XIMATRIMONYHear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,An’ let poor damned bodies be:I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gieEv’n to a deilTo skelp and scaud poor dogs like meAn’ hear us squeal.HEreturned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay. She held out her hand to him.“What a strange man you are! Couldn’t you sleep?”“No. I couldn’t sleep.“Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully.”Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she glowedin her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her, who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:“A—a—ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet, lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!”He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on.She said:“René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it you.”He answered:“Peace.”“Peace? Isn’t this peace?”Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away from her.“Can there ever be peace,” he asked, “between a man and a woman?”“What do you mean?”He made no reply.“Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you mean.” And she dodged aside into phrases—the war of the sexes, the difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.“I meant you and me,” he said, biting out his words.“Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us. We couldn’t be more wonderful. Could we?”“I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can’t help thinking of those damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said: ‘How wonderful we are!’”That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and jumped to her feet.“Oh, I never thought——”She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out behind her. He came up to her.“What did you never think?”“That on our second day you would be satirical.”He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:“I said what I felt. Mayn’t I do that? I didn’t think it would hurt you, really, I didn’t. Linda, I——“Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more than you can say. And you don’t know how uncomfortable it is.”She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood pondering it.“I can’t help it,” he said slowly, “I’m made like that. I can’t be comfortable.”Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.“I know you can’t,” she said, “but I can, and you mustn’t spoil it for me.”He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her and cried:“Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would——”“What would you do?”“I don’t know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to you.”“I believe you would, and that makes me love you.”He weakened to her will, and not again during their honeymoon did he let slip in expression or gesture thetiniest hint of the storm let loose in him. Small periods of solitude he could procure at night when she had retired for her astonishingly lengthy toilette. Then in suppression of his fire and rebellion, in the effort to keep a tight control on it even within himself, he became aware of a strength, a firmness that, out of all that he had lost of youth and ease and pleasant happiness and the charm of living, emerged as gain. Yet it was not in his nature to count it up nor to hoard. He could find much to rejoice over, the splendor of the night, the keen winds, the huge waves splashing under the wind, and all he would take to his wife for her to turn into charm. And she would weave her spells round him. Her tone, her eyes, her warmth, that was so like tenderness as almost to deceive him into acquiescence, all said to him: “Forget! Forget!” But every fiber of his will was stretched in the effort to remember and gain knowledge—to remember how this thing had come about, that he should have so much and so little love for this woman, by what blindness he had come to it, and what in all his slow growth to manhood should have brought him to such sweet mockery of it. These were not his words. He was groping beyond words, beyond actions; his captured force was searching through his life to find forces to sustain it, to urge it on, to release that slow-moving stream that had brought him thus far to be chained and confined. He who had realized so little was struggling to realize himself, to find within himself the power that should break this woman in her complacent dwelling in the pleasure of their loveand set him free and her. For he had begun dimly to perceive that she too was to be thought of, and in his effort he was gentle with her. This was hard, for against his gentleness she chafed. She wanted turbulence, upheaval, suspected not the stirring in his depths and was forever agitating the surface of his being. Once or twice she did call forth the anger, and then she reveled in her delicious fright and was so quiet as to alarm him and drive him back into his gentleness. Out of this she stirred him. It was to her only an odious sluggishness.It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but hisadmiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to it.Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end of their stay:“I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a woman.” (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) “A man must have his work.”“I’ve been thinking,” said René, “that we never know what we want but when we have it.”