Marriage

MARRIAGE

V

At least there came out of these discussions one thing, a phrase, a purpose, which was to rule the lives of the Traffords for some years. It expressed their realization that instinct and impulse had so far played them false, that life for all its rich gifts of mutual happiness wasn’t adjusted between them. “We’ve got,” they said, “to talk all this out between us. We’ve got to work this out.” They didn’t mean to leave things at a misfit, and that was certainly their present relation. They were already at the problem of their joint lives, like a tailor with his pins and chalk. Marjorie hadn’t rejected a humorist and all his works in order to decline at last to the humorous view of life, that rather stupid, rather pathetic, grin-and-bear- it attitude compounded in incalculable proportions of goodwill, evasion, indolence, slovenliness, and (nevertheless) spite (masquerading indeed as jesting comment), which supplies the fabric of everyday life for untold thousands of educated middle-class people. She hated the misfit. She didn’t for a moment propose to pretend that the ungainly twisted sleeve, the puckered back, was extremely jolly and funny. She had married with a passionate anticipation of things fitting and fine, and it was her nature, in great matters as in small, to get what she wanted strenuously before she counted the cost. About both their minds there was something sharp and unrelenting, and if Marjorie had been disposed to take refuge from

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facts in swathings of aesthetic romanticism, whatever covering she contrived would have been torn to rags very speedily by that fierce and steely veracity which swung down out of the laboratory into her home.

One may want to talk things out long before one hits upon the phrases that will open up the matter.

There were two chief facts in the case between them and so far they had looked only one in the face, the fact that Marjorie was unemployed to a troublesome and distressing extent, and that there was nothing in her nature or training to supply, and something in their circumstances and relations to prevent any adequate use of her energies. With the second fact neither of them cared to come to close quarters as yet, and neither as yet saw very distinctly how it was linked to the first, and that was the steady excess of her expenditure over their restricted means. She was secretly surprised at her own weakness. Week by week and month by month, they were spending all his income and eating into that little accumulation of capital that had once seemed so sufficient against the world....

And here it has to be told that although Trafford knew that Marjorie had been spending too much money, he still had no idea of just how much money she had spent. She was doing her utmost to come to an understanding with him, and at the same time – I don’t explain it, I don’t excuse it – she was keeping back her bills from him, keeping back urgent second and third and fourth demands, that she had no cheque-book now to stave off even by the most partial satisfaction. It kept her awake at nights, that catastrophic explanation, that all

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unsuspected by Trafford hung over their attempts at mutual elucidation; it kept her awake but she could not bring it to the speaking point, and she clung, in spite of her own intelligence, to a persuasion that after they had got something really settled and defined then it would be time enough to broach the particulars of this second divergence....

Talking one’s relations over isn’t particularly easy between husband and wife at any time; we are none of us so sure of one another as to risk loose phrases or make experiments in expression in matters so vital; there is inevitably an excessive caution on the one hand and an abnormal sensitiveness to hints and implications on the other. Marjorie’s bills were only an extreme instance of these unavoidable suppressions that always occur. Moreover, when two people are continuously together, it is amazingly hard to know when and where to begin; where intercourse is unbroken it is as a matter of routine being constantly interrupted. You cannot broach these broad personalities while you are getting up in the morning, or over the break- fast-table while you make the coffee, or when you meet again after a multitude of small events at tea, or in the evening when one is rather tired and trivial after the work of the day. Then Miss Margharita Trafford permitted no sustained analysis of life in her presence. She synthesized things fallaciously, but for the time convincingly; she insisted that life wasn’t a thing you discussed, but pink and soft and jolly, which you crowed at and laughed at and addressed as “Goo.” Even without Margharita there were occasions when the Traffords were a forgetfulness to one another. After an ear has been pinched or

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a hand has been run through a man’s hair, or a pretty bare shoulder kissed, all sorts of broader interests lapse into a temporary oblivion. They found discussion much more possible when they walked together. A walk seemed to take them out of the everyday sequence, isolate them from their household, abstract them a little from one another. They set out one extravagant spring Sunday to Great Missenden, and once in spring also they discovered the Waterlow Park. On each occasion they seemed to get through an enormous amount of talking. But the Great Missenden walk was all mixed up with a sweet keen wind, and beechwoods just shot with spring green and bursting hedges and the extreme earliness of honeysuckle, which Trafford noted for the first time, and a clamorous rejoicing of birds. And in the Waterlow Park there was a great discussion of why the yellow crocus comes before white and purple, and the closest examination of the manner in which daffodils and narcissi thrust their green noses out of the garden beds. Also they found the ugly, ill-served, aggressively propagandist non-alcoholic refreshment-room in that gracious old house a scandal and disappointment, and Trafford scolded at the stupidity of officialdom that can control so fine a thing so ill.

