Though they talked on these walks they were still curiously evasive. Indeed, they were afraid of each other. They kept falling away from their private thoughts and intentions. They generalized, they discussed Marriage and George Gissing and Bernard Shaw and the suffrage movement and the agitation for the reform of the divorce laws. They pursued imaginary cases into distant thickets of contingency remotely far from the personal issues between them....
§ 6
One day came an incident that Marjorie found wonderfully illuminating. Trafford had a fit of rage. Stung by an unexpected irritation, he forgot himself, as people say, and swore, and was almost physically violent, and the curious thing was that so he litup things for her as no premeditated attempt of his had ever done.
A copy of theScientific Bulletinfired the explosion. He sat down at the breakfast-table with the heaviness of a rather overworked and worried man, tasted his coffee, tore open a letter and crumpled it with his hand, turned to theBulletin, regarded its list of contents with a start, opened it, read for a minute, and expressed himself with an extraordinary heat of manner in these amazing and unprecedented words:
"Oh! Damnation and damnation!"
Then he shied the paper into the corner of the room and pushed his plate from him.
"Damn the whole scheme of things!" he said, and met the blank amazement of Marjorie's eye.
"Behrens!" he said with an air of explanation.
"Behrens?" she echoed with a note of inquiry.
"He's doing my stuff!"
He sat darkling for a time and then hit the table with his fist so hard that the breakfast things seemed to jump together—to Marjorie's infinite amazement. "I can'tstandit!" he said.
She waited some moments. "I don't understand," she began. "What has he done?"
"Oh!" was Trafford's answer. He got up, recovered the crumpled paper and stood reading. "Fool and thief," he said.
Marjorie was amazed beyond measure. She felt as though she had been effaced from Trafford's life. "Ugh!" he cried and slapped back theBulletininto the corner with quite needless violence. He became aware of Marjorie again.
"He's doing my work," he said.
And then as if he completed the explanation:"And I've got to be in Croydon by half-past ten to lecture to a pack of spinsters and duffers, because they're too stupid to get the stuff from books. It's all in books,—every bit of it."
He paused and went on in tones of unendurable wrong. "It isn't as though he was doing it right. He isn't. He can't. He's a fool. He's a clever, greedy, dishonest fool with a twist. Oh! the pile, the big Pile of silly muddled technicalities he's invented already! The solemn mess he's making of it! And there he is, I can't get ahead of him, I can't get at him. I've got no time. I've got no room or leisure to swing my mind in! Oh, curse these engagements, curse all these silly fretting entanglements of lecture and article! I never get the time, I can't get the time, I can't get my mind clear! I'm worried! I'm badgered! And meanwhile Behrens——!"
"Is he discovering what you want to discover?"
"Behrens!No!He's going through the breaches I made. He's guessing out what I meant to do. And he's getting it set out all wrong,—misleading terminology,—distinctions made in the wrong place. Oh, the fool he is!"
"But afterwards——"
"Afterwards I may spend my life—removing the obstacles he's made. He'll be established and I shan't. You don't know anything of these things. You don't understand."
She didn't. Her next question showed as much. "Will it affect your F.R.S.?" she asked.
"Oh!that'ssafe enough, and it doesn't matter anyhow. The F.R.S.! Confound the silly little F.R.S.! As if that mattered. It's seeing all my great openings—misused. It's seeing all I might be doing. This brings it all home to me. Don't you understand, Marjorie? Will you never understand? I'm gettingaway from allthat!I'm being hustled away by all this work, this silly everyday work to get money. Don't you see that unless I can have time for thought and research, life is just darkness to me? I've made myself master of that stuff. I had at any rate. No one can do what I can do there. And when I find myself—oh, shut out, shut out! I come near raving. As I think of it I want to rave again." He paused. Then with a swift transition: "I suppose I'd better eat some breakfast. Is that egg boiled?"
She gave him an egg, brought his coffee, put things before him, seated herself at the table. For a little while he ate in silence. Then he cursed Behrens.
"Look here!" she said. "Bad as I am, you've got to reason with me, Rag. I didn't know all this. I didn't understand... I don't know what to do."
"Whatisthere to do?"
"I've got to do something. I'm beginning to see things. It's just as though everything had become clear suddenly." She was weeping. "Oh, my dear! I want to help you. I have so wanted to help you. Always. And it's come to this!"
"But it's notyourfault. I didn't mean that. It's—it's in the nature of things."
"It's my fault."
"It's not your fault."
"It is."
"Confound it, Marjorie. When I swear at Behrens I'm not swearing at you."
"It's my fault. All this is my fault. I'm eating you up. What's the good of your pretending, Rag. You know it is. Oh! When I married you I meant to make you happy, I had no thought but to make you happy, to give myself to you, my body, my brains, everything, to make life beautiful for you——"
"Well,haven'tyou?" He thrust out a hand shedid not take.
"I've broken your back," she said.
An unwonted resolution came into her face. Her lips whitened. "Don't you know, Rag," she said, forcing herself to speak——"Don't you guess? You don't know half! In that bureau there——In there! It's stuffed with bills. Unpaid bills."
She was weeping, with no attempt to wipe the streaming tears away; terror made the expression of her wet face almost fierce. "Bills," she repeated. "More than a hundred pounds still. Yes! Now.Now!"
He drew back, stared at her and with no trace of personal animus, like one who hears of a common disaster, remarked with a quiet emphasis: "Oh,damn!"
"I know," she said, "Damn!" and met his eyes. There was a long silence between them. She produced a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. "That's what I amount to," she said.
"It's your silly upbringing," he said after a long pause.
"And my silly self."
She stood up, unlocked and opened her littered desk, turned and held out the key to him.
"Why?" he asked.
"Take it. You gave me a cheque-book of my own and a corner of my own, and they—they are just ambushes—against you."
He shook his head.
"Take it," said Marjorie with quiet insistence.
He obeyed. She stood with her eyes on the crumpled heap of bills. They were not even tidily arranged. That seemed to her now an extreme aggravation of her offence.
"I ought to be sent to the chemist's," she remarked,"as one sends a worthless cat."
Trafford weighed this proposition soberly for some moments. "You're a bother, Marjorie," he said with his eyes on the desk; "no end of a bother. I'd better have those bills."
He looked at her, stood up, put his hands on her shoulders, drew her to him and kissed her forehead. He did it without passion, without tenderness, with something like resignation in his manner. She clung to him tightly, as though by clinging she could warm and soften him.
"Rag," she whispered; "all my heart is yours.... I want to help you.... And this is what I have done."
"I know," he said—almost grimly.
He repeated his kiss.
Then he seemed to explode again. "Gods!" he cried, "look at the clock. I shall miss that Croydon lecture!" He pushed her from him. "Where are my boots?..."