“How true!” She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the rocky coast-line, and murmured:“It will be something to remember. Itisa pretty place.”For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He was committed to her, isolatedwith her. The loneliness of that day upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.Linda was immediately busy organizing her household, buying, buying all day long; visiting, receiving visitors; she had crowds of friends and gushing acquaintances, and they easily assimilated her husband, were interested in him as they were interested in her wall-papers, her furniture, her plans for the little garden, her gowns, her china. He used to watch eagerly, almost hungrily, for a sign that they recognized his existence apart from hers, but no sign ever came. To the women he was something belonging to dear Linda, and therefore to be admired since she was reputed to get the best of everything; to the men, hard-headed, commercial gentry, he seemed to be baffling and ominous, for they either fished nervously and falteringly for his views or left him in the silence to which their geniality reduced him.He resumed his work at the school where he had not yet learned to disengage himself from his schoolboy’s sensations—dread of the headmaster, an inclination to run along the corridors when the bell sounded, a desire to smack cheeky little boys over the head, reluctance to attend prayers in the morning. At the end of the year a vacancy occurred on the staff of the university and he was appointed to fill it.His first tussle with Linda came with his assertion of a desire to be alone in his study when he was working. She had made a practice of settling down with him in the evening with her sewing, or some clerical work connected with one of the various committees towhich she had had herself appointed—social and rescue work, Arts and Crafts, the University Musical Society, the Thrigsby Amateur Dramatic Club, the Goethe Society, etc. She had learned to be silent, but by the plying of her needle or the scratching of her pen she disturbed and distracted him. He put up with it for some time, but at last it was too strong for him, and he protested.“But Mrs. Smallman sits with her husband every evening.”“He may be used to it, and she has a capacity for doing nothing which you do not share.”“But it’s so absurd to have two fires lit in the evening.”“I’d rather not work then, and come and sit with you.”“But you must work. You never say anything.”“Then I must work alone.”“Why must you?”“Because I can’t work any other way.”“What is it disturbs you? I won’t do it if you’ll tell me.”“I can’t tell you. It’s just having you there.”“Then you— Then you— Oh, well! There’s nothing more to say if you feel like that about me.”“Linda, don’t be silly. It isn’t about you.”She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood of tears and a fierce hunger forpossession and to be possessed by him compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers, no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation. Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year married:“The room over the study—that would be the best for the nursery when we want one.”“But, René,” she answered, after a pause, “we don’t want to have children yet, do we?”Despair seized him. He could not look at her.“No. No. Of course, it is as you please.”She smiled awry:“Oh, my dear, I didn’t mean you to take it like that. It sounded horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be possible——”He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of “modern men and women,” as though some change had come over human nature.“I sometimes think,” he said, “that no single word has the same meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not my Yes, your No is not mine.”“Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem to knowmore than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don’t seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you . . . Oh, I don’t know what to do with you! Can’t we be just happy?”“Just happy! . . . I suppose we can.”“We have been . . . Haven’t we?”“We have been,” he said, but the words in his mind were: “No more than happy.”To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired.She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to drive.That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism.“But what shall I do if it breaks down?”“It can’t break down,” said Kurt. “The magneto can’t go wrong. If she stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or the jet.”René tried to read a book about motor-cars, butcould not apply its technicalities to his own machine. He spent some days in and about and under the car, tracing out the principles on which it worked, and following its transmission of energy from cylinder to clutch, from clutch to gear, gear to back-axle. When he had done that he felt some confidence in driving, came to know the moods of his engine, and to take an extraordinary pleasure in handling it. Every week-end he made some excursion with Kurt or Linda, and sometimes alone. He explored the country for fifty miles round Thrigsby, and discovered to his dismay the vastness of the network of industrial towns, and, to his delight, the loveliness of the still uncontaminated country.At first the change produced the effect Linda had desired. He had a new energy which enabled him to take the dull work of the week lightly. He seemed to have caught some of Kurt’s enthusiasm together with a little of his good humor and tolerance. But these qualities he could not assume without the frankness that nourished them. Soon he was no longer deceived by the counterfeit he had evolved for his wife’s satisfaction, and could not evade the fact that his excursions were desired chiefly as an escape from it. Their two habitual lives were organized effectively enough; it was when their lives met that there was insufficiency, fumbling, distrust, evasion. He could not altogether conceal from her the disgust and almost horror that he felt on being faced with the deception he had practiced on himself, and through himself on her. She saw his distress, could not altogether understand, felt that shewas giving him too many opportunities to escape from her, and in her turn began to counterfeit an interest in his enthusiasms and to insist on occupying a seat in the car whenever he went away, whether Kurt was with him or not. Kurt had an affectionate pampering way with her, a mere expedient for striking harmony between their different natures, which René as usual, taking seriously, misread as contempt. This, unknown to himself, encouraged the growth of the hatred which he had never allowed to rear its