Though they talked on these walks they were still curiously evasive. Indeed, they were afraid of each other. They kept falling away from their private thoughts and intentions. They generalized, they discussed Marriage and George Gissing and Bernard Shaw and the suffrage movement and the agitation for the reform of the divorce laws. They pursued imaginary cases into distant thickets of contingency remotely far from the personal issues between them....

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VI

One day came an incident that Marjorie found wonderfully illuminating. Trafford had a fit of rage. Stung by an unexpected irritation, he forgot himself, as people say, and swore, and was almost physically violent, and the curious thing was that so he lit up things for her as no premeditated attempt of his had ever done.

A copy of the Scientific Bulletin fired the explosion. He sat down at the breakfast-table with the heaviness of a rather overworked and worried man, tasted his coffee, tore open a letter and crumpled it with his hand, turned to the Bulletin, regarded its list of contents with a start, opened it, read for a minute, and expressed himself with an extraordinary heat of manner in these amazing and unprecedented words:

“Oh! Damnation and damnation!”

Then he shied the paper into the corner of the room and pushed his plate from him.

“Damn the whole scheme of things!” he said, and met the blank amazement of Marjorie’s eye.

“Behrens!” he said with an air of explanation. “Behrens?” she echoed with a note of inquiry. “He’s doing my stuff!”

He sat darkling for a time and then hit the table with his fist so hard that the breakfast things seemed to jump together – to Marjorie’s infinite amazement. “I can’t stand it!” he said.

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She waited some moments. “I don’t understand,” she began. “What has he done?”

“Oh!” was Trafford’s answer. He got up, recovered the crumpled paper and stood reading. “Fool and thief,” he said.

Marjorie was amazed beyond measure. She felt as though she had been effaced from Trafford’s life. “Ugh!” he cried and slapped back the Bulletin into the corner with quite needless violence. He became aware of Marjorie again.

“He’s doing my work,” he said.

And then as if he completed the explanation: “And I’ve got to be in Croydon by half-past ten to lecture to a pack of spinsters and duffers, because they’re too stupid to get the stuff from books. It’s all in books, – every bit of it.”

He paused and went on in tones of unendurable wrong. “It isn’t as though he was doing it right. He isn’t. He can’t. He’s a fool. He’s a clever, greedy, dishonest fool with a twist. Oh! the pile, the big Pile of silly muddled technicalities he’s invented already! The solemn mess he’s making of it! And there he is, I can’t get ahead of him, I can’t get at him. I’ve got no time. I’ve got no room or leisure to swing my mind in! Oh, curse these engagements, curse all these silly fretting entanglements of lecture and article! I never get the time, I can’t get the time, I can’t get my mind clear! I’m worried! I’m badgered! And meanwhile Behrens – !”

“Is he discovering what you want to discover?”

“Behrens! No! He’s going through the breaches I made. He’s guessing out what I meant to do. And he’s getting it set out all wrong, – misleading terminology, – distinctions made in the wrong place. Oh, the fool he is!”

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“But afterwards – “

“Afterwards I may spend my life – removing the obstacles he’s made. He’ll be established and I shan’t. You don’t know anything of these things. You don’t understand.”

She didn’t. Her next question showed as much. “Will it affect your F.R.S.?” she asked.

“Oh! that’s safe enough, and it doesn’t matter anyhow. The F.R.S.! Confound the silly little F.R.S.! As if that mattered. It’s seeing all my great openings – misused. It’s seeing all I might be doing. This brings it all home to me. Don’t you understand, Marjorie? Will you never understand? I’m getting away from all that! I’m being hustled away by all this work, this silly everyday work to get money. Don’t you see that unless I can have time for thought and research, life is just darkness to me? I’ve made myself master of that stuff. I had at any rate. No one can do what I can do there. And when I find myself – oh, shut out, shut out! I come near raving. As I think of it I want to rave again.” He paused. Then with a swift transition: “I suppose I’d better eat some breakfast. Is that egg boiled?”

