotten and infinitely
familiar handwriting of Lady Mary Justin.... The sight of it gave me an
odd mixture of sensations. I was startled, I was disturbed, I was a
little afraid. I hadn't forgiven her yet; it needed but this touch to
tell me how little I had forgotten....
§ 2
I sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before I opened it,
hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic
situation. Then I pushed my chair a little back from the table and
ripped the envelope.
It was a far longer letter than Mary had ever written me in the old
days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. I
have it still, and here I open its worn folds and, except for a few
trifling omissions, copy it out for you.... A few trifling omissions, I
say,--just one there is that is not trifling, but that I must needs
make....
You will never see any of these letters because I shall destroy them so
soon as this copy is made. It has been difficult--or I should have
destroyed them before. But some things can be too hard for us....
This first letter is on the Martens note-paper; its very heading was
familiar to me. The handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little
stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two scribbled obliterations;
it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her
usual and characteristic ease....
And as I read, slowly my long-cherished anger evaporated, and the real
Mary, outspoken and simple, whom I had obscured by a cloud of fancied
infidelities, returned to me....
"My dear Stephen," she begins, "About six weeks ago I saw in the _Times_
that you have a little daughter. It set me thinking, picturing you with
a mite of a baby in your arms--what _little_ things they are,
Stephen!--and your old face bent over it, so that presently I went to my
room and cried. It set me thinking about you so that I have at last
written you this letter.... I love to think of you with wife and
children about you Stephen,--I heard of your son for the first time
about a year ago, but--don't mistake me,--something wrings me too....
"Well, I too have children. Have you ever thought of me as a mother? I
am. I wonder how much you know about me now. I have two children and the
youngest is just two years old. And somehow it seems to me that now that
you and I have both given such earnests of our good behavior, such
evidence that _that_ side of life anyhow is effectually settled for us,
there is no reason remaining why we shouldn't correspond. You are my
brother, Stephen, and my friend and my twin and the core of my
imagination, fifty babies cannot alter that, we can live but once and
then die, and, promise or no promise, I will not be dead any longer in
your world when I'm not dead, nor will I have you, if I can help it, a
cold unanswering corpse in mine....
"Too much of my life and being, Stephen, has been buried, and I am in
rebellion. This is a breach of the tomb if you like, an irregular
private premature resurrection from an interment in error. Out of my
alleged grave I poke my head and say Hello! to you. Stephen, old friend!
dear friend! how are you getting on? What is it like to you? How do you
feel? I want to know about you.... I'm not doing this at all furtively,
and you can write back to me, Stephen, as openly as your heart desires.
I have told Justin I should do this. I rise, you see, blowing my own
Trump. Let the other graves do as they please....
"Your letters will be respected, Stephen.... If you choose to rise also
and write me a letter.
"Stephen, I've been wanting to do this for--for all the time. If there
was thought-reading you would have had a thousand letters. But formerly
I was content to submit, and latterly I've chafed more. I think that as
what they call passion has faded, the immense friendliness has become
more evident, and made the bar less and less justifiable. You and I have
had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day--it was in a
report in the _Times_, I think--was calling _Materia Matrimoniala_. And
of course I hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts
of ways--whatever you have done about me I've had a woman's sense of
honor about you and I've managed to learn a great deal without asking
forbidden questions. I've pricked up my ears at the faintest echo of
your name.
"They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort
of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all
rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I
should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I
never see any advertisement of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what
it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd
and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest
appearance of being animated by you. And equally perplexing is your
being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace
Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so forth. It's
so--Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports
of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the _Fortnightly_. I
can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching
into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean,
Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English
politics--speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning,
taking up that work you dropped--it's six years now ago. I've been
accumulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our
side,"--this you will remember was in 1909--"still steers our devious
party courses, and the Tariff Reformers have still to capture us. Weston
Massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the
Clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good
seaman in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the poop,
white and shrieking with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists
armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons
were fixed.... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only
for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?
"We are in it so far as I can contrive. But I contrive very little. We
are pillars of the Conservative party--on that Justin's mind is firmly
settled--and every now and then I clamor urgently that we must do more
for it. But Justin's ideas go no further than writing cheques--doing
more for the party means writing a bigger cheque--and there are moments
when I feel we shall simply bring down a peerage upon our heads and bury
my ancient courtesy title under the ignominy of a new creation. He would
certainly accept it. He writes his cheque and turns back at the earliest
opportunity to his miniature gardens and the odd little freaks of
collecting that attract him. Have you ever heard of chintz oil jars?
