On an evening of early June Martin, Rendell and Lawrence punted up a backwater of the Thames. It was cool on the water's surface and a lingering remnant of breeze stole across the silent meadows and played gently with the willows. They had escaped from Oxford and the gas-works, from gramophones and the university boathouse. It was a special haunt of their own to which they had come, one of Hinksey's unpathed waters, very narrow and remote. At length they made fast to a stump of wood and smoked in peace.
It was all over. They had lived through a week of sweltering agony, of darting to the Schools in cap and gown and stuffy clothes, of darting out again to see how many words they had got wrong in their translation. Such is the dignity of Greats. Abiding by their plans, they had worked their philosophy according to schedule and answered their questions on grimly practical lines. They hadn't made bold to know about Beauty.
"Well," said Rendell, "that's the end of that."
"What?" yawned Martin. He was tired alike by his exertions and recent celebration of the end.
"Of everything."
"Edified?"
"I think so. It's been rather majestic somehow. To have to know about everything and keep a theory about every branch of thought and action. One doesn't do it, but it's rather good to think one is supposed to do it."
"Depressing enough before the event," Martin remembered nights of wild battling with insoluble problems and days when he had gazed in despair at papers recently set and realised his complete incapacity to inform the examiners about modality or the legal aspects of the Cæsar-Pompey quarrel.
"You used to get jolly black?" said Lawrence, remembering silences and outbursts or the lonely walks that Martin sometimes took.
"It's all very well for you," retorted Martin. "You may have to look forward to dull sort of work, but you're secure enough. I'm just beginning this business of getting a job and it's poor fun. I suppose it means India."
"You'll get a decent screw," said Rendell by way of comfort.
"And come back without a liver or an idea."
"Except about curry and cigars."
"I can't imagine our gloomy Martin as a sun-dried bureaucrat," Lawrence remarked. "But I suppose he'll have punkahs and khitmutgars and syces and be the devil of a chap. I daresay it's all right when you're there."
"There are few people who loathe the British Empire more cordially than I do," said Martin. "But there seems to be no way of keeping clear of it. Anyway I've quite settled not to starve as a journalist. Sooner the White Man's Burden than that."
"Anyhow," said Rendell, still eager to comfort, "we don't know anything about the Burden, do we? There may be something in it."
"Well, one thing is quite plain," asserted Martin, "there's no charity going as far as I am concerned. If I have to go and live in a dirty hot hole I go there because I can't get a decent living otherwise. I go on the make and I'll resign as soon as I can get the thousand that they're always chattering about. None of your Burden for me."
"To gather from what one sees," said Lawrence, "the Burden doesn't weigh very heavily on the shoulders of the big pots. They seem to do themselves pretty well."
"Of course they do. That's what they go for. How many varsity men would go abroad if they could live in comfort and get the same wage at home? Not ten per cent. And who can blame them? India pays, and it pays for hard, dangerous, useful work. I don't mind men going for the pay, but I do mind journalists blithering about their self-devotion in taking up the noble load."
"All the same," said Rendell cheerily, "you've quite a good chance for the Home."
"I wish the deuce I had," sighed Martin. "If I'd worked all the time I might have done it. But it's too late now. I don't really know anything and will be lucky to get India. Come on, let's move a bit."
During the next few days Martin managed to forget the looming menace of the East. The heat remained and they lived on the river, bathing and sleeping and feeding in turn. And then here were a couple of farewell dinners. The champagne flowed and Holywell was full of rushing people and strange noises. The passing of Lawrence was worthy of his whole career and on his last night a stalwart cortège bore him like a warrior to his rest.
After the end of term Martin stayed up to work. July was a month of lonely misery, of dust and bad tennis and the cramming of English Literature. At last the time for his Greats viva came and he walked down to the Schools with Lawrence, there to be asked by a nervous little man whether he thought things or thought thoughts. He at once informed the nervous little man that this was an idiotic question and that Descartes ... his knowledge of Descartes was overwhelming. Lawrence was dealt with by a truculent, red-faced man who asked him minute questions about the wanderings of the Phocæans. Lawrence just smiled wisely and was sent away. Rendell's turn came later. He was asked about the foundations of morality and maintained that while Kant was very wise and venerable he was also very wrong. But he remained respectful of Kant. One can only be offensive to J. S. Mill in Oxford nowadays, but about him one can say anything.
Once more Rendell took a first, Martin a second, and Lawrence a third. It was the history that kept them apart. Their philosophy had been uniformly good; Mr Cuggy was filled with pride and wrote to congratulate them all: whereat they wondered what would have happened if they had continued to cling to that philosophic rock, the Absolute. Yet it was nice of him to write. That was the worst of Cuggy: you couldn't dislike him.
From an Oxford of glaring streets and searching, irresistible dust Martin went up to London to seek his fortune at Burlington House. Later he remembered that August as a month of blazing heat and tired hands and aching head. He remembered a gloomy place shaped like a theatre where morose men asked him if he had a buff book and tore his papers from under his pen when time was up. There were days of solid labour and nights of anxiety spent with the text-books for to-morrow's exams: and there were unforgettable crowds of candidates sitting upon the steps before each paper and going over their notes for a last time with feverish futility. He remembered hating the people from Wren's as he had hated the Grammar School boys in his scholarship exams, jealously loathing and dreading their preparedness and notes and iron methods. He remembered the filthy temper he was in and his contempt for the scrubby little man who sat next to him and muttered to himself incessantly. Martin had crammed Blankney's notes on the Attic constitution because he had heard a rumour that Blankney was examining, and he remembered a ceaseless effort to display knowledge which he did not possess and to scrape up marks, marks, marks....