She gave him an egg, brought his coffee, put things before him, seated herself at the table. For a little while he ate in silence. Then he cursed Behrens.

“Look here!” she said. “Bad as I am, you’ve got to reason with me, Rag. I didn’t know all this. I didn’t understand...

I don’t know what to do.” “What is there to do?”

“I’ve got to do something. I’m beginning to see things. It’s just as though everything had become clear suddenly.” She was

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weeping. “Oh, my dear! I want to help you. I have so wanted to help you. Always. And it’s come to this!”

“But it’s not your fault. I didn’t mean that. It’s – it’s in the nature of things.”

“It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault.” “It is.”

“Confound it, Marjorie. When I swear at Behrens I’m not swearing at you.”

“It’s my fault. All this is my fault. I’m eating you up. What’s the good of your pretending, Rag. You know it is. Oh! When I married you I meant to make you happy, I had no thought but to make you happy, to give myself to you, my body, my brains, everything, to make life beautiful for you – “

“Well, haven’t you?” He thrust out a hand she did not take. “I’ve broken your back,” she said.

An unwonted resolution came into her face. Her lips whitened. “Don’t you know, Rag,” she said, forcing herself to speak – “Don’t you guess? You don’t know half! In that bureau there – In there! It’s stuffed with bills. Unpaid bills.”

She was weeping, with no attempt to wipe the streaming tears away; terror made the expression of her wet face almost fierce. “Bills,” she repeated. “More than a hundred pounds still. Yes! Now. Now!”

He drew back, stared at her and with no trace of personal animus, like one who hears of a common disaster, remarked with a quiet emphasis: “Oh, damn!”

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“I know,” she said, “Damn!” and met his eyes. There was a long silence between them. She produced a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “That’s what I amount to,” she said.

“It’s your silly upbringing,” he said after a long pause. “And my silly self.”

She stood up, unlocked and opened her littered desk, turned and held out the key to him.

“Why?” he asked.

“Take it. You gave me a cheque-book of my own and a corner of my own, and they – they are just ambushes – against you.”

He shook his head.

“Take it,” said Marjorie with quiet insistence.

He obeyed. She stood with her eyes on the crumpled heap of bills. They were not even tidily arranged. That seemed to her now an extreme aggravation of her offence.

“I ought to be sent to the chemist’s,” she remarked, “as one sends a worthless cat.”

Trafford weighed this proposition soberly for some moments. “You’re a bother, Marjorie,” he said with his eyes on the desk; “no end of a bother. I’d better have those bills.”

He looked at her, stood up, put his hands on her shoulders, drew her to him and kissed her forehead. He did it without passion, without tenderness, with something like resignation in his manner. She clung to him tightly, as though by clinging she could warm and soften him.

“Rag,” she whispered; “all my heart is yours.... I want to help you.... And this is what I have done.”

“I know,” he said – almost grimly.

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He repeated his kiss.

Then he seemed to explode again. “Gods!” he cried, “look at the clock. I shall miss that Croydon lecture!” He pushed her from him. “Where are my boots?...”

VII

Marjorie spent the forenoon and the earlier part of the afternoon repeating and reviewing this conversation. Her mind was full of the long disregarded problem of her husband’s state of mind. She thought with a sympathetic astonishment of his swearing, of his startling blow upon the table. She hadn’t so far known he could swear. But this was the real thing, the relief of vehement and destructive words. His voice, saying “damnation and damnation,” echoed and re-echoed in her ears. Somehow she understood that as she had never understood any sober statement of his case. Such women as Marjorie, I think, have an altogether keener understanding of people who have lost control of themselves than they have of reasoned cases. Perhaps that is because they themselves always reserve something when they state a reasoned case.

She went on to the apprehension of a change in him that hitherto she had not permitted herself to see – a change in his attitude to her. There had been a time when she had seemed able without an effort to nestle inside his heart. Now she felt distinctly for the first time that that hadn’t happened. She had instead a sense of her embrace sliding over a rather deliberately contracted exterior.... Of course he had been in a hurry....

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