Marriage

MARRIAGE

elaborately. Her mother had never achieved such miracles of mis-statement, and she added a vigour that was all her own. It is easier to sympathize with her than exonerate her. She was in a state of intense impatience, and – what is strange – extraordinarily afraid that something would separate her from her lover if she did not secure him. She was in a fever of determination. She could not eat or sleep or attend to anything whatever; she was occupied altogether with the thought of assuring herself to Trafford. He towered in her waking vision over town and land and sea.

He didn’t hear the lies she told; he only knew she was magnificently coming back to him. He met her at Paddington, a white-faced, tired, splendidly resolute girl, and they went to the waiting registrar’s forthwith.

She bore herself with the intentness and dignity of one who is taking the cardinal step in life. They kissed as though it was a symbol, and were keenly business-like about cabs and luggage and trains. At last they were alone in the train together. They stared at one another.

“We’ve done it, Mrs. Trafford!” said Trafford.

She snapped like an over-taut string, crumpled, clung to him, and without a word was weeping passionately in his arms.

It surprised him that she could weep as she did, and still more to see her as she walked by his side along the Folkestone pier, altogether recovered, erect, a little flushed and excited like a child. She seemed to miss nothing. “Oh, smell the sea!” she said, “Look at the lights! Listen to the swish of the water below.” She watched the luggage spinning on the wire rope of the giant crane, and he watched her face and thought how

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beautiful she was. He wondered why her eyes could sometimes be so blue and sometimes dark as night.

The boat cleared the pier and turned about and headed for France. They walked the upper deck together and stood side by side, she very close to him.

“I’ve never crossed the sea before,” she said.

“Old England,” she whispered. “It’s like leaving a nest. A little row of lights and that’s all the world I’ve ever known, shrunken to that already.”

Presently they went forward and peered into the night. “Look!” she said. “Italy! There’s sunshine and all sorts of

beautiful things ahead. Warm sunshine, wonderful old ruins, green lizards....” She paused and whispered almost noiselessly: “love – “

They pressed against each other.

“And yet isn’t it strange? All you can see is darkness, and clouds – and big waves that hiss as they come near....”

XI

Italy gave all her best to welcome them. It was a late year, a golden autumn, with skies of such blue as Marjorie had never seen before. They stayed at first in a pretty little Italian hotel with a garden on the lake, and later they walked over Salvator to Morcote and by boat to Ponte Tresa, and thence they had the most wonderful and beautiful tramp in the world to Luino, over the hills by Castelrotto. To the left of them all day was a broad valley with low-lying villages swimming in a luminous

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mist, to the right were purple mountains. They passed through paved streets with houses the colour of flesh and ivory, with balconies hung with corn and gourds, with tall church campaniles rising high, and great archways giving upon the blue lowlands; they tramped along avenues of sweet chestnut and between stretches of exuberant vineyard, in which men and women were gathering grapes – purple grapes, a hatful for a soldo, that rasped the tongue. Everything was strange and wonderful to Marjorie’s eyes; now it would be a wayside shrine and now a yoke of soft-going, dewlapped oxen, now a chapel hung about with ex votos, and now some unfamiliar cultivation – or a gipsy-eyed child – or a scorpion that scuttled in the dust. The very names of the villages were like jewels to her, Varasca, Croglio, Ronca, Sesia, Monteggio. They walked, or sat by the wayside and talked, or rested at the friendly table of some kindly albergo. A woman as beautiful as Ceres, with a white neck all open, made them an omelette, and then fetched her baby from its cradle to nurse it while she talked to them as they made their meal. And afterwards she filled their pockets with roasted chestnuts, and sent them with melodious good wishes upon their way. And always high over all against the translucent blue hung the white shape of Monte Rosa, that warmed in colour as the evening came.

Marjorie’s head was swimming with happiness and beauty, and with every fresh delight she recurred again to the crowning marvel of this clean-limbed man beside her, who smiled and carried all her luggage in a huge rucksack that did not seem to exist for him, and watched her and caressed her – and was hers, hers!

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CHAPTER THE FIRST

SETTLING DOWN

I

It was in a boat among reeds upon the lake of Orta that Trafford first became familiarized with the idea that Marjorie was capable of debt.

“Oh, I ought to have told you,” she began, apropos of nothing.