But the exams brought him also to Freda.
He found her pale and tired and more fragile than ever: he found her working from ten to six and idling despondently in the evenings. Quite obviously she was not the woman he had known in Devonshire.
Then she was strong and at her ease, full of mysterious confidence, rejoicing in life and her ability to cope with it. He had been to her merely an undergraduate, nicely foolish, he had amused her and she had read his letters, even answered them. He had chattered of affection and she had laughed him gently to scorn.
Now he came to her as a man in a world where men were scarce and men were needed. But it was Freda who had changed, not Martin. The transformation of the boy into the man was due to the heat of summer and the click of typewriters. To one deafened with the city's roar Martin brought memories of perfect woods and lonely pines that stood out against emptiness, starkly black. They used to go out together in the evenings, to Richmond, to Putney Heath, to Hampstead. They went where the others went because they were as the others, hard-worked, tired-out, desperately needing one another. There was no glory of passion in their evenings. Street lamps did not flame as flowers of the East, trees did not tower like giants luring them with soft voices, water was still water. Earth and sky had not altered for them: it had not altered for the others who wandered in the same places.
One Monday at half-past five Martin hurried out of Burlington House after his second paper in English Literature. Never in his life had he written more in six hours: he had drained his soul of platitude and pretence, discreetly praising and blaming men whom he had never read, never, thank God, would read, all the remoter 'C's,' Cowley, Cowper, Crabbe.
His nerves were all frayed. He hated the statues of Liebnitz and Locke and Plato ... what had Platonism to do with that sordid spot? He hated the Burlington Arcade with its lingering odour of stale scent: a woman smiled at him horribly and he hated her. He hated Piccadilly because it was dusty and deserted, and he hated the tea he drank because it was too hot and there were flies on the table. He hated himself for not remembering a quotation. How plain it all seemed now, and yet he had missed it.
He met Freda at half-past six at Waterloo and they went down to Thames Ditton. The river was crowded with punts and canoes and boats of every kind, but they joined the press. As darkness fell lights began to glitter like jewels across the water. Here and there a Chinese lantern swung on a prow, the glowing end of a cigarette flickered and was gone. Ripples of laughter floated from a nook where people supped, the popping of a cork, the tinkling of distant music. But if there was not solitude or silence, there was at least a breeze that shook the parched leaves and whispered in bough and rush. Martin found a vacant berth deeply curtained with bushes and low-hanging trees and there they made fast the punt and lingered.
They talked a little of his exam and of his prospects. And then they talked of her prospects.
"You're too fine for it," he said suddenly. It was what he had said so often before, but now she was no longer maternal or cheerily scornful of his protests. She yielded alike to his thought and to his touch. Never had she so yielded before. For Martin the world became a great, black silence: the only thing he knew was the closeness of her. That she trusted him, and wanted him was joy: that she was there, beside him, his, was magic. Because she for the first time yielded, he for the first time forgot. Never before had he quite escaped from himself, from considering the impression that he was likely to be making, from worrying fears and self-conscious timidity. Now he was free. He was aware only of the intangible fragrance of her hair, the warmth and movement of her body, the curve and rhythm of her limbs, the instant claim of her fragility. Everything became different.
At the end of the month Freda had a fortnight's holiday and went to an aunt in Yorkshire. Martin had arranged to meet Lawrence and Rendell at Seatoller in the Lakes. He went in a bitter mood, hungry for Freda, physically stale, and hopeless. But the traditional rain never came and soon they knew every crag of Honister and Grey Knotts, of Glaramara, of The Gables and the Scawfells, of the Langdale Pikes. The challenge of wind and weather on the hills and the flaming splendour of Borrowdale in autumn drove apprehension and despair from his soul. He learned that in some places a man cannot be morbid.
On an evening of late September they were playing three-handed auction. A telegram arrived from Devonshire. The commissioners had sent the result to his home address, it seemed.
Martin put down his hand and tore open the envelope. He had passed fifty-first on the list.
"Looks like India," he said quietly.
Neither Rendell nor Lawrence knew what to say. He had wanted the Home service, they knew, and fifty-first would not get that for him. They muttered congratulations self-consciously.
Martin took up his hand once more. It was solidly black.
"Five hearts?" he said. "Five royals."
The opposition collapsed and he made his tricks.
They played late, thinking only of the cards. Martin's career was settled, his life mapped out, his whole future determined by that message, and they talked of rubbers and pence. If he had miraculously passed in first or failed altogether they would have discussed it, but, because he had achieved the expected mediocrity, by tacit convention they were silent. The cards were really more important.
As Martin lay in bed that night it occurred to him with all the violence of a real discovery that he was, under certain conditions, the destined ruler and administrator of a nation far vaster and more ancient than his own, a nation of whose religion, ideals and practical needs he knew nothing whatever. He was equally ignorant of its population, products and methods of life, though of course he had a year in which to learn about these things. Incredible that he, Martin, twenty-two, boyish and superficial, should be a guardian of this people, a pro-consul in the making! And perhaps more strange was his apathy. In addition to his complete ignorance about India he cared nothing for the place, for how can a man, temperamentally inclined to Nationalism rather than to Imperialism, care for a nation which he only knows by a red blob on the map or by finding its stamps in collections restricted to the British Empire. India meant nothing to Martin. He had read Kipling, and certainly no tales of his had, despite the magic of their narrative, made him responsive to the call of the East. He still took it for granted that British rulers there would be as British rulers elsewhere, bigoted, snobbish, and unexpectedly effectual: corrupt, perhaps, fooling the poor and honouring the rich, bungling and lying and making money. That, he felt, was the attitude of the men he met, exaggerated, no doubt, but based on fact. But as he lay gazing at the cracks in the old ceiling above him his thoughts went back to the sheer bulk and beauty of The Gable, to Holywell at dusk, to the woods around The Steading and the cult of his uncle's deity. About the Oriental world he neither knew nor cared. He couldn't believe in it, so remote and unimportant it still seemed.