head. . . . And Linda, a little wearied by now of the part of the lover, had begun to play the part of the devoted, settled wife, to throw up round herself as bulwarks her advantages—her charming house, her ample means, her distinguished husband, a man of learning and culture in a commercial atmosphere, leisure among the unleisured. It was only an experiment on her part, but she gave it a thorough trial. When it failed she had her moments of despair. She had felt her husband’s withdrawal from her, at least the removal of the deceit which covered it. She was enraged, determined to break him into submission, flung the whole force of her nature into the effort and failed again. Then, to escape boredom, she began to amuse herself with her sufferings. She would lead him on to talk in his inarticulate fashion of what he felt and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world, and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that, after all, sincehe could produce nothing definitely superior to her desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy—charm and excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on turned to bitterness in his mouth.He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was to enter. She said:“She is a dear old woman, your mother.”In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed, he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:“Linda Brock has no back to her mind.”It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded, brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: “See! This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of it.” If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes, that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: “He is a boy of whom the school will one day be proud.” And she had been so elated by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient, himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another. Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his domestic life.He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him pleasure,and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music—so far as one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimentallieder,colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume. That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them, but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying. She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their grace, and he liked the skill with which sheclothed herself to give every one of her attractions free play.It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive him of it.At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:“You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from abominations.”“Ah!” She too was angry now. “What else is it?”“By God!” he said. “I thought it led to love.”And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on hearing his father’s cynicism.For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext—wished to have some of the rooms papered—and went to stay with her mother.
Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,An’ let poor damned bodies be:I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gieEv’n to a deilTo skelp and scaud poor dogs like meAn’ hear us squeal.
Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An’ let poor damned bodies be:
I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gie
Ev’n to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me
An’ hear us squeal.
HEreturned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay. She held out her hand to him.
“What a strange man you are! Couldn’t you sleep?”
“No. I couldn’t sleep.
“Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully.”
Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.
Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she glowedin her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her, who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:
“A—a—ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet, lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!”
He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on.
She said:
“René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it you.”
He answered:
“Peace.”
“Peace? Isn’t this peace?”
Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away from her.
“Can there ever be peace,” he asked, “between a man and a woman?”
“What do you mean?”
He made no reply.
“Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you mean.” And she dodged aside into phrases—the war of the sexes, the difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.
“I meant you and me,” he said, biting out his words.
“Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us. We couldn’t be more wonderful. Could we?”
“I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can’t help thinking of those damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said: ‘How wonderful we are!’”
That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and jumped to her feet.
“Oh, I never thought——”
She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out behind her. He came up to her.
“What did you never think?”
“That on our second day you would be satirical.”
He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:
“I said what I felt. Mayn’t I do that? I didn’t think it would hurt you, really, I didn’t. Linda, I——
“Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more than you can say. And you don’t know how uncomfortable it is.”
She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood pondering it.
“I can’t help it,” he said slowly, “I’m made like that. I can’t be comfortable.”
Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.
“I know you can’t,” she said, “but I can, and you mustn’t spoil it for me.”
He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her and cried:
“Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would——”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to you.”
“I believe you would, and that makes me love you.”