§ 7
Marjorie spent the forenoon and the earlier part of the afternoon repeating and reviewing this conversation. Her mind was full of the long disregarded problem of her husband's state of mind. She thought with a sympathetic astonishment of his swearing, of his startling blow upon the table. She hadn't so far known he could swear. But this was the real thing, the relief of vehement and destructive words. His voice, saying "damnation and damnation," echoed and re-echoed in her ears. Somehow she understood that as she had never understood any sober statement of his case. Such women as Marjorie, I think, have an altogether keener understanding of people who have lost control of themselves than theyhave of reasoned cases. Perhaps that is because they themselves always reserve something when they state a reasoned case.
She went on to the apprehension of a change in him that hitherto she had not permitted herself to see—a change in his attitude to her. There had been a time when she had seemed able without an effort to nestle inside his heart. Now she felt distinctly for the first time that that hadn't happened. She had instead a sense of her embrace sliding over a rather deliberately contracted exterior.... Of course he had been in a hurry....
She tried to follow him on his journey to Croydon. Now he'd have just passed out of London Bridge. What was he thinking and feeling about her in the train? Now he would be going into the place, wherever it was, where he gave his lecture. Did he think of Behrens and curse her under his breath as he entered that tiresome room?...
It seemed part of the prevailing inconvenience of life that Daffy should see fit to pay an afternoon call.
Marjorie heard the sobs and uproar of an arrested motor, and glanced discreetly from the window to discover the dark green car with its green-clad chauffeur which now adorned her sister's life, and which might under different circumstances, have adorned her own. Wilkins—his name was Wilkins, his hair was sandy and his expression discreet, and he afforded material for much quiet humorous observation—descended smartly and opened the door. Daffy appeared in black velvet, with a huge black fur muff, and an air of being unaware that there were such things as windows in the world.
It was just four, and the cook-general, who ought to have been now in her housemaid's phase, was still upstairs divesting herself of her more culinary characteristics.Marjorie opened the door.
"Hullo, old Daffy!" she said.
"Hullo, old Madge!" and there was an exchange of sisterly kisses and a mutual inspection.
"Nothing wrong?" asked Daffy, surveying her.
"Wrong?"
"You look pale and—tired about the eyes," said Daffy, leading the way into the drawing-room. "Thought you might be a bit off it, that's all. No offence, Madge."
"I'm all right," said Marjorie, getting her back to the light. "Want a holiday, perhaps. How's every one?"
"All right.We'reoff to Lake Garda next week. This new play has taken it out of Will tremendously. He wants a rest and fresh surroundings. It's to be the biggest piece of work he's done—so far, and it's straining him. And people worry him here; receptions, first nights, dinners, speeches. He's so neat, you know, in his speeches.... But it wastes him. He wants to get away. How's Rag?"
"Busy."
"Lecturing?"
"And his Research of course."
"Oh! of course. How's the Babe?"
"Just in. Come up and see the little beast, Daffy! It is getting so pretty, and it talks——"
Margharita dominated intercourse for a time. She was one of those tactful infants who exactly resemble their fathers and exactly resemble their mothers, and have a charm and individuality quite distinctly their own, and she was now beginning to converse with startling enterprise and intelligence.
"Big, big, bog," she said at the sight of Daffy.
"Remembers you," said Marjorie.
"Bog! Go ta-ta!" said Margharita.
"There!" said Marjorie, and May, the nurse in the background, smiled unlimited appreciation.
"Bably," said Margharita.
"That's herself!" said Marjorie, falling on her knees. "She talks like this all day. Oh de sweetums, den!"Wasit?
Daffy made amiable gestures and canary-like noises with her lips, and Margharita responded jovially.
"You darling!" cried Marjorie, "you delight of life," kneeling by the cot and giving the crowing, healthy little mite a passionate hug.
"It's really the nicest of babies," Daffy conceded, and reflected....
"I don't know what I should do with a kiddy," said Daffy, as the infant worship came to an end; "I'm really glad we haven't one—yet. He'd love it, I know. But it would be a burthen in some ways. Theyarea tie. As he says, the next few years means so much for him. Of course, here his reputation is immense, and he's known in Germany, and there are translations into Russian; but he's still got to conquer America, and he isn't really well known yet in France. They read him, of course, and buy him in America, but they're—restive. Oh! I do so wish they'd give him the Nobel prize, Madge, and have done with it! It would settle everything. Still, as he says, we mustn't think of that—yet, anyhow. He isn't venerable enough. It's doubtful, he thinks, that they would give the Nobel prize to any humorist now that Mark Twain is dead. Mark Twain was different, you see, because of the German Emperor and all that white hair and everything."
At this point Margharita discovered that the conversation had drifted away from herself, and it was only when they got downstairs again that Daffycould resume the thread of Magnet's career, which had evidently become the predominant interest in her life. She brought out all the worst elements of Marjorie's nature and their sisterly relationship. There were moments when it became nakedly apparent that she was magnifying Magnet to belittle Trafford. Marjorie did her best to counter-brag. She played her chief card in the F. R. S.
"They always ask Will to the Royal Society Dinner," threw out Daffy; "but of course he can't always go. He's asked to so many things."
Five years earlier Marjorie would have kicked her shins for that.
Instead she asked pointedly, offensively, if Magnet was any balder.
"He's not really bald," said Daffy unruffled, and went on to discuss the advisability of a second motor car—purely for town use. "I tell him I don't want it," said Daffy, "but he's frightfully keen upon getting one."
§ 8
When Daffy had at last gone Marjorie went back into Trafford's study and stood on the hearthrug regarding its appointments, with something of the air of one who awakens from a dream. She had developed a new, appalling thought. Was Daffy really a better wife than herself? It was dawning upon Marjorie that she hadn't been doing the right thing by her husband, and she was as surprised as if it had been suddenly brought home to her that she was neglecting Margharita. This was her husband's study—and it showed just a little dusty in the afternoon sunshine, and everything about it denied the pretensions of serene sustained work that she had always made to herself. Here were the crumpled galley proofs of hisscience notes; here were unanswered letters. There, she dare not touch them, were computations, under a glass paper-weight. What did they amount to now? On the table under the window were back numbers of theScientific Bulletinin a rather untidy pile, and on the footstool by the arm-chair she had been accustomed to sit at his feet when he stayed at home to work, and look into the fire, and watch him furtively, and sometimes give way to an overmastering tenderness and make love to him. The thought of Magnet, pampered, fenced around, revered in his industrious tiresome repetitions, variations, dramatizations and so forth of the half-dozen dry little old jokes which the British public accepted as his characteristic offering and rewarded him for so highly, contrasted vividly with her new realization of Trafford's thankless work and worried face.
And she loved him, she loved him—so. She told herself in the presence of all these facts, and without a shadow of doubt in her mind that all she wanted in the world was to make him happy.
It occurred to her as a rather drastic means to this end that she might commit suicide.
She had already gone some way in the composition of a touching letter of farewell to him, containing a luminous analysis of her own defects, before her common-sense swept away this imaginative exercise.