At Oxford during his Indian year he found that the future civilians took little interest in the place to which they were going. They wanted the pay and perhaps, though not admittedly, the possibility of a knighthood and a row of letters after their names. Certainly no one was concerned about the White Man's Burden. Naturally he did not blame these people: like himself, they were only seeking for a reasonable livelihood. But he was sickened by the cant he discovered in speeches and papers, the froth about self-sacrifice and noble callings: the work might, he acknowledged, be good and useful, it might promote the welfare of mankind and bring the peace of Cæsar to a troubled world, but no one was giving anything away in going to do it.
And he was lonely now. He had rooms in narrow Ship Street, and there he spent solitary days and nights craving the society of the Push: sometimes one of them would come down for a week-end, but otherwise there was scarcely anyone to whom he could talk. The winter crept on dismally, and Martin studied Bengali or rode on horseback over Shotover and Port meadow. But there was something wrong about Oxford: he felt old and alien and the college, when he entered it, seemed to be bubbling over with freshmen, all amazingly young and innocent and happy. He was vaguely jealous of them, uncharitably hostile. Were they not talking as he had talked, idling as he had idled? One friend he had, a poet in his third year, discreet and practical. From time to time Martin dined with him and forgot about India.
Most of all Freda mattered. Now that he was alone and despondent, he relied on her letters and his memories and thoughts of her to make life easier, even more tolerable. He retraced the whole course of their friendship, trying to reshape their relations. He remembered her first as an arguer, a friend to whom he had talked and talked: and then as a martyr, the sufferer for whom he had felt with a genuine, unstinting pity. And at last ... well, at last as a woman, as a person who had the power of making life different, of turning London into an enchanted fairyland and India into a vision of cool beauty, a person of infinite tenderness and understanding, a person whose presence and sympathy could stop things hurting. What rendered him most happy was his ability to meet her on equal terms. Hitherto she had been self-supporting, he a pampered undergraduate. He had had prospects but no certainty, and he had shrunk, even on that summer night upon the river, from saying things that he wanted to say, because he felt that it wasn't fair. One couldn't honourably say these things until one was 'a made man': one couldn't decently make women expect things unless you had some reasonable basis for hopes. With girls like May Williams it didn't matter what one said, because he had been just a 'fellow,' she just a 'girl.' Such affairs had their agreeable conventions. But with Freda it had been different, because there was no such tacit agreement: she might, she would expect him to take her out of her toil and weariness. And now he was free to say and do as it pleased him. He was 'made' and had position, for only by great folly and stupidity could he lose his opportunity.
At the end of term he went up to London. He told the Berrisfords that he had to go to a riding test at Woolwich and wanted to see the varsity rugger match. It is odd that a young man should be instinctively ashamed of love: he will tell his companions of his bodily desires gladly and even proudly, but he will hesitate before he confesses a craving for sympathy. He did ride, it is true, and he went to Queen's Club, where he caught an occasional glimpse of Cambridge three-quarters running abominably fast. It was one of the 'slump' years in Oxford football, the reaction after the reign of the immortals at Iffley Road, when the whole city and university trooped down to watch six elusive Internationals playing with the opposition's defence. Now Cambridge was doing the same and avenging those past defeats. Humiliating to watch those Tabs waving hats and yelling and ultimately carrying their captain from the field of glory! Comforting to reflect that when Oxford won they won soberly and with restraint, as though victory were for them the normal and accustomed thing! Only Tabs would behave like that. With such thoughts he tried to soothe his anger and disgust.
In the evening, because Freda had a headache, Martin dined with Lawrence and became expensively drunk: later he had memories of a crowded music hall, of distant singers and dancers flitting incessantly before white scenery: they worried him and he shouted at them to go away, but seemingly they refused. There were recollections of drinks with an old Elfreyan and the toasting of the school, of an elaborate conversation in French with a woman who only spoke Cockney, of a speech to the Indian nation begun on the crowded promenade and ended magnificently from the fountain at Piccadilly Circus. Probably there was supper somewhere and more noise and then he must have walked miles, for suddenly he became sober and found himself far down the Fulham Road. He picked up a taxi, and managed to get into bed more or less successfully about half-past three.
Freda, too, had spent a dull autumn. She had spoken the truth when she said that she was just too good for dull toil and not good enough for real work. The system was gradually devouring her and she had long ago reached the stage at which the one thing in life that matters is six o'clock, the hour of release from the drudgery and sordid gloom of the office. She lived for her leisure and on her leisure she had nothing to spend. There were friends whom she saw at intervals, but their intimacy had limitations and was only close enough to drive home the need for real companionship.
In one matter she had been fortunate. She had found a cheap room at the top of an old house in Bloomsbury and was thus spared the necessity of going to one of those gloomy mansions for working women. It was a small room, high up and chilly: but it was hers, and even the gas-fire could not rob it of real comfort.