'No,' you will say. Nor has anyone else yet except our immediate circle
of friends and a few dealers who are no doubt industriously increasing
the present scanty supply. We possess three. They are matronly shaped
jars about two feet or a yard high, of a kind of terra-cotta with wooden
tops surmounted by gilt acorns, and they have been covered with white
paint and on this flowers and birds and figures from some very rich old
chintz have been stuck very cunningly, and then everything has been
varnished--and there you are. Our first and best was bought for
seven-and-sixpence, brought home in the car, put upon a console table
on the second landing and worshipped. It's really a very pleasant mellow
thing to see. Nobody had ever seen the like. Guests, sycophantic people
of all sorts were taken to consider it. It was looked at with heads at
every angle, one man even kept his head erect and one went a little
upstairs and looked at it under his arm. Also the most powerful lenses
have been used for a minute examination, and one expert licked the
varnish and looked extremely thoughtful and wise at me as he turned the
booty over his gifted tongue. And now, God being with us, we mean to
possess every specimen in existence--before the Americans get hold of
the idea. Yesterday Justin got up and motored sixty miles to look at an
alleged fourth....
"Oh my dear! I am writing chatter. You perceive I've reached the
chattering stage. It is the fated end of the clever woman in a good
social position nowadays, her mind beats against her conditions for the
last time and breaks up into this carping talk, this spume of
observation and comment, this anecdotal natural history of the
restraining husband, as waves burst out their hearts in a foam upon a
reef. But it isn't chatter I want to write to you.
"Stephen, I'm intolerably wretched. No creature has ever been gladder to
have been born than I was for the first five and twenty years of my
life. I was full of hope and I was full, I suppose, of vanity and rash
confidence. I thought I was walking on solid earth with my head reaching
up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the
smiling. And I am nothing and worse than nothing, I am the ineffectual
mother of two children, a daughter whom I adore--but of her I may not
tell you--and a son,--a son who is too like his father for any fury of
worship, a stolid little creature.... That is all I have done in the
world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue Persian who is scarcely
two years old, has already had nine kittens. My husband and I have never
forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other;
that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our rôle;
I have done my duty to the great new line of Justin by giving it the
heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen
between us. We hardly speak except in company. I have not been so much
married, Stephen, I find, as collected, and since our tragic
misadventure--but there were beautiful moments, Stephen, unforgettable
glimpses of beauty in that--thank God, I say impenitently for that--the
door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is
not locked, is very discreetly--watched. I have no men friends, no
social force, no freedom to take my line. My husband is my official
obstacle. We barb the limitations of life for one another. A little
while ago he sought to chasten me--to rouse me rather--through jealousy,
and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of
artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous
interest. I was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired.
'This,' I said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for _me_, Justin,'--and
the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible
celerity. I hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with
by a minion, but I become more and more aware of my ignorance of a
great financier's methods as I become more and more aware of them....
"Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know
what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like
a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release
me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not;
and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any
secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me,
write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.
"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore,
and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And
you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge
he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had
nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it
all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the
case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are
active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publishing
a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But
justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul
alive."
§ 3
I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about
me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things
upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to
me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And
Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young
mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of
reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary
for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter
jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room.
Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a
desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a
book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.
And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a
character in the story.
I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. "It's a letter from Mary Justin," I
said.
She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame
of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what
she had to do with that and then remarked, "I thought you two were not
to correspond."
"Yes," I said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding."
There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to
the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.
"I suppose," said Rachel, "she wants to hear from you again."
"She thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can
consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to
hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great
friends."
"Of course," said Rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. You must
have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write."
"I suppose," she added, "her husband knows."
"She's told him, she says...."
Her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a
second, and it was as if hastily she snatched away a thought from my
observation. I had a moment of illuminating embarrassment. So far we had
contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought
to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an
entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. If
perhaps I had been largely silent to her about Mary it was not so much
that I sought to hide things from her as that I myself sought to forget.
It is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any
such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. But we had maintained a
convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each
other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our
friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.
I wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read--and to do so was
manifestly impossible. Something had arisen between us that made out of
our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. Here were
things I knew and understood completely and that I could not even
describe to Rachel. What would she make of Mary's "Write to me. Write to
me"? A mere wish to resume.... I would not risk the exposure of Mary's
mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....
That letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that
region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted
convention of our complete mutual understanding. In my memory it seems
to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the
evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.
Then I put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy assumption of
carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.
"It will be curious," I said, "to write to her again.... To tell her
about things...."
And then with immense interest, "Are these Chichester sausages you've
got here, Rachel, or some new kind?"
Rachel roused herself to respond with an equal affectation, and we made
an eager conversation about bacon and sausages--for after that startling
gleam of divergence we were both anxious to get back to the
superficialities of life again.
§ 4