Meanwhile, as if it had been working at her problem all the time that this exciting farewell epistle had occupied the foreground of her thoughts, her natural lucidity emerged with the manifest conclusion that she had to alter her way of living. She had been extraordinarily regardless of him, she only began to see that, and now she had to take up the problem of his necessities. Her self-examination now that it had begun was thorough. She had always told herselfbefore that she had made a most wonderful and beautiful little home for him. But had she made it for him? Had he as a matter of fact ever wanted it, except that he was glad to have it through her? No doubt it had given him delight and happiness, it had been a marvellous little casket of love for them, but how far did that outweigh the burthen and limitation it had imposed upon him? She had always assumed he was beyond measure grateful to her for his home, in spite of all her bills, but was he? It was like sticking a knife into herself to ask that, but she was now in a phase heroic enough for the task—was he? She had always seen herself as the giver of bounties; greatest bounty of all was Margharita. She had faced pains and terrors and the shadow of death to give him Margharita. Now with Daffy's illuminating conversation in her mind, she could turn the light upon a haunting doubt that had been lurking in the darkness for a long time. Had he really so greatly wanted Margharita? Had she ever troubled to get to the bottom of that before? Hadn't she as a matter of fact wanted Margharita ten thousand times more than he had done? Hadn't she in effect imposed Margharita upon him, as she had imposed her distinctive and delightful home upon him, regardlessly, because these things were the natural and legitimate developments of herself?
These things were not his ends.
Had she hitherto ever really cared what his ends might be?
A phrase she had heard abundantly enough in current feminist discussion recurred to her mind, "the economic dependence of women," and now for the first time it was charged with meaning. She had imposed these things upon him not because she loved him, but because these things that were the expansionsand consequences of her love for him were only obtainable through him. A woman gives herself to a man out of love, and remains clinging parasitically to him out of necessity. Was there no way of evading that necessity?
For a time she entertained dreams of marvellous social reconstructions. Suppose the community kept all its women, suppose all property in homes and furnishings and children vested in them! That was Marjorie's version of that idea of the Endowment of Womanhood which has been creeping into contemporary thought during the last two decades. Then every woman would be a Princess to the man she loved.... He became more definitely personal. Suppose she herself was rich, then she could play the Princess to Trafford; she could have him free, unencumbered, happy and her lover! Then, indeed, her gifts would be gifts, and all her instincts and motives would but crown his unhampered life! She could not go on from that idea, she lapsed into a golden reverie, from which she was roused by the clock striking five.
In half an hour perhaps Trafford would be home again. She could at least be so much of a princess as to make his home sweet for his home-coming. There should be tea in here, where callers did not trouble. She glanced at an empty copper vase. It ached. There was no light in the room. There would be just time to dash out into High Street and buy some flowers for it before he came....
§ 9
Spring and a renewed and deepened love for her husband were in Marjorie's blood. Her mind worked rapidly during the next few days, and presently she found herself clearly decided upon her course ofaction. She had to pull herself together and help him, and if that meant a Spartan and strenuous way of living, then manifestly she must be Spartan and strenuous. She must put an end once for all to her recurrent domestic deficits, and since this could only be done by getting rid of May, she must get rid of May and mind the child herself. (Every day, thank Heaven! Margharita became more intelligent, more manageable, and more interesting.) Then she must also make a far more systematic and thorough study of domestic economy than she had hitherto done, and run the shopping and housekeeping on severer lines; she bought fruit carelessly, they had far too many joints; she never seemed able to restrain herself when it came to flowers. And in the evenings, which would necessarily be very frequently lonely evenings if Trafford's researches were to go on, she would typewrite, and either acquire great speed at that or learn shorthand, and so save Trafford's present expenditure on a typist. That unfortunately would mean buying a typewriter.
She found one afternoon in a twopenny book-box, with which she was trying to allay her craving for purchases, a tattered little pamphlet entitled: "Proposals for the Establishment of an Order of Samurai," which fell in very exactly with her mood. The title "dated"; it carried her mind back to her middle girlhood and the defeats of Kuropatki and the futile earnest phase in English thought which followed the Boer War. The order was to be a sort of self-appointed nobility serving the world. It shone with the light of a generous dawn, but cast, I fear, the shadow of the prig. Its end was the Agenda Club.... She read and ceased to read—and dreamt.
The project unfolded the picture of a new methodof conduct to her, austere, yet picturesque and richly noble. These Samurai, it was intimated, were to lead lives of hard discipline and high effort, under self-imposed rule and restraint. They were to stand a little apart from the excitements and temptations of everyday life, to eat sparingly, drink water, resort greatly to self-criticism and self-examination, and harden their spirits by severe and dangerous exercises. They were to dress simply, work hard, and be the conscious and deliberate salt of the world. They were to walk among mountains. Incidentally, great power was to be given them. Such systematic effort and self-control as this, seemed to Marjorie to give just all she wasn't and needed to be, to save her life and Trafford's from a common disaster....
It particularly appealed to her that they were to walk among mountains....
But it is hard to make a change in the colour of one's life amidst the routine one has already established about oneself, in the house that is grooved by one's weaknesses, amidst hangings and ornaments living and breathing with the life of an antagonistic and yet insidiously congenial ideal. A great desire came upon Marjorie to go away with Trafford for a time, out of their everyday life into strange and cool and spacious surroundings. She wanted to leave London and its shops, and the home and the movements and the callers and rivalries, and even dimpled little Margharita's insistent claims, and get free and think. It was the first invasion of their lives by this conception, a conception that was ever afterwards to leave them altogether, of retreat and reconstruction. She knelt upon the white sheepskin hearthrug at Trafford's feet one night, and told him of her desire. He, too, was tired of his work and his vexations, and ripe for this suggestion of an altered life. The Easterholiday was approaching, and nearly twenty unencumbered days. Mrs. Trafford, they knew, would come into the house, meanwhile, and care for Margharita. They would go away somewhere together and walk, no luggage but a couple of knapsacks, no hotel but some homely village inn. They would be in the air all day, until they were saturated with sweet air and spirit of clean restraints. They would plan out their new rule, concentrate their aims. "And I could think," said Trafford, "of this new work I can't begin here. I might make some notes." Presently came the question of where the great walk should be. Manifestly, it must be among mountains, manifestly, and Marjorie's eye saw those mountains with snow upon their summits and cold glaciers on their flanks. Could they get to Switzerland? If they travelled second class throughout, and took the cheaper way, as Samurai should?...
§ 10
That holiday seemed to Marjorie as if they had found a lost and forgotten piece of honeymoon. She had that same sense of fresh beginnings that had made their first walk in Italian Switzerland so unforgettable. She was filled with the happiness of recovering Trafford when he had seemed to be slipping from her. All day they talked of their outlook, and how they might economise away the need of his extra work, and so release him for his search again. For the first time he talked of his work to her, and gave her some intimation of its scope and quality. He became enthusiastic with the sudden invention of experimental devices, so that it seemed to her almost worth while if instead of going on they bolted back, he to his laboratory and she to her nursery, and so at once inauguratedthe new régime. But they went on, to finish the holiday out. And the delight of being together again with unfettered hours of association! They rediscovered each other, the same—and a little changed. If their emotions were less bright and intense, their interest was far wider and deeper.