Martin had not meant to linger in London as he had work to do. But he soon realised the impossibility of going away. Not only did he need Freda, but she too needed him. There was no advantage in denying the mutual emptiness and mutual satisfaction. So he stayed, and in the mornings and afternoons he read his Indian law and history, or wandered about London, loitering in picture galleries or threading the ways of Bloomsbury with many a passing glance at the house where Freda slept. Squarely and simply it stood, with no flaunting brick-work or Victorian embellishment: its colour was the nameless colour that a London house should have, the sombre blending of grey and red and deepest brown. On one side was a mean street, one of those sad thoroughfares which Chance has brought to destitution: the houses were good and strong, but each contained a score of people and belched out numberless squalid children to play and quarrel in the teeming gutters. On the other side a wide street ran straight up to a square garden and the two lines of houses converged and faded away in a haze of smoke and branches. In the afternoons, when Martin walked there, sunset would stain the gentle greyness with pink or, in angrier mood, would stab dark clouds and leave great rifts of red. It was all so strong and quiet and dignified, seeming actually to exhale the finest quality of London. The street, at any rate, was worthy of her.
When the long day's wait was over he would have Freda to himself. Then London became beautiful in every line and form and colour. The lamps were flaming jewels and the rain-soaked, glittering streets were bands of silver: the murkiest lane threw off its squalor, and the night, with its great glooms and shadows, its sudden bursts of iridescence and its mystery of swiftly moving figures, made him think of Eastern jungles, splashed with fierce colours, cavernous with infinite shade. Then a woman, rouged and powdered and swathed in tawny fur, would sweep majestically past: she was the tiger who burned brightly. Formerly he hated these women, because they charmed him, challenged and held his gaze, hated them too because they brought home to him the fact that he had not the courage of his desires. But now he need not care. That was the great joy of it.
So in this enchanted forest of London they walked and drove, feasted and saw the play: not one play, but all the plays. And after the play they feasted again and were contented. It was a forest that tended to swallow gold rather than yield it, and Martin had to borrow on the security of his position as a probationer in the Indian Civil Service. But there was pleasure in the signing of the bond.
Sometimes they would sit in Martin's hotel, which had a large, deserted lounge with sensible corners and crannies for conversation. Sometimes he would go back with Freda to her room in Bloomsbury and wait until she turned him out.
"I won't have you here after eleven," she told him and quoted fromThe Great Adventureon reputations, the coddling and neglect of them.
"But if you have me at all——" he protested.
"I'm English and I believe in compromise," she answered.
So he stayed till eleven. It was a neat place and orderly with naked walls: he loved it as he loved its owner. When the washstand and bed had been hidden behind their curtain, the stray shoes kicked beneath the wardrobe, and the arm-chair drawn up to the gas-fire, there seemed to be nothing mean or sordid in the room despite the lack of space and the roof corner that jutted rudely in. What did it matter now if the window looked on to a back yard and a world of chimneys?
"Why are you so wonderfully tidy?" Martin asked.
"Don't you associate tidiness with me?"
"No, you're too wild. Tidinesss is a petty virtue."
"Well I confess it hasn't anything to do with my general character. I hope I'm not petty anyhow. It's sternly practical tidiness. I used to be lazy and find my stockings muddled up with the spoons, but it soon sickened me and now I have come to prefer the fag of clearing up to the discomfort of a muddle. Besides, if I'm going to have you here it oughtn't to be a beddy 'bed-sit,' but a sitty 'bed-sit.'"
"Your precious reputation," he laughed.
On another night she asked him what the Berrisfords thought about his absence from home.
"I don't know and I don't think I care!" he answered.
"Why? They must be interested in you, and you're very fond of them."
"I dare say, but I can't think of them now." He drew her to him. "Freda, I'm too happy to care about them. I just can't imagine that the world has any other place but London, or any other people but you and me. Nothing else is real; nothing counts, not India or Oxford or anything."
She yielded herself to him, but suddenly drew back.
"You mustn't go and muddle things," she said conscientiously. "Supposing you fail next September, what would I feel like?"
"I won't fail next September," he answered defiantly.
"I'm glad you said that. You must be confident, much, much more confident. I'm sure you would have been happier if you had never been afraid of things."
Ecstasy to know her gladness, to see her quick smile of confidence because he was confident! How could he have feared and doubted? He could not let her draw away: his arms must have her.
"I'm never going to be afraid again," he said. "I know what was wrong now."
"Well?"
"I didn't care about anything. I didn't know what I wanted, while everything lay in front of me. I didn't feel, though I had all the world to feel about. I didn't love, though I had all the world to love. I just drifted. Now I have what I want."
She was silent. Across the tumult of his soul stole things of the senses, the pulsing of her blood, the scent of that brown witchery of hair, the touch of her tired hand, the vision of a glistening bow of silk on a poised foot: above all, the divine sense of his own grasping possession, her clinging weakness.
"I know now what I want," he went on rapidly. "I want the same thing to go on that has just begun, the thing that has brushed all the hardness and ugliness out of the world and made the future easy. You've done all that. I want you."
He crushed her to him roughly, almost hurting her: and he knew by her stillness that it pleased her so to be hurt.
"You're not going back now," he whispered fiercely. "You're not going to knock to pieces the thing you've built. India is a cool heaven now; don't make it a fiery hell. Work is all doing and creating. Don't make it all drudgery. Oh, I'm selfish. You're so perfect, and I can only talk of my own work, my own troubles. Freda, I'm sorry. I——"
Still she was silent.
"Oh, say something," he begged. "Forgive me for being selfish."
"There's nothing to forgive."
"Then say—you've said you cared for me—say you love me."
In a moment he had forgotten his remorse and again was claiming, insisting. And she, knowing that love can be, even must be, selfish and imperious, was glad that he should claim her and obeyed his command.
Of course Martin stayed in London over Christmas and into the New Year, living with a fullness he had never known, seeing the purpose and fineness of things which he had despised and neglected. How strange it was that all the world should be changed by that one weak figure, seemingly so ineffectual! how strange that one mortal should carry for another the keys of heaven! How trivial seemed all his philosophy with its objectivity of this and that when he discovered how subjective all his outlook was, how the presence or the absence of a loved one could make or mar the colour-medley of a sunset or the beauty of a tree against the sky.
