A COMPROMISE WITH CONVENTIONALITY.
MARLOWE was as responsible for Emily’s self-exaggeration as was Emily
herself. He had been enveloping her in an atmosphere of adulation,
through which she could see clearly and sensibly neither him nor
herself nor her affairs.
When she first appeared he was deeply entangled elsewhere. But at once
with the adroitness of experience, he extricated himself and boldly
advanced into the new and unprecedently attractive net which fate was
spreading for him. He was of those men who do not go far on the journey
without a woman, or long with the same woman. He abhorred monotony
both in work and in love; a typical impressionist, he soon found one
subject, whether for his mind or for his heart, exhausted and wearisome.
Emily in her loneliness and youth, yearning for love and companionship,
was so frankly attracted that he at first thought her as easy a
conquest as had been the women who dwelt in the many and brief chapters
of the annals of his conquering career. But he, and she also, to
her great surprise, discovered that, while she had cast aside most
conventionality in practice and all conventionality in theory there
remained an immovable remnant. And this, fast anchored in unreasoning
inherited instinct, stubbornly resisted their joint attack. In former
instances of somewhat similar discoveries, he had winged swiftly, and
gracefully, away; now, to his astonishment, he found that his wings
were snared. Without intention on his part, without effort on her part,
he was fairly caught. Nor was he struggling against the toils.
They had been together many times since the return from Furnaceville.
And usually it was just he and she, dining in the open air, or taking
long drives or walks, or sailing the river or the bay. But their
perplexed state of mind had kept them from all but subtle reference to
the one subject of which both were thinking more and more intently and
intensely. One night they were driving in a hansom after a dinner on
the Savoy balcony--he suddenly bent and kissed the long sleeve of her
thin summer dress at the wrist. “You light a flame that goes dancing
through my veins,” he said. “I wish I could find new words to put it
in. But I’ve only the old ones, Emily--I love you and I want your
love--I want you. This is an unconditional surrender and I’m begging
you to receive it. You won’t say no, will you, Emily?”
Her eyes were brilliant and her cheeks pale. But she succeeded in
controlling her voice so that she could put a little mockery into her
tone when she said: “What--you! You, who are notoriously opposed to
unconditional surrender. I never expected to live to see the day when
you would praise treason and proclaim yourself a traitor.”
“I love you,” he said--“that’s all the answer I can make.”
“And only a few days ago some one was repeating to me a remark of
yours--let me see, how did you put it? Oh, yes--‘love is a bird that
does not sing well in a cage.’”
“I said it--and I meant it,” he replied. “And I love you--that’s all. I
still believe what I said, but--please, Emily, dear--bring the cage!”
The mockery in her face gave place to a serious look. “I wonder,” she
said, “does love sing at all in a cage? I’ve never known an instance,
though I’ve read and heard of them. But they’re almost all a long way
off, or a long time ago, or among old-fashioned people.”
“But I’m old-fashioned, I find--and won’t you be, dear? And I think we
might teach our wild bird to sing in a cage, don’t you?”
Emily made no answer but continued to watch the dark trees, that closed
in on either side of the shining drive.
“Since I’ve known you, Emily, I’ve found a new side to my nature--one I
did not suspect the existence of. Perhaps it didn’t exist until I knew
you.”
“It has been so with me,” she said. She had been surprised and even
disquieted by the upbursting of springs of tenderness and gentleness
and longing since she had known Marlowe.
“Do you care--a little, dear?” he asked.
She nodded. “But what were you going to say?”
“I’ve always disliked the idea of marriage,” he went on. “There’s
something in me--not peculiar to me, I imagine, but in most men as
well--that revolts at the idea of a bond of any kind. A man falls in
love with a woman or a woman with a man. And heretofore I’ve always
said to myself, how can they know that love will last?”
“They can’t know it,” replied Emily. “And when they pledge themselves
to keep on loving and honouring, they must know, if they are capable of
thinking, that they’ve promised something they had no right to promise.
I hate to be bound. I love to be free. Nothing, nothing, could induce
me to give up my freedom.”