The season was too early for high passes, and the weather was changeable. They started from Fribourg and walked to Thun and then back to Bulle, and so to Bultigen, Saanen, Montbovon and the Lake of Geneva. They had rain several days, the sweet, soft, windless mountain rain that seemed so tolerable to those who are accustomed to the hard and driven downpours of England, and in places they found mud and receding snow; the inns were at their homeliest, and none the worse for that, and there were days of spring sunshine when a multitude of minute and delightful flowers came out as it seemed to meet them—it was impossible to suppose so great a concourse universal—and spread in a scented carpet before their straying feet. The fruit trees in the valleys were powdered with blossom, and the new grass seemed rather green-tinted sunlight than merely green. And they walked with a sort of stout leisureliness, knapsacks well-hung and cloaks about them, with their faces fresh and bright under the bracing weather, and their lungs deep charged with mountain air, talking of the new austerer life that was now beginning. With great snow-capped mountains in the background, streaming precipices overhead, and a sward of flowers to go upon, that strenuous prospect was altogether delightful. They went as it pleased them, making detours into valleys, coming back upon their steps. The interludes of hot, bright April sunshine made them indolent, and they would loiter and halt where some rock or wall invited, and sit basking likehappy, animals, talking very little, for long hours together. Trafford seemed to have forgotten all the strain and disappointment of the past two years, to be amazed but in no wise incredulous at this enormous change in her and in their outlook; it filled her with a passion of pride and high resolve to think that so she could recover and uplift him.
He was now very deeply in love with her again. He talked indeed of his research, but so that it might interest her, and when he thought alone, he thought, not of it, but of her, making again the old discoveries, his intense delight in the quality of her voice, his joy in a certain indescribable gallantry in her bearing. He pitied all men whose wives could not carry themselves, and whose voices failed and broke under the things they had to say. And then again there was the way she moved her arms, the way her hands took hold of things, the alert lucidity of her eyes, and then that faint, soft shadow of a smile upon her lips when she walked thinking or observant, all unaware that he was watching her.
It rained in the morning of their eleventh day and then gave way to warmth and sunshine, so that they arrived at Les Avants in the afternoon a little muddy and rather hot. At one of the tables under the trees outside the Grand Hotel was a small group of people dressed in the remarkable and imposing costume which still in those days distinguished the motorist. They turned from their tea to a more or less frank inspection of the Traffords, and suddenly broke out into cries of recognition and welcome. Solomonson—for the most part brown leather—emerged with extended hands, and behind him, nestling in the midst of immense and costly furs, appeared the kindly salience and brightness of his Lady's face. "Good luck!" cried Solomonson. "Good luck! Come and have teawith us! But this is a happy encounter!"
"We're dirty—but so healthy!" cried Marjorie, saluting Lady Solomonson.
"You look, oh!—splendidly well," that Lady responded.
"We've been walking."
"With just that knapsack!"
"It's been glorious."
"But the courage!" said Lady Solomonson, and did not add, "the tragic hardship!" though her tone conveyed it. She had all the unquestioning belief of her race in the sanity of comfort. She had ingrained in her the most definite ideas of man's position and woman's, and that any one, man or woman, should walk in mud except under dire necessity, was outside the range of her philosophy. She thought Marjorie's thick boots and short skirts quite the most appalling feminine costume she had ever seen. She saw only a ruined complexion and damaged womanhood in Marjorie's rain-washed, sun-bit cheek. Her benevolent heart rebelled at the spectacle. It was dreadful, she thought, that nice young people like the Traffords should have come to this.
The rest of the party were now informally introduced. They were all very splendid and disconcertingly free from mud. One was Christabel Morrison, the actress, a graceful figure in a green baize coat and brown fur, who looked ever so much more charming than her innumerable postcards and illustrated-paper portraits would have led one to expect; her neighbour was Solomonson's cousin Lee, the organizer of the Theatre Syndicate, a brown-eyed, attenuated, quick-minded little man with an accent that struck Trafford as being on the whole rather Dutch, and the third lady was Lady Solomonson's sister, Mrs. Lee. It appeared they were all staying at Lee's villa aboveVevey, part of an amusing assembly of people who were either vividly rich or even more vividly clever, an accumulation which the Traffords in the course of the next twenty minutes were three times invited, with an increasing appreciation and earnestness, to join.
From the first our two young people were not indisposed to do so. For eleven days they had maintained their duologue at the very highest level; seven days remained to them before they must go back to begin the hard new life in England, and there was something very attractive—they did not for a moment seek to discover the elements of that attractiveness—in this proposal of five or six days of luxurious indolence above the lake, a sort of farewell to the worldly side of worldly things, before they set forth upon the high and narrow path they had resolved to tread.
"But we've got no clothes," cried Marjorie, "no clothes at all! We've these hobnail boots and a pair each of heelless slippers."
"My dear!" cried Lady Solomonson in real distress, and as much aside as circumstances permitted, "my dear! My sister can manage all that!" Her voice fell to earnest undertones. "We can really manage all that. The house is packed with things. We'll come to dinner in fancy dress. And Scott, my maid, is so clever."
"But really!" said Marjorie.
"My dear!" said Lady Solomonson. "Everything." And she changed places with Lee in order to be perfectly confidential and explicit. "Rachel!" she cried, and summoned her sister for confirmatory assurances....
"But my husband!" Marjorie became audible.
"We've long Persian robes," said Mrs. Lee, with a glance of undisguised appraisement. "He'll besplendid. He'll look like a Soldan...."
The rest of the company forced a hectic conversation in order not to seem to listen, and presently Lady Solomonson and her sister were triumphant. They packed Marjorie into the motor car, and Trafford and Solomonson returned to Vevey by train and thence up to the villa by a hired automobile.
§ 11
They didn't go outside the magic confines of the Lees' villa for three days, and when they did they were still surrounded by their host's service and possessions; they made an excursion to Chillon in his motor-cars, and went in his motor-boat to lunch with the Maynards in their lake-side villa close to Geneva. During all that time they seemed lifted off the common earth into a world of fine fabrics, agreeable sounds, noiseless unlimited service, and ample untroubled living. It had an effect of enchantment, and the long healthy arduous journey thither seemed a tale of incredible effort amidst these sunny excesses. The weather had the whim to be serenely fine, sunshine like summer and the bluest of skies shone above the white wall and the ilex thickets and cypresses that bounded them in from the great world of crowded homes and sous and small necessities. And through the texture of it all for Trafford ran a thread of curious new suggestion. An intermittent discussion of economics and socialism was going on between himself and Solomonson and an agreeable little stammering man in brown named Minter, who walked up in the afternoon from Vevey,—he professed to be writing a novel—during the earlier half of the day. Minter displayed the keenest appreciation of everything in his entertainment, and blinked cheerfullyand expressed opinions of the extremest socialistic and anarchistic flavour to an accompaniment of grateful self-indulgence. "Your port-wine is wonderful, Lee," he would say, sipping it. "A terrible retribution will fall upon you some day for all this."