One thing was certain: he gloried in possession. All his loneliness was forgotten now and, as he paced the streets, he could look upon the other couples without the pang of jealousy that once had stung him. There would be no more glances thrown furtively at passing women, no turning of an eager eye for bygone faces, no more emptiness and yearning. Deep magic lay in the thought that Freda, with her smile, and her quick mind, and her infinite grace of movement, was his to possess, to own. He was not ashamed to glory in these proprietary relations nor was she ashamed to accept them. She even welcomed them, yielding to Martin with an utter abandonment of self. She wanted only to be his, to be his loved possession, to help him and to share humbly in his triumphs and successes.
One night indeed he repented, not of his love, but of his manner of love. He felt the indignity of ownership.
They had gone, in a fit of intellectual enthusiasm, to see a play calledDrift. At a small outlying theatre two young men of ideas were completing the noble task of self-imposed bankruptcy by giving the British public a season of "good drama." And the public naturally helped on the work by the easy method of staying away. The house was barely half full when, after the hammerings customary in these circles, the curtain went up.
Drift, a play in four acts by Villiers Wentworth, turned out to be a fair specimen of that now antiquated genre, The New Drama. It had the monosyllabic title, the insistent realism, the contempt for form and dramatic convention, the arid conversation with lapses of brilliance, the admirable acting, and, above all, the Great Gloom. It was naturally a play with a point, showing, justly and forcibly, the hopeless inadequacy of modern life to provide the average man and woman with anything like a Unity of Interest. The characters drifted from home which they dreaded to work which they loathed and in the evening they made the return journey. Nothing held their lives together, nothing remained as a permanent, unifying interest. There was love, but, as Mr Villiers Wentworth pointed out, the young man is barred socially and economically from indulging in anything but hole-and-corner affairs just when he most needs real sympathy.
"Not a good play," said Martin as they walked out into the flaring streets and joined the joyous welter of confusion at Piccadilly. "The man's got no sense of humour and he thinks that everyone is miserable who hasn't got two hundred a year. The poor are just as happy as the rich. Of course they oughtn't to be, but they are."
"But there was a point," said Freda, "about unity of interest. It may be obvious, but it's true. Didn't you drift? Haven't I drifted?"
They turned into a restaurant.
As they supped they forgot about the play. But later Martin's mind returned to the subject.
"Come back," said Freda suddenly. "Penny."
"Hand over," he answered, smiling as he started.
"Well, what is it?"
"You, of course."
"I'm sorry for that. You looked so sad."
"I'm feeling ashamed," he confessed.
"What of?"
"Of the way I've thought of you. I've been so selfish. I only cared for my own escape from drifting. It's been my work, my life, my love. I have been thinking of you as the person who would make my life perfect. It's been all me, me, me. When we first met I thought of you and your work. Now it's only me and my work."
"That's as it should be."
"No, no, it isn't. A year ago I should have hated myself for thinking like this."
"Perhaps you have learned as well as lived."
"I've been a brute and there's an end of it." He was deriving a secret pleasure from his self-depreciation. There was bliss in humiliating himself before her, in grovelling at the feet of her whom he adored. If he could not get the conventional thrill from the confession of past affairs and failings, he would achieve the ecstasy of self-torture by laying bare a loftier mistake.
But she laughed at him. "Silly Billy," she said. "Pay the waiter and I'll tell you."
She told him as they drove back together in their taxi.
"After all," she began, "compare my work with yours. Mine is drudgery. Yours is big and important. It doesn't matter what becomes of mine, but it matters a lot what becomes of yours, I hate mine and I love yours. I want to give myself up to yours, to make it easier and better. Can't you see, Martin dear, that isn't selfishness or unselfishness. Those words don't count in such a case. If we love, then I'm you and you're me, and one person can't give to himself or take away from himself surely."
"It sounds so specious," he said. "And yet I still feel greedy, as though I were denying your right to be yourself."
"I don't want to be myself. I want to be different. I'm as greedy as you are and more so, only differently. As it is, the word isn't real. We're both giving and both taking and there's an end of it."
He was silent for a moment. "It's no use my trying to say how perfect you are," he said at last.
"Dear, delightful, serious, conscience-stricken gloomkins," she laughed at him. "What does all this matter ... how we share things, I mean? The only real thing is enthusiasm, wanting and feeling and loving. You were at a loose end until you began to feel; you couldn't work, you couldn't do anything. Nor could I. And now work is all changed and seems better and easier. The office is a palace for me, India a pleasure garden for you. Do stop worrying and be sensible."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll try and be good. You're always right. This taxi goes far too fast. We're in your street."
"Bother," she said.
"Let's tell him to drive on somewhere else and come back in another one."
"No. You've spent far too much and we've done that often enough. I'm going to be a good girl to-night."
"Tyrant."
"Wastrel."
"He's stopping. One more kiss."
Through streets that more than ever resembled enchanted pathways in a forest of shadow and silver, Martin went back exulting to his hotel.
It was the second week in January when Martin went down to The Steading: he merely stayed to collect books and clothes and returned at once to London. While he was there he told his uncle and aunt that he was engaged to be married.
That night John Berrisford discussed the matter with his wife. "Well," he began, "what about our young Martin?"
"I suppose it's all right," said Mrs Berrisford quietly. "He's very young, but that seems to be the fashion nowadays."
"Yes, that doesn't matter. Long engagements are tragic, unhealthy things, but they'll be apart and he ought to be able to marry almost at once. Quite a lot of civilians do."