He weakened to her will, and not again during their honeymoon did he let slip in expression or gesture thetiniest hint of the storm let loose in him. Small periods of solitude he could procure at night when she had retired for her astonishingly lengthy toilette. Then in suppression of his fire and rebellion, in the effort to keep a tight control on it even within himself, he became aware of a strength, a firmness that, out of all that he had lost of youth and ease and pleasant happiness and the charm of living, emerged as gain. Yet it was not in his nature to count it up nor to hoard. He could find much to rejoice over, the splendor of the night, the keen winds, the huge waves splashing under the wind, and all he would take to his wife for her to turn into charm. And she would weave her spells round him. Her tone, her eyes, her warmth, that was so like tenderness as almost to deceive him into acquiescence, all said to him: “Forget! Forget!” But every fiber of his will was stretched in the effort to remember and gain knowledge—to remember how this thing had come about, that he should have so much and so little love for this woman, by what blindness he had come to it, and what in all his slow growth to manhood should have brought him to such sweet mockery of it. These were not his words. He was groping beyond words, beyond actions; his captured force was searching through his life to find forces to sustain it, to urge it on, to release that slow-moving stream that had brought him thus far to be chained and confined. He who had realized so little was struggling to realize himself, to find within himself the power that should break this woman in her complacent dwelling in the pleasure of their loveand set him free and her. For he had begun dimly to perceive that she too was to be thought of, and in his effort he was gentle with her. This was hard, for against his gentleness she chafed. She wanted turbulence, upheaval, suspected not the stirring in his depths and was forever agitating the surface of his being. Once or twice she did call forth the anger, and then she reveled in her delicious fright and was so quiet as to alarm him and drive him back into his gentleness. Out of this she stirred him. It was to her only an odious sluggishness.
It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but hisadmiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to it.
Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end of their stay:
“I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a woman.” (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) “A man must have his work.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said René, “that we never know what we want but when we have it.”
“How true!” She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.
And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the rocky coast-line, and murmured:
“It will be something to remember. Itisa pretty place.”
For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.
The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He was committed to her, isolatedwith her. The loneliness of that day upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.
Linda was immediately busy organizing her household, buying, buying all day long; visiting, receiving visitors; she had crowds of friends and gushing acquaintances, and they easily assimilated her husband, were interested in him as they were interested in her wall-papers, her furniture, her plans for the little garden, her gowns, her china. He used to watch eagerly, almost hungrily, for a sign that they recognized his existence apart from hers, but no sign ever came. To the women he was something belonging to dear Linda, and therefore to be admired since she was reputed to get the best of everything; to the men, hard-headed, commercial gentry, he seemed to be baffling and ominous, for they either fished nervously and falteringly for his views or left him in the silence to which their geniality reduced him.
He resumed his work at the school where he had not yet learned to disengage himself from his schoolboy’s sensations—dread of the headmaster, an inclination to run along the corridors when the bell sounded, a desire to smack cheeky little boys over the head, reluctance to attend prayers in the morning. At the end of the year a vacancy occurred on the staff of the university and he was appointed to fill it.
His first tussle with Linda came with his assertion of a desire to be alone in his study when he was working. She had made a practice of settling down with him in the evening with her sewing, or some clerical work connected with one of the various committees towhich she had had herself appointed—social and rescue work, Arts and Crafts, the University Musical Society, the Thrigsby Amateur Dramatic Club, the Goethe Society, etc. She had learned to be silent, but by the plying of her needle or the scratching of her pen she disturbed and distracted him. He put up with it for some time, but at last it was too strong for him, and he protested.
“But Mrs. Smallman sits with her husband every evening.”
“He may be used to it, and she has a capacity for doing nothing which you do not share.”
“But it’s so absurd to have two fires lit in the evening.”
“I’d rather not work then, and come and sit with you.”
“But you must work. You never say anything.”
“Then I must work alone.”
“Why must you?”
“Because I can’t work any other way.”
“What is it disturbs you? I won’t do it if you’ll tell me.”
“I can’t tell you. It’s just having you there.”
“Then you— Then you— Oh, well! There’s nothing more to say if you feel like that about me.”
“Linda, don’t be silly. It isn’t about you.”
She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.
Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood of tears and a fierce hunger forpossession and to be possessed by him compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers, no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation. Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year married:
“The room over the study—that would be the best for the nursery when we want one.”
“But, René,” she answered, after a pause, “we don’t want to have children yet, do we?”
Despair seized him. He could not look at her.