The villa had been designed by Lee to please his wife, and if it was neither very beautiful nor very dignified, it was at any rate very pretty and amusing. It might have been built by a Parisian dressmaker—in the châteauesque style. It was of greyish-white stone, with a roof of tiles. It had little balconies and acutely roofed turrets, and almost burlesque buttresses, pierced by doors and gates; and sun-trap loggias, as pleasantly casual as the bows and embroideries of a woman's dress; and its central hall, with an impluvium that had nothing to do with rain-water, and its dining-room, to which one ascended from this hall between pillars up five broad steps, were entirely irrelevant to all its exterior features. Unobtrusive men-servants in grey with scarlet facings hovered serviceably.
From the little terrace, all set with orange-trees in tubs, one could see, through the branches and stems of evergreens and over a foreground of budding, starting vineyard, the clustering roofs of Vevey below, an agglomeration veiled ever so thinly in the morning by a cobweb of wood smoke, against the blue background of lake with its winged sailing-boats, and sombre Alpine distances. Minter made it all significant by a wave of the hand. "All this," he said, and of the crowded work-a-day life below, "all that."
"All this," with its rich litter of stuffs and ornaments, its fine profusion, its delicacies of flower and food and furniture, its frequent inconsecutive pleasures, its noiseless, ready service, was remarkably novel and yet remarkably familiar to Trafford. Fora time he could not understand this undertone of familiarity, and then a sunlit group of hangings in one of the small rooms that looked out upon the lake took his mind back to his own dining-room, and the little inadequate, but decidedly good, Bokhara embroidery that dominated it like a flag, that lit it, and now lit his understanding, like a confessed desire. Of course, Mrs. Lee—happy woman!—was doing just everything that Marjorie would have loved to do. Marjorie had never confessed as much, perhaps she had never understood as much, but now in the presence of Mrs. Lee's æsthetic exuberances, Trafford at least understood. He surveyed the little room, whose harmonies he had at first simply taken for granted, noted the lustre-ware that answered to the gleaming Persian tiles, the inspiration of a metallic thread in the hangings, and the exquisite choice of the deadened paint upon the woodwork, and realized for the first time how little aimless extravagance can be, and all the timid, obstinately insurgent artistry that troubled his wife. He stepped through the open window into a little loggia, and stared unseeingly over glittering, dark-green leaves to the mysteries of distance in the great masses above St. Gingolph, and it seemed for the first time that perhaps in his thoughts he had done his wife a wrong. He had judged her fickle, impulsive, erratic, perhaps merely because her mind followed a different process from his, because while he went upon the lines of constructive truth, her guide was a more immediate and instinctive sense of beauty.
He was very much alive to her now, and deeply in love with her. He had reached Les Avants with all his sense of their discordance clean washed and walked out of his mind, by rain and sun and a flow of high resolutions, and the brotherly swing of theirstrides together. They had come to the Lee's villa, mud-splashed, air-sweet comrades, all unaware of the subtle differences of atmosphere they had to encounter. They had no suspicion that it was only about half of each other that had fraternized. Now here they were in a company that was not only altogether alien to their former mood, but extremely interesting and exciting and closely akin to the latent factors in Marjorie's composition. Their hostess and her sister had the keen, quick æsthetic sensibilities of their race, with all that freedom of reading and enfranchisement of mind which is the lot of the Western women. Lee had an immense indulgent affection for his wife, he regarded her arrangements and exploits with an admiration that was almost American. And Mrs. Lee's imagination had run loose in pursuit of beautiful and remarkable people and splendours rather than harmonies of line and colour. Lee, like Solomonson, had that inexplicable alchemy of mind which distils gold from the commerce of the world ("All this," said Minter to Trafford, "is an exhalation from all that"); he accumulated wealth as one grows a beard, and found his interest in his uxorious satisfactions, and so Mrs. Lee, with her bright watchful eyes, quick impulsive movements and instinctive command had the utmost freedom to realize her ideals.
In the world at large Lee and Solomonson seemed both a little short and a little stout, and a little too black and bright for their entirely conventional clothing, but for the dinner and evening of the villa they were now, out of consideration for Trafford, at their ease, and far more dignified in Oriental robes. Trafford was accommodated with a long, black, delicately embroidered garment that reached to his feet, and suited something upstanding and fine in his bearing;Minter, who had stayed on from an afternoon call, was gorgeous in Chinese embroidery. The rest of the men clung boldly or bashfully to evening dress....
On the evening of his arrival Trafford, bathed and robed, found the rest of the men assembling about an open wood fire in the smaller hall at the foot of the main staircase. Lee was still upstairs, and Solomonson, with a new grace of gesture begotten by his costume, made the necessary introductions; a little man with fine-cut features and a Galway accent was Rex the playwright; a tall, grey-haired, clean-shaven man was Bright from the New York Central Museum; and a bearded giant with a roof of red hair and a remote eye was Radlett Barns, the great portrait-painter, who consents to paint your portrait for posterity as the King confers a knighthood. These were presently joined by Lee and Pacey, the blond-haired musician, and Mottersham, whose patents and inventions control electric lighting and heating all over the world, and then, with the men duly gathered and expectant, the women came down the wide staircase.
The staircase had been planned and lit for these effects, and Mrs. Lee meant to make the most of her new discovery. Her voice could be heard in the unseen corridor above arranging the descent: "You go first, dear. Will you go with Christabel?" The conversation about the fire checked and ceased with the sound of voices above and the faint rustle of skirts. Then came Christabel Morrison, her slender grace beautifully contrasted with the fuller beauties of that great lady of the stage, Marion Rufus. Lady Solomonson descended confidently in a group of three, with Lady Mottersham and sharp-tongued little Mrs. Rex, all very rich and splendid. After a brief interval their hostess preceded Marjorie, and was so much of an artist that she had dressed herself merely as a foilto this new creation. She wore black and scarlet, that made the white face and bright eyes under her sombre hair seem the face of an inspiring spirit. A step behind her and to the right of her came Marjorie, tall and wonderful, as if she were the queen of earth and sunshine, swathed barbarically in gold and ruddy brown, and with her abundant hair bound back by a fillet of bloodstones and gold. Radlett Barns exclaimed at the sight of her. She was full of the manifest consciousness of dignity as she descended, quite conscious and quite unembarrassed; two borrowed golden circlets glittered on her shining arm, and a thin chain of gold and garnets broke the contrast of the warm, sun-touched neck above, with the unsullied skin below.
She sought and met her husband's astonishment with the faintest, remotest of smiles. It seemed to him that never before had he appreciated her beauty. His daily companion had become this splendour in the sky. She came close by him with hand extended to greet Sir Philip Mottersham. He was sensible of the glow of her, as it were of a scented aura about her. He had a first full intimation of the cult and worship of woman and the magnificence of women, old as the Mediterranean and its goddesses, and altogether novel to his mind....