"And she's quite a nice girl."
John Berrisford gave the slight wriggle of the shoulders for which we have only the excessive word "shrug."
"Don't you approve?" added his wife.
"Yes and no. On the whole, no." He kicked at the fire testily. "She's quite a nice girl and clever and reasonable beyond the average. If Martin were going to hang about in town, well and good. But really is she the wife of an Indian Civilian?"
"But, John, surely! You with your ideas about freedom! You don't believe in the marriage of convenience, I know. Isn't Martin to have his choice?"
"Of course he shall have every choice. I'm not one to bluster or give orders or interfere. He's going to marry the girl, not I. I know that. But I'd like him to think a little first. Do consider the facts. Freda is clever and quick. Perhaps she really cares for Martin, perhaps she's only sick to death of the hellish existence decreed by modern civilisation for penniless orphans of the female sex. But she has lived in a groove, she has never met people—not the kind of people she'd run up against in India. She doesn't like games or society. She likes talking and arguing and lying in bed. She'd hate the Anglo-Indian just as she hates any kind of pomp and circumstance. She hasn't the vaguest notion as to what they'll expect of her. Worse still, she hasn't even health. She would be invalided home in a year and Martin with a salary of three or perhaps four hundred a year would have to support a wife whom he only saw on leave. You've got to consider his career and his general happiness. There is no reason why he shouldn't find a woman who understands the kind of life and behaviour, a woman who could fit in, and yet has brains and charm enough for an intelligent person."
"Mary Brodrick?" suggested Mrs Berrisford. "The kind of girl who sings about her caravan resting after dinner?"
"We needn't go as far as that. Something between the two."
"You're a heartless old schemer, John. We must respect his choice."
"Absolutely. But I'm fairly confident about the result. Anyhow there is plenty of time and it's Martin's first affair."
"Are you sure?"
"I have watched the signs of times. This is the first time he has taken a month to see the varsity match."
"But he is stubborn when he has once settled on a thing. He doesn't decide quickly, I know, but when he has he is firm."
"We'll see. As it is, I suppose you must have her down for Easter. I got her her present job and I know her employers well. I can easily get them to allow her a holiday then. And when we've got them, we must leave them very much alone."
"But surely——"
"My dear, it's the only hope. Keep them apart, hint at the unsuitability of marriage, and they'll elope on nothing in a fortnight's time. That's quite certain. My idea is to bang them together fairly hard. I don't want it to hurt, but I do want them to have a clear idea as to what they are both made of."
"Do you think it's quite fair?"
"Isn't it what they would want themselves? It's the only possible thing we can do. And also," he added quietly, "it will give a certain interest to next Easter."
But there was no need to beg a holiday for Freda. In February, when the winds came driving up the Channel and brought to England a month-long burden of rain and sleet, her health gave way again and she was warned that she was not strong enough for the wear and tear of an office life. For most people it is true that colds are not liable to the laws of cause and effect: they happen or they don't and to be soaked to the skin is no more fatal than to bask in the sun. But for Freda to arrive at the office with feet wet and cold meant certain visitation. And by six o'clock she was always worn out. Now she would have to rely on an uncle and aunt. The uncle had money and had offered already to release Freda from the misery of work, but she had refused, so intolerable had seemed his great Victorian mansion on Sheffield's edge. She had wanted, in her youthful courage, to work and to be free. But now there was no use in fighting and she yielded partly from a consideration of hard fact, partly because her uncle had retired from his business and was coming to London. Idleness in town with an allowance! By privation she had been taught the meaning and the value of both. So it was as a woman of moderate means and unlimited leisure that Freda came to The Steading for Easter.
Martin came from Oxford jaded and tired out. He had had to work hard in order to make up for a vacation of complete indolence. The wet February had brought floods and stinted exercise and despondency: it had been tedious work, toiling over a new language in those lonely Ship Street rooms. His soul hungered for sympathy, his body for the infinite swell and splendour of the moor and for the cold sting of the winds that whirled across it like the thongs of a lash.
For a week he stayed about the house and strolled in the near woods with Freda, whose recent illness had left her far too weak for real walking. She hadn't the strength nor could she risk a strain or chill. So Martin lingered with her all day, while they built fantastic castles of hopes and visions. Then the inactivity grew intolerable to his body, tore at his nerves, and made him ravenous for the moor and the golf-links. Freda despised golf and could not understand how any sane person could be bothered with it. They squabbled about it gently, never suspecting that it might come to matter.
Fate fought against Freda.
Martin, whenever during these days he handled a club, found that he could do nothing wrong: he was "on his game." And the Cartmells came down for the Easter recess. Godfrey had captured the seat two years ago and had settled down comfortably on a back bench from which his wife intended to oust him. But the back-bencher may live strenuous nights and days: he too was tired and wanted air and exercise. And so in the afternoons Martin was called upon as much by civility as by the craving of his heart to motor with them to the golf-course and join in a foursome. Desperate warfare took place in which Martin was Viola's, Godfrey Margaret Berrisford's ally. And Martin was wonderful. His drives flew far and low, straight for the flag or the direction post: no ugly jarring told him of the topped iron-shot: his short putts ran straight into the middle of the hole. He dug his partner's foozled drives out of heather and hedge and laid her wild approaches dead with a niblick. Up on that lonely course with only the wind and the white clouds for neighbours, with no one to keep them back or hurry them on, with turf so springy that a foot could never tire, so spongy-soft that a brassie might be lightly taken and effectively wielded, with the exquisite strain of even conflict, with matches taken to the last green and won, perhaps by Martin's inimitable 'run-up'—yes, it was golf.