Marlowe had expected that she would gladly put aside her idea of
freedom the moment he announced that he was willing to sacrifice his
own. Her earnestness disconcerted, alarmed him. “Emily!” he said in
a low, intense tone, putting his hand upon hers. “Tell me”-- She
had turned her head and they were now looking each into the other’s
eyes--“do you--can’t you--care for me?” He wondered at the appeal in
his voice, at the anxiety with which he waited for her answer. “I
cannot live without you, Emily.”
“But if I were tied to you,” she said, “if I felt compelled, if I felt
that you were being compelled, to keep on with me--well, I’m not sure
that I could continue to care or to believe that you cared.”
“Then”--he interrupted.
“But,” she went on, “I’m not great enough or wise enough, or perhaps
I was too long trained to conventionality, or am too recently and
incompletely freed,--to----”
“It isn’t necessary,” he began, as she hesitated and cast about for a
phrase. “Perhaps--in some circumstances--I’d have hoped that it would
be so. But with you--it’s different. I can’t explain myself even to
myself. All I know is that my theories have gone down the wind and
that--I want you. I want you on the world’s terms--for better or for
worse, for ever and a day. Dear, can’t you care enough for me to take
the risk?”
He put his arm round her and kissed her. She said in a faint voice,
hardly more than a murmur, “I think so--yes.”
“Will you marry me, Emily?” he asked eagerly, and then he smiled with
a little self-mockery. “I’ve always loathed that word ‘marry’--and all
other words that mean finality. I’ve always wished to be free to change
my mind and my course at any moment. And now----”
She pushed him from her, but left her hand on his shoulder. “Yes, dear,
but it isn’t a finality with us. We go through a ceremony because--say,
because it is convenient. But if we--either of us--cease to love, each
must feel free to go. If I ever found out that you had kissed me
once, merely because you thought it was expected of you, I’d despise
myself--and you. If I promise to marry you, dear, you must promise to
leave me free.”
“Since I could not hold you--the real you--an instant longer than you
wished--I promise.” He caught her in his arms and kissed her again and
again. “But you’ll never call on me to redeem my promise, will you,
dear?”
“That’s why I ask you to make it. If we’re both free, we may not ever
care to test it,” she answered. The words came from her mind, but with
them came a tone and a look from the heart that were an answer to his.
“We--you talk the new wisdom,” he said, “but--” and he kissed her once
more “feel the old wisdom, or folly--which is it? No matter--I love
you.”
“The road is very bright here and carriages are coming,” she answered,
sitting up and releasing herself from him. And then they both laughed
at their sensitiveness to conventions.
Marlowe was all for flinging their theories overboard in the mass and
accepting the routine as it is marked out for the married. But Emily
refused. She could not entertain the idea of becoming a dependent
upon him, absorbed in his personality. “I wish to continue to love
him,” she said to herself. “And also I’d be very foolish to bind him,
though he wishes to be bound. The chances are, he’d grow weary long
before I did. A man’s life is fuller than a woman’s, even than a
working-woman’s. And he has more temptations to wander.”
“We will marry,” she said to him, “but we will not ‘settle down’.”
“I should hope _not_,” he answered, with energy, as before his eyes
rose a vision of himself yawning in carpet-slippers with a perambulator
in the front hall.
“We will compromise with conventionality,” she went on. “We will marry,
but we won’t tell anybody. And I’ll take an apartment with Joan Gresham
and will go on with my work. And-- Dearest, I don’t wish to become an
old story to you--at least not so long as we’re young. I don’t want
you as my husband. I want you to be my lover. And I want to be always,
every time we meet, new and interesting to you.”
“But--why, I’d be little more than a stranger.”
“Do you think so?” She put her arms about his neck and looked him full
in the eyes. “You know it wouldn’t be so.”
He thought a moment. “I see what you mean,” he said. “I suppose it
is familiarity that drives love out of marriage. Whatever you wish,
Strange Lady--anything, everything. We can easily try your plan.”
“And if it fails, we can ‘settle down’ just like other people, where,
if we ‘settled down’ first and failed at that, we’d have nothing left
to try.”
“You are so--so different from any other woman that ever was,” he
said. “No wonder I love you in the way that a man loves only once.”
“And I’m determined that you shall keep on loving me.”
“I can see that you are getting ready to lead me a wild life.” There
was foreboding as well as jest in his tone.