Christabel Morrison found him a pleasant but not very entertaining or exciting neighbor at the dinner-table, and was relieved when the time came for her to turn an ear to the artistic compliments of Radlett Barns. But Trafford was too interested and amused by the general effect of the dinner to devote himself to the rather heavy business of really exhilarating Christabel. He didn't give his mind to her. He found the transformation of Sir Rupert into a turbanned Oriental who might have come out of a picture byCarpaccio, gently stimulating and altogether delightful. His attention returned again and again to that genial swarthiness. Mrs. Lee on his left lived in her eyes, and didn't so much talk to him as rattle her mind at him almost absent-mindedly, as one might dangle keys at a baby while one talked to its mother. Yet it was evident she liked the look of him. Her glance went from his face to his robe, and up and down the table, at the bright dresses, the shining arms, the glass and light and silver. She asked him to tell her just where he had tramped and just what he had seen, and he had scarcely begun answering her question before her thoughts flew off to three trophies of china and silver, struggling groups of china boys bearing up great silver shells of fruit and flowers that stood down the centre of the table. "What do you think of my chubby boys?" she asked. "They're German work. They came from a show at Düsseldorf last week. Ben saw I liked them, and sent back for them secretly, and here they, are! I thought they might be too colourless. But are they?"
"No," said Trafford, "they're just cool. Under that glow of fruit. Is this salt-cellar English cut glass?"
"Old Dutch," said Mrs. Lee. "Isn't it jolly?" She embarked with a roving eye upon the story of her Dutch glass, which was abundant and admirable, and broke off abruptly to say, "Your wife is wonderful."
"Her hair goes back," she said, "like music. You know what I mean—a sort of easy rhythm. You don't mind my praising your wife?"
Trafford said he didn't.
"And there's a sort of dignity about her. All my life, Mr. Trafford, I've wanted to be tall. It stopped my growth."
She glanced off at a tangent. "Tell me, Mr.Trafford," she asked, "was your wife beautiful like this when you married her? I mean—of course she was a beautiful girl and adorable and all that; but wasn't she just a slender thing?"
She paused, but if she had a habit of asking disconcerting questions she did not at any rate insist upon answers, and she went on to confess that she believed she would be a happier woman poor than rich—"not that Ben isn't all he should be"—but that then she would have been a fashionable dressmaker. "People want help," she said, "so much more help than they get. They go about with themselves—what was it Mr. Radlett Barns said the other night—oh!—like people leading horses they daren't ride. I think he says such good things at times, don't you? So wonderful to be clever in two ways like that. Just looknowat your wife—now I mean, that they've drawn that peacock-coloured curtain behind her. My brother-in-law has been telling me you keep the most wonderful and precious secrets locked up in your breast, that you know how to make gold and diamonds and all sorts of things. If I did,—I should make them."
She pounced suddenly upon Rex at her left with questions about the Keltic Renascence, was it still going on—or what? and Trafford was at liberty for a time to enjoy the bright effects about him, the shadowed profile and black hair of Christabel to the right of him, and the coruscating refractions and reflections of Lady Solomonson across the white and silver and ivory and blossom of the table. Then Mrs. Lee dragged him into a sudden conflict with Rex, by saying abruptly—
"Of course, Mr. Trafford wouldn't believe that."
He looked perhaps a little lost.
"I was telling Mrs. Lee," said Rex, "that I don'tbelieve there's any economy of human toil in machinery whatever. I mean that the machine itself really embodies all the toil it seems to save, toil that went to the making of it and preparing it and getting coal for it...."
§ 12
Next morning they found their hostess at breakfast in the dining-room and now the sun was streaming through a high triple window that had been curtained overnight, and they looked out through clean, bright plate-glass upon mountains half-dissolved in a luminous mist, and a mist-veiled lake below. Great stone jars upon the terrace bore a blaze of urged and early blossom, and beyond were cypresses. Their hostess presided at one of two round tables, at a side table various breakfast dishes kept warm over spirit lamps, and two men servants dispensed tea and coffee. In the bay of the window was a fruit table, with piled fruit-plates and finger-bowls.
Mrs. Lee waved a welcoming hand, and drew Marjorie to a seat beside her. Rex was consuming trout and Christabel peaches, and Solomonson, all his overnight Orientalism abandoned, was in outspoken tweeds and quite under the impression that he was interested in golf. Trafford got frizzled bacon for Marjorie and himself, and dropped into a desultory conversation, chiefly sustained by Christabel, about the peculiarly exalting effect of beautiful scenery on Christabel's mind. Mrs. Lee was as usual distraught, and kept glancing towards the steps that led up from the hall. Lady Solomonson appeared with a rustle in a wrapper of pink Chinese silk. "I came down after all," she said. "I lay in bed weighing rolls and coffee and relaxed muscles against yourEnglish breakfast downstairs. And suddenly I remembered your little sausages!"
She sat down with a distribution of handkerchief, bag, letters, a gold fountain pen and suchlike equipments, and Trafford got her some of the coveted delicacies. Mrs. Lee suddenly cried out, "Herethey come!Herethey come!" and simultaneously the hall resonated with children's voices and the yapping of a Skye terrier.
Then a gay little procession appeared ascending the steps. First came a small but princely little boy of three, with a ruddy face and curly black hair, behind him was a slender, rather awkward girl of perhaps eleven, and a sturdier daughter of Israel of nine. A nurse in artistic purple followed, listening inattentively to some private whisperings of a knickerbockered young man of five, and then came another purple-robed nurse against contingencies, and then a nurse of a different, white-clad, and more elaborately costumed sort, carrying a sumptuous baby of eight or nine months. "Ah! thedarlings!" cried Christabel, springing up quite beautifully, and Lady Solomonson echoed the cry. The procession broke against the tables and split about the breakfast party. The small boy in petticoats made a confident rush for Marjorie, Christabel set herself to fascinate his elder brother, the young woman of eleven scrutinized Trafford with speculative interest and edged towards him coyly, and Mrs. Lee interviewed her youngest born. The amiable inanities suitable to the occasion had scarcely begun before a violent clapping of hands announced the appearance of Lee.
It was Lee's custom, Mrs. Lee told Marjorie over her massively robed baby, to get up very early and work on rolls and coffee; he never breakfasted norjoined them until the children came. All of them rushed to him for their morning kiss, and it seemed to Trafford that Lee at least was an altogether happy creature as he accepted the demonstrative salutations of this struggling, elbowing armful of offspring, and emerged at last like a man from a dive, flushed and ruffled and smiling, to wish his adult guests good morning.
"Come upstairs with us, daddy," cried the children, tugging at him. "Come upstairs!"
Mrs. Lee ran her eye about her table and rose. "It's the children's hour," she said to Marjorie. "You don't I hope, mind children?"
"But," said Trafford incredulous, and with a friendly arm about his admirer, "is this tall young woman yours?"
The child shot him a glance of passionate appreciation for this scrap of flattery.
"We began young," said Mrs. Lee, with eyes of uncritical pride for the ungainly one, and smiled at her husband.
"Upstairs," cried the boy of five and the girl of nine. "Upstairs."
"May we come?" asked Marjorie.
"May we all come?" asked Christabel, determined to be in the movement.