The joy of it was almost insupportable. Martin began to live for those afternoons; yet, if he had been off his game, had sliced with his driver and topped with his irons, as was indeed his wont, the golf-club would have lost its appeal: there is little pleasure in playing golf badly, but there is all the world in playing above your form.
Once Freda came up to watch them and walk as far as she could. But she was plainly bored, pleaded fatigue, and went back to the little club-house where she sat reading. To Martin, in his present mood of triumphant exultation, it seemed incredible that anyone could fail to see the point of it.
He tried to convince her. "Perhaps you can't imagine the thrill that conies from a really true hit: really it's one of the few good things in the world. The ball goes off clean and sweet and leaves you with a faint tingling that lets you know you've done the trick. And then you climb a ridge and there's the ball white and glistening on the green. That means you've done exactly what you set out to do and that you've got a long putt to beat Bogey. And if you ram it in!"
"Baby!" she said, laughing. "Did 'ums like 'ums bouncey ball."
At first he laughed too and told himself that naturally they couldn't share all the same tastes. In the morning and evening he stayed with her, neglecting his work. But gradually he came to feel that there was something more than jocosity in her denunciation of the bouncey ball.
Soon after Easter one of Freda's colds kept her in bed for breakfast. It was the Cartmells' last day but one and everything pointed to a final test of strength. They went over in the morning and stayed to lunch at the club-house. There were two great matches, of which each side gained one. Martin had not yet lost his skill: he had dreaded the day of torture when he would go "right off."
"Let's have another nine holes," said Viola Cartmell as they took an early tea. "We aren't keeping Martin from his duty. And it's our last chance and such an evening."
They agreed to play and nerved themselves for faultless execution.
An hour later Martin lay upon the steep bank at the edge of the ninth green. Now he had grasped most certainly, what Freda would never grasp, the mystery of Ham and Eggs. In the fine light of sunset the moor seemed to tower inimitably above them, crowned with its eternal tors, clear-cut as by a razor's edge against the vast blue emptiness behind. The April breeze was whispering in the grass and timid larks soared and plunged and hung singing in the void. Before him was the smooth-shaven green, true as a billiard cloth but humped with testing undulations. And there were the three other players awaiting with tense anxiety the future of the match. Godfrey was kneeling to take the line of his putt: the ball would end its journey along the side of a veritable mountain, a glorious stroke to achieve! Farther back were Margaret and Viola. Suddenly the breeze caught them, snatched at a stray wisp of hair, played with their skirts, and gave a last caress to cheeks already kissed to flame. There were grace and strength knit perfectly: to Martin they seemed, after the slight form of Freda, tremendous. Yet why shouldn't women be strong? He wanted them to be strong, to walk with him, to fear neither wind nor weather. And Freda...
His thoughts returned swiftly to the match. Godfrey was on the point of playing: he had this, a ten footer, to halve the hole and the match. There was silence and then the gentle tap of the club on a rubber-cored ball. One gazed, one shouted. The ball had lipped the hole and swung out to the left.
In the car they fought the whole match over again.
"If only I hadn't given you the sixteenth this morning——"
"No, it was my fault. If I miss two-foot putts, you can't be expected——"
And thus during the whole journey superb concentration on an end to be won, superb oblivion to work and wealth and weariness.
Martin found Freda yawning in the porch.
"I thought you were staying upstairs all day," he began.
"Who said so?"
"The maid, I think."
"Well, I never said anything about it. You don't seem very glad to see me."
"Of course I am. Only I meant that I would have come back earlier if I had known."
"I wouldn't keep you from your golf."
He sat beside her, but she did not welcome him. She was hurt.
"If I'd only known, I wouldn't——"
"Day after day," she whispered. "I know you like to be out and about. I don't claim you always, do I? But sometimes, surely."
"I didn't know," he repeated remorsefully. "I didn't know."
"Yesterday you went and to-morrow you'll go."
"No, I won't. Freda, I'm a brute. I've been rotten to you. I've nothing to say for myself."
"You've got to go to-morrow."
"I won't. You don't want me to go."
"You must go. I'm not going to keep you, if you don't stay of your own accord. The ball is much more amusing than I am."
He pleaded, he fought against her, but she insisted on his going.
The punishment was effective. He went in anguish and played with no zest for the game. He sliced, he topped, he missed short putts. The match fizzled out on the fourteenth green, a fiasco.
The Cartmells hurried back to London and Martin remained to make peace with Freda. He had been unspeakably pained by the sordidness and waste of energy and peace that quarrelling had entailed. He hated the suspicions and embarrassments that must linger on: he was passionately desirous of restoring the old intimacy and yet ... somehow or other the wound remained. He couldn't forget that evening on the ninth green. Why wouldn't Freda see the point of these things? Why wouldn't she walk? She was strong enough now for a mile or two. Almost he was angry with her for having been ill, for it is an odd feature of humanity that we sometimes dislike people for their sufferings, hate them for a cough or sniff. And now Martin was on the point of blaming Freda for the weakness he had once adored. Why wasn't she strong like Margaret or Viola? Why didn't she understand about the moor and wind-swept spaces and the miracle of hitting a golf-ball?
While he was bearing the olive branch these questions, dreaded and strongly combated, kept forcing themselves into the narrow passes of his mind as the Persian host flooded into Thermopylae. It was futile to feign deafness: in time they would force a hearing. And there were other less easily worded doubts and apprehensions.
Perhaps the summer-time came as a release. More than he would have cared to admit, Martin wanted to be alone, to see Freda dispassionately, from a distance. And so to Oxford.