“No. No. Of course, it is as you please.”
She smiled awry:
“Oh, my dear, I didn’t mean you to take it like that. It sounded horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be possible——”
He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of “modern men and women,” as though some change had come over human nature.
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that no single word has the same meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not my Yes, your No is not mine.”
“Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem to knowmore than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don’t seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you . . . Oh, I don’t know what to do with you! Can’t we be just happy?”
“Just happy! . . . I suppose we can.”
“We have been . . . Haven’t we?”
“We have been,” he said, but the words in his mind were: “No more than happy.”
To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired.
She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to drive.
That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism.
“But what shall I do if it breaks down?”
“It can’t break down,” said Kurt. “The magneto can’t go wrong. If she stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or the jet.”
René tried to read a book about motor-cars, butcould not apply its technicalities to his own machine. He spent some days in and about and under the car, tracing out the principles on which it worked, and following its transmission of energy from cylinder to clutch, from clutch to gear, gear to back-axle. When he had done that he felt some confidence in driving, came to know the moods of his engine, and to take an extraordinary pleasure in handling it. Every week-end he made some excursion with Kurt or Linda, and sometimes alone. He explored the country for fifty miles round Thrigsby, and discovered to his dismay the vastness of the network of industrial towns, and, to his delight, the loveliness of the still uncontaminated country.
At first the change produced the effect Linda had desired. He had a new energy which enabled him to take the dull work of the week lightly. He seemed to have caught some of Kurt’s enthusiasm together with a little of his good humor and tolerance. But these qualities he could not assume without the frankness that nourished them. Soon he was no longer deceived by the counterfeit he had evolved for his wife’s satisfaction, and could not evade the fact that his excursions were desired chiefly as an escape from it. Their two habitual lives were organized effectively enough; it was when their lives met that there was insufficiency, fumbling, distrust, evasion. He could not altogether conceal from her the disgust and almost horror that he felt on being faced with the deception he had practiced on himself, and through himself on her. She saw his distress, could not altogether understand, felt that shewas giving him too many opportunities to escape from her, and in her turn began to counterfeit an interest in his enthusiasms and to insist on occupying a seat in the car whenever he went away, whether Kurt was with him or not. Kurt had an affectionate pampering way with her, a mere expedient for striking harmony between their different natures, which René as usual, taking seriously, misread as contempt. This, unknown to himself, encouraged the growth of the hatred which he had never allowed to rear its head. . . . And Linda, a little wearied by now of the part of the lover, had begun to play the part of the devoted, settled wife, to throw up round herself as bulwarks her advantages—her charming house, her ample means, her distinguished husband, a man of learning and culture in a commercial atmosphere, leisure among the unleisured. It was only an experiment on her part, but she gave it a thorough trial. When it failed she had her moments of despair. She had felt her husband’s withdrawal from her, at least the removal of the deceit which covered it. She was enraged, determined to break him into submission, flung the whole force of her nature into the effort and failed again. Then, to escape boredom, she began to amuse herself with her sufferings. She would lead him on to talk in his inarticulate fashion of what he felt and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world, and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that, after all, sincehe could produce nothing definitely superior to her desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy—charm and excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on turned to bitterness in his mouth.
He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was to enter. She said:
“She is a dear old woman, your mother.”
In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed, he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:
“Linda Brock has no back to her mind.”
It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded, brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: “See! This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of it.” If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes, that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.
And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: “He is a boy of whom the school will one day be proud.” And she had been so elated by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient, himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another. Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his domestic life.
He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him pleasure,and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music—so far as one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimentallieder,colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume. That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.
He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them, but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.
At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying. She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their grace, and he liked the skill with which sheclothed herself to give every one of her attractions free play.
It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive him of it.
At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:
“You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from abominations.”
“Ah!” She too was angry now. “What else is it?”
“By God!” he said. “I thought it led to love.”
And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on hearing his father’s cynicism.
For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext—wished to have some of the rooms papered—and went to stay with her mother.