Rex strolled towards the cigars, with disentanglement obviously in his mind.
"Do you really care?" asked Mrs. Lee. "You know, I'm so proud of their nursery. Would you care——? Always I go up at this time."
"I've my little nursery, too," said Marjorie.
"Of course!" cried Mrs. Lee, "I forgot. Of course;" and overwhelmed Marjorie with inquiries as she followed her husband. Every one joined the nurseryward procession except Rex, who left himselfbehind with an air of inadvertency, and escaped to the terrace and a cigar....
It was a wonderful nursery, a suite of three bedrooms, a green and white, well-lit schoolroom and a vast playroom, and hovering about the passage Trafford remarked a third purple nurse and a very efficient and serious-looking Swiss governess. The schoolroom and the nursery displayed a triumph of judicious shopping and arrangement, the best of German and French and English things had been blended into a harmony at once hygienic and pedagogic and humanly charming. For once Marjorie had to admire the spending of another woman, and admit to herself that even she could not have done better with the money.
There were clever little desks for the elder children to work at, adjustable desks scientifically lit so that they benefited hands and shoulders and eyes; there were artistically coloured and artistically arranged pictures, and a little library held all the best of Lang and Lucas, rare good things like "Uncle Lubin," Maurice Baring's story of "Forget-me-not," "Johnny Crow's Garden," "The Bad Child's Book of Beasts," animal books and bird books, costume books and story books, colour books and rhyme books, abundant, yet every one intelligently chosen, no costly meretricious printed rubbish such as silly Gentile mothers buy. Then in the great nursery, with its cork carpet on which any toy would stand or run, was an abundance of admirable possessions and shelving for everything, and great fat cloth elephants to ride, and go-carts, and hooks for a swing. Marjorie's quick eye saw, and she admired effusively and envied secretly, and Mrs. Lee appreciated her appreciation. A skirmishing romp of the middle children and Lee went on about the two of them, andTrafford was led off by his admirer into a cubby-house in one corner (with real glass windows made to open) and the muslin curtains were drawn while he was shown a secret under vows. Lady Solomonson discovered some soldiers, and was presently on her knees in a corner with the five-year old boy.
"These are like my Teddy's," she was saying. "My Billy has some of these."
Trafford emerged from the cubby-house, which was perhaps a little cramped for him, and surveyed the room, with his admirer lugging at his arm unheeded, and whispering: "Come back with me."
Of course this was the clue to Lee and Solomonson. How extremely happy Lee appeared to be! Enormous vistas of dark philoprogenitive parents and healthy little Jews and Jewesses seemed to open out to Trafford, hygienically reared, exquisitely trained and educated. And he and Marjorie had just one little daughter—with a much poorer educational outlook. She had no cloth elephant to ride, no elaborate cubby-house to get into, only a half-dozen picture books or so, and later she wouldn't when she needed it get that linguistic Swiss.
He wasn't above the normal human vanity of esteeming his own race and type the best, and certain vulgar aspects of what nowadays one calls Eugenics crossed his mind.
§ 13
During those few crowded days of unfamiliar living Trafford accumulated a vast confused mass of thoughts and impressions. He realized acutely the enormous gulf between his attitudes towards women and those of his host and Solomonson—and indeed of all the other men. It had never occurred to him before that there was any other relationshippossible between a modern woman and a modern man but a frank comradeship and perfect knowledge, helpfulness, and honesty. That had been the continual implication of his mother's life, and of all that he had respected in the thought and writing of his time. But not one of these men in their place—with the possible exception of Minter, who remained brilliant but ambiguous—believed anything of the sort. It necessarily involved in practice a share of hardship for women, and it seemed fundamental to them that women should have no hardship. He sought for a word, and hung between chivalry and orientalism. He inclined towards chivalry. Their women were lifted a little off the cold ground of responsibility. Charm was their obligation. "A beautiful woman should be beautifully dressed," said Radlett Barns in the course of the discussion of a contemporary portrait painter. Lee nodded to endorse an obvious truth. "But she ought to dress herself," said Barns. "It ought to be herself to the points of the old lace—chosen and assimilated. It's just through not being that, that so many rich women are—detestable. Heaps of acquisition. Caddis-women...."
Trafford ceased to listen, he helped himself to a cigar and pinched its end and lit it, while his mind went off to gnaw at: "A beautiful woman should be beautifully dressed," as a dog retires with a bone. He couldn't escape from its shining truth, and withal it was devastating to all the purposes of his life.
He rejected the word orientalism; what he was dealing with here was chivalry. "All this," was indeed, under the thinnest of disguises, the castle and the pavilion, and Lee and Solomonson were valiant knights, who entered the lists not indeed with spear and shield but with prospectus and ingenious enterprise, who drew cheques instead of swords for theirladies' honour, who held "all that" in fee and subjection that these exquisite and wonderful beings should flower in rich perfection. All these women lived in a magic security and abundance, far above the mire and adventure of the world; their knights went upon quests for them and returned with villas and pictures and diamonds and historical pearls. And not one of them all was so beautiful a being as his Marjorie, whom he made his squaw, whom he expected to aid and follow him, and suffer uncomplainingly the rough services of the common life. Not one was half so beautiful as Marjorie, nor half so sweet and wonderful....
If such thoughts came in Lee's villa, they returned with redoubled force when Trafford found himself packed painfully with Marjorie in the night train to Paris. His head ached with the rattle and suffocation of the train, and he knew hers must ache more. The windows of the compartment and the door were all closed, the litigious little commercial traveller in shiny grey had insisted upon that, there was no corner seat either for Marjorie or himself, the dim big package over her head swayed threateningly. The green shade over the light kept opening with the vibration of the train, the pallid old gentleman with the beard had twisted himself into a ghastly resemblance to a broken-necked corpse, and pressed his knees hard and stiffly against Trafford, and the small, sniffing, bow-legged little boy beside the rusty widow woman in the corner smelt mysteriously and penetratingly of Roquefort cheese. For the seventeenth time the little commercial traveller jumped up with an unbecoming expletive, and pulled the shade over the light, and the silent young man in the fourth corner stirred and readjusted his legs.
For a time until the crack of light overhead hadwidened again every one became a dark head-dangling outline....
He watched the dim shape before him and noted the weary droop of her pose. He wished he had brought water. He was intolerably thirsty, and his thirst gave him the measure of hers. This jolting fœtid compartment was a horrible place for her, an intolerably horrible place. And she was standing it, for all her manifest suffering, with infinite gallantry and patience. What a gallant soul indeed she was! Whatever else she did she never failed to rise to a challenge. Her very extravagance that had tried their lives so sorely was perhaps just one aspect of that same quality. It is so easy to be saving if one is timid; so hard if one is unaccustomed to fear. How beautiful she had shone at times in the lights and glitter of that house behind there, and now she was back in her weather-stained tweeds again, like a shining sword thrust back into a rusty old sheath.
Was it fair that she should come back into the sheath because of this passion of his for a vast inexhaustible research?