Freda, while undergoing all unconsciously this dispassionate appreciation, retired to London. But within a few weeks' time she had received another invitation to Devonshire, and tired not so much of town as of her relations she gladly accepted.
At The Steading were a Mr and Mrs Brodrick with their daughter. Arthur Brodrick had been contemporary with John Berrisford at Oxford and had passed high into the Indian Civil Service. Just before his time for a pension was due he had been invalided home and had missed the full reward of his service. The Brodricks lived at Sutton in a remote mediocrity of wealth more galling than actual poverty.
Was it Chance again, the Chance that had brought a perfect Easter and put Martin on his game, that now seemed to keep the conversation on Oriental diseases and the rigours of imperial service? Certainly Freda heard more of fever in distant stations than of health and company at Simla. But the Brodricks had not been divorced from patriotism by the hardness of their lot: they still believed in the flag, in the pomp and state of the British Raj, in stately dinners at Government House where the couples went down to the feast in order of social precedence, and they recounted squabbles, petty but bitter antagonisms, of rival ladies who considered themselves insulted by their positions in the troop of diners.
Freda listened silently and learned.
So this was the life for which she had bargained. Eternal fever—so they implied—eternal society of the Brodricks and their kind! For Martin with his work to love and his career to think about such things might be well enough! But for her! How could she blend with this unknown, this unparalleled society?
Then the Berrisfords suggested that they should all go to Oxford for Eights Week. Mr and Mrs Berrisford had to be in town: would Mary Brodrick come? And, naturally, Freda? Both the girls accepted eagerly. It was soon settled and rooms were engaged at the Mitre.
On reading the letter announcing their plans Martin groaned in the spirit. It wasn't, of course it wasn't, that he did not want to see Freda. Did he not write to her as eagerly as ever? Did she not answer? But Eights Week of all times!
Martin was sufficiently a lover of Oxford, summery Oxford of the still water-ways, to loathe and despise Eights Week, that Whitsuntide holiday of the wealthy, when the city is invaded by a host of rich trippers, whose tripping has not even the justification of beer-bottles and hearty bestiality. He did not wish to eat salmon mayonnaise, to drink champagne cup, to propel, in faultless flannels, a punt among a solid mass of punts, to go for picnics where all London was revelling. His choice would have been to launch a vessel on the upper river, to find some tranquil backwater past Eynsham, with a canopy of willow and the scene of flowering meadows; or else to make use of deserted tennis courts and to enjoy things properly. Now they were going to break in upon him: and indeed another idle vacation had left him work enough to do. They had not come when he was a fresher and such things were allowable, and the Berrisfords knew Oxford well. Presumably they desired to show Freda the city and its ways. But why, oh why, in Eights Week? It wasn't like the Berrisfords.
They arrived duly and lived in state at the Mitre: they mingled with the crowds, tramped the colleges, and demanded to have things pointed out to them. Mary Brodrick said all the right things. Martin shuddered as the phrases came out in turn:
"Can we see the kitchens?" (at Christ Church).
"Where are the Prince's rooms?" (at Magdalen).
"Isn't this the clever college?" (at Balliol).
It was a gloomy ceremony.
There was Freda. And she ... well, he had to admit that she didn't harmonise with this world of fine raiment and expensive bean-feasts. The Freda who glittered in the punt, the Freda clothed sumptuously at her uncle's expense was undeniably different from the insignificant wisp of a girl in plain blue coat and skirt who had hurried out of the office at six and come to Martin for rest and comfort. To have explained his feelings accurately would have been an impossible task for Martin, but he could not put aside a vague sensation that Freda was wrongly placed in this world, that she was pre-eminently a martyr and a rebel, not a woman of leisure.
She did not even know what to say. There is a particular kind of speech appropriate to these occasions: it is neither flirtation nor conversation in the proper sense, but a discreet blend, a mixture as insipid as it is inevitable. It does not demand brains or wit, but a certain quality, a training. Mary Brodrick, with all her limitations, knew the game; she was jolly and made things go. Freda hung back or, when she came forward, made mistakes. Odd that Martin should have been angry with Freda for her inability to play a game which he himself despised. Yet it did pain him that she didn't "fit in."
As a strange word whose meaning has recently been discovered seems to the reader to occur on every page he reads, so Freda suddenly revealed to Martin in a hundred ways her incapacity for "fitting in." And it was to the society of countless Brodricks that Martin would have to take her.
On the Wednesday evening, when the river was rendered invisible by the press of vessels and fair women, when the supporters of the victorious college swam across the river and dived from barge and boathouse, when supper-parties began to disappear up the Cherwell and gramophones to tinkle in shady recesses, Mary Brodrick caught her train to town, Mr and Mrs Berrisford went to see the Irish Players, and Martin took Freda on the river.
To avoid the crowd they were going to the Cherwell above the rollers. She kept him waiting in the taxi that was to take them to Tims'.
At Tims' she found the punt dirty, said the cushions were filthy, and would ruin her dress.
"Eights Week," said Martin. "We've got to be thankful to get any kind of a punt."
Still she grumbled. Martin ran into a projecting bush and, before she knew what had occurred, her hat had been pushed over her eyes, her hair disarranged, and her face scratched. She said nothing at all. Worse than any expostulation! It grew cold and a chilly breeze sprang up.
Inevitably they quarrelled. There was no particular cause for the outburst. A long week of strain, of mutual revelation and discovery, of mingled pleasure and annoyance, was bound to tell.
They had at least the satisfaction of making things clear.
"You only cared for me as a martyr," she ended.
"I didn't, you know I didn't," he protested on the spur of the moment.
But both knew that it was more than half the truth.
Their letters of renunciation crossed.
Chance and John Berrisford had been powerful allies.