Her explanation was airy; she had let the thing slip out of her mind for a time. But there were various debts to Oxbridge tradespeople. How much? Well, rather a lot. Of course, the tradespeople were rather enticing when first one went up – How much, anyhow?

“Oh, about fifty pounds,” said Marjorie, after her manner. “Not more. I’ve not kept all the bills; and some haven’t come in. You know how slow they are.”

“These things will happen,” said Trafford, though, as a matter of fact, nothing of the sort had happened in his case. “However, you’ll be able to pay as soon as you get home, and get them all off your mind.”

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“I think fifty pounds will clear me,” said Marjorie, clinging to her long-established total, “if you’ll let me have that.”

“Oh, we don’t do things like that,” said Trafford. “I’m arranging that my current account will be a sort of joint account, and your signature will be as good as mine – for the purpose of drawing, at least. You’ll have your own cheque-book – “

“I don’t understand, quite,” said Marjorie.

“You’ll have your own cheque-book and write cheques as you want them. That seems the simplest way to me.”

“Of course,” said Marjorie. “But isn’t this – rather unusual? Father always used to allowance mother.”

“It’s the only decent way according to my ideas,” said Trafford. “A man shouldn’t marry when he can’t trust.”

“Of course not,” said Marjorie. Something between fear and compunction wrung her. “Do you think you’d better?” she asked, very earnestly.

“Better?” “Do this.” “Why not?”

“It’s – it’s so generous.”

He didn’t answer. He took up an oar and began to push out from among the reeds with something of the shy awkwardness of a boy who becomes apprehensive of thanks. He stole a glance at her presently and caught her expression – there was something very solemn and intent in her eyes – and he thought what a grave, fine thing his Marjorie could be.

But, indeed, her state of mind was quite exceptionally confused. She was disconcerted – and horribly afraid of herself.

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“Do you mean that I can spend what I like?” asked Marjorie.

“Just as I may,” he said.

“I wonder,” said Marjorie again, “if I’d better.”

She was tingling with delight at this freedom, and she knew she was not fit for its responsibility. She just came short of a passionate refusal of his proposal. He was still so new to her, and things were so wonderful, or I think she would have made that refusal.

“You’ve got to,” said Trafford, and ended the matter. So Marjorie was silent – making good resolutions.

II

Perhaps some day it may be possible to tell in English again, in the language of Shakspeare and Herrick, of the passion, the tenderness, the beauty, and the delightful familiarizations of a happy honeymoon; suffice it now, in this delicate period, to record only how our two young lovers found one day that neither had a name for the other. He said she could be nothing better than Marjorie to him; and she, after a number of unsuccessful experiments, settled down to the old school-boy nickname made out of his initials, R. A. G.

“Dick,” she said, “is too bird-like and boy-like. Andrew I can’t abide. Goodwin gives one no chances for current use. Rag you must be. Mag and Rag – poor innocents! Old rag!”

“Mag,” he said, “has its drawbacks! The street-boy in London says, ‘Shut your mag.’ No, I think I shall stick to Marjorie....”

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All honeymoons must end at last, so back they came to London, still very bright and happy. And then, Marjorie, whose eyes had changed from flashing stones to darkly shining pools of blue, but whose soul had still perhaps to finds its depths, set herself to the business of decorating and furnishing the little house Mrs. Trafford had found for them within ten minutes of her own. Meanwhile they lived in lodgings.

There can be no denying that Marjorie began her furnishing with severely virtuous intentions. She was very particular to ask Trafford several times what he thought she might spend upon the enterprise. He had already a bedroom and a study equipped, and he threw out three hundred pounds as his conception of an acceptable figure. “Very well,” said Marjorie, with a note of great precision, “now I shall know,” and straightway that sum took a place in her imagination that was at once definitive and protective, just as her estimate of fifty pounds for her Oxbridge debts had always been. She assured herself she was going to do things, and she assured herself she was doing things, on three hundred pounds. At times the astonishment of two or three school friends, who joined her in her shopping, stirred her to a momentary surprise at the way she was managing to keep things within that limit, and following a financial method that had, after all, in spite of some momentary and already nearly forgotten distresses, worked very well at Oxbridge, she refrained from any additions until all the accounts had come to hand.

It was an immense excitement shopping to make a home. There was in her composition a strain of constructive artistry with such concrete things, a strain that had hitherto famished.

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