He had never asked himself before if it was fair to assume she would follow his purpose and his fortunes. He had taken that for granted. And she too had taken that for granted, which was so generously splendid of her. All her disloyalties had been unintentional, indeed almost instinctive, breaches of her subordination to this aim which was his alone. These breaches he realized had been the reality of her nature fighting against her profoundest resolutions.
He wondered what Lee must think of this sort of married life. How ugly and selfish it must seem from that point of view.
He perceived for the first time the fundamentalincongruity of Marjorie's position, she was made to shine, elaborately prepared and trained to shine, desiring keenly to shine, and then imprisoned and hidden in the faded obscurity of a small, poor home. How conspicuously, how extremely he must be wanting in just that sort of chivalry in which Lee excelled! Those business men lived for their women to an extent he had hitherto scarcely dreamt of doing....
His want of chivalry was beyond dispute. And was there not also an extraordinary egotism in this concentration upon his own purposes, a self-esteem, a vanity? Had her life no rights? Suppose now he were to give her—two years, three years perhaps of his life—altogether. Or even four. Was it too much to grudge her four? Solomonson had been at his old theme with him, a theme the little man had never relinquished since their friendship first began years ago, possibilities of a business alliance and the application of a mind of exceptional freshness and penetration to industrial development. Why shouldn't that be tried? Why not "make money" for a brief strenuous time, and then come back, when Marjorie's pride and comfort were secure?...
(Poor dear, how weary she looked!)
He wondered how much more remained of this appalling night. It would have made so little difference if they had taken the day train and travelled first-class. Wasn't she indeed entitled to travel first-class? Pictures of the immense spaciousness, the softness, cleanliness and dignity of first-class compartments appeared in his mind....
He would have looked at his watch, but to get at it would mean disturbing the silent young man on his left.
Outside in the corridor there broke out a noisydispute about a missing coupon, a dispute in that wonderful language that is known to the facetious asentente cordiale, between an Englishman and the conductor of the train....
§ 14
In Paris there was a dispute with an extortionate cabman, and the crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven was rough and bitterly cold. They were both ill. They reached home very dirty and weary, and among the pile of letters and papers on Trafford's desk was a big bundle of Science Note proofs, and two letters from Croydon and Pinner to alter the hours of his lectures for various plausible and irritating reasons.
The little passage looked very small and rather bare as the door shut behind them, and the worn places that had begun to be conspicuous during the last six months, and which they had forgotten during the Swiss holiday, reasserted themselves. The dining-room, after spacious rooms flooded with sunshine, betrayed how dark it was, and how small. Those Bokhara embroideries that had once shone so splendid, now, after Mrs. Lee's rich and unlimited harmonies, seemed skimpy and insufficient, mere loin-cloths for the artistic nakedness of the home. They felt, too, they were beginning to find out their post-impressionist picture. They had not remembered it as nearly so crude as it now appeared. The hole a flying coal had burnt in the unevenly faded dark-blue carpet looked larger than it had ever done before, and was indeed the only thing that didn't appear faded and shrunken.
§ 15
The atmosphere of the Lees' villa had disturbedMarjorie's feelings and ideas even more than it had Trafford's. She came back struggling to recover those high resolves that had seemed so secure when they had walked down to Les Avantes. There was a curiously tormenting memory of that vast, admirable nursery, and the princely procession of children that would not leave her mind. No effort of her reason could reconcile her to the inferiority of Margharita's equipment. She had a detestable craving for a uniform for May. But May was going....
But indeed she was not so sure that May was going.
She was no longer buoyantly well, she was full of indefinable apprehensions of weakness and failure. She struggled to control an insurgence of emotions that rose out of the deeps of her being. She had now, she knew, to take on her share of the burden, to become one of the Samurai, to show her love no longer as a demand but as a service. Yet from day to day she procrastinated under the shadow of apprehended things; she forebore to dismiss May, to buy that second-hand typewriter she needed, to take any irrevocable step towards the realization of the new way of living. She tried to think away her fears, but they would not leave her. She felt that Trafford watched her pale face with a furtive solicitude and wondered at her hesitations; she tried in vain to seem cheerful and careless in his presence, with an anxiety, with premonitions that grew daily.
There was no need to worry him unduly....
But soon the matter was beyond all doubting. One night she gathered her courage together suddenly and came down into his study in her dressing-gown with her hair about her shoulders. She openedthe door and her heart failed her.
"Rag," she whispered.
"Yes," he said busily from his desk, without looking round.
"I want to speak to you," she answered, and came slowly, and stood beside him silently.
"Well, old Marjorie?" he said presently, drawing a little intricate pattern in the corner of his blotting paper, and wondering whether this was a matter of five pounds or ten.
"I meant so well," she said and caught herself back into silence again.
He started at the thought, at a depth and meaning in her voice, turned his chair about to look at her, and discovered she was weeping and choking noiselessly. He stood up close to her, moving very slowly and silently, his eyes full of this new surmise, and now without word or gesture from her he knew his thought was right. "My dear," he whispered.
She turned her face from him. "I meant so well," she sobbed. "My dear! I meant so well." Still with an averted face her arms came out to him in a desperate, unreasoning appeal for love. He took her and held her close to him. "Never mind, dear," he said. "Don't mind." Her passion now was unconstrained. "I thought—" he began, and left the thing unsaid.
"But your work," she said; "your research?"
"I must give up research," he said.
"Oh, my dearest!"
"I must give up research," he repeated. "I've been seeing it for days. Clearer and clearer.Thisdear, just settles things. Even—as we were coming home in the train—I was making up my mind. AtVevey I was talking to Solomonson."
"My dear," she whispered, clinging to him.
"I talked to Solomonson. He had ideas—a proposal."
"No," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I've left the thing too long."
He repeated. "I must give up research—for years. I ought to have done it long before."
"I had meant so well," she said. "I meant to work. I meant to deny myself...."
"I'm glad," he whispered. "Glad! Why should you weep?" It seemed nothing to him then, that so he should take a long farewell to the rare, sweet air of that wonderland his mind had loved so dearly. All he remembered was that Marjorie was very dear to him, very dear to him, and that all her being was now calling out for him and his strength. "I had thought anyhow of giving up research," he repeated. "This merely decides. It happens to decide. I love you, dear. I put my research at your feet. Gladly. This is the end, and I do not care, my dear, at all. I do not care at all—seeing I have you...."
He stood beside her for a moment, and then sat down again, sideways, upon his chair.
"It isn't you, my dear, or me," he said, "but life that beats us—that beautiful, irrational mother.... Life does not care for research or knowledge, but only for life. Oh! the world has to go on yet for tens of thousands of years before—before we are free for that. I've got to fight—as other men fight...."
He thought in silence for a time, oddly regardless of her. "But if it was not you," he said, staring at the fireplace with knitted brows, "if I did not love you.... Thank God, I love you, dear! Thank God, our children are love children! I want to live—to my finger-tips, but if I didn't love you—oh! love you!then I think now—I'd be glad—I'd be glad, I think, to cheat life of her victory."