Marriage

MARRIAGE

She tried to follow him on his journey to Croydon. Now he’d have just passed out of London Bridge. What was he thinking and feeling about her in the train? Now he would be going into the place, wherever it was, where he gave his lecture. Did he think of Behrens and curse her under his breath as he entered that tiresome room?...

It seemed part of the prevailing inconvenience of life that Daffy should see fit to pay an afternoon call.

Marjorie heard the sobs and uproar of an arrested motor, and glanced discreetly from the window to discover the dark green car with its green-clad chauffeur which now adorned her sister’s life, and which might under different circumstances, have adorned her own. Wilkins – his name was Wilkins, his hair was sandy and his expression discreet, and he afforded material for much quiet humorous observation – descended smartly and opened the door. Daffy appeared in black velvet, with a huge black fur muff, and an air of being unaware that there were such things as windows in the world.

It was just four, and the cook-general, who ought to have been now in her housemaid’s phase, was still upstairs divesting herself of her more culinary characteristics.Marjorie opened the door.

“Hullo, old Daffy!” she said.

“Hullo, old Madge!” and there was an exchange of sisterly kisses and a mutual inspection.

“Nothing wrong?” asked Daffy, surveying her. “Wrong?”

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“You look pale and – tired about the eyes,” said Daffy, leading the way into the drawing-room. “Thought you might be a bit off it, that’s all. No offence, Madge.”

“I’m all right,” said Marjorie, getting her back to the light. “Want a holiday, perhaps. How’s every one?”

“All right. We’re off to Lake Garda next week. This new play has taken it out of Will tremendously. He wants a rest and fresh surroundings. It’s to be the biggest piece of work he’s done – so far, and it’s straining him. And people worry him here; receptions, first nights, dinners, speeches. He’s so neat, you know, in his speeches.... But it wastes him. He wants to get away. How’s Rag?”

“Busy.”

“Lecturing?”

“And his Research of course.” “Oh! of course. How’s the Babe?”

“Just in. Come up and see the little beast, Daffy! It is getting so pretty, and it talks – “

Margharita dominated intercourse for a time. She was one of those tactful infants who exactly resemble their fathers and exactly resemble their mothers, and have a charm and individuality quite distinctly their own, and she was now beginning to converse with startling enterprise and intelligence.

“Big, big, bog,” she said at the sight of Daffy. “Remembers you,” said Marjorie.

“Bog! Go ta-ta!” said Margharita.

“There!” said Marjorie, and May, the nurse in the background, smiled unlimited appreciation.

“Bably,” said Margharita.

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“That’s herself!” said Marjorie, falling on her knees. “She talks like this all day. Oh de sweetums, den!” Was it?

Daffy made amiable gestures and canary-like noises with her lips, and Margharita responded jovially.

“You darling!” cried Marjorie, “you delight of life,” kneeling by the cot and giving the crowing, healthy little mite a passionate hug.

“It’s really the nicest of babies,” Daffy conceded, and reflected....

“I don’t know what I should do with a kiddy,” said Daffy, as the infant worship came to an end; “I’m really glad we haven’t one – yet. He’d love it, I know. But it would be a burthen in some ways. They are a tie. As he says, the next few years means so much for him. Of course, here his reputation is immense, and he’s known in Germany, and there are translations into Russian; but he’s still got to conquer America, and he isn’t really well known yet in France. They read him, of course, and buy him in America, but they’re – restive. Oh! I do so wish they’d give him the Nobel prize, Madge, and have done with it! It would settle everything. Still, as he says, we mustn’t think of that – yet, anyhow. He isn’t venerable enough. It’s doubtful, he thinks, that they would give the Nobel prize to any humorist now that Mark Twain is dead. Mark Twain was different, you see, because of the German Emperor and all that white hair and everything.”

At this point Margharita discovered that the conversation had drifted away from herself, and it was only when they got downstairs again that Daffy could resume the thread of Magnet’s career, which had evidently become the predominant

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interest in her life. She brought out all the worst elements of Marjorie’s nature and their sisterly relationship. There were moments when it became nakedly apparent that she was magnifying Magnet to belittle Trafford. Marjorie did her best to counter-brag. She played her chief card in the F. R. S.

“They always ask Will to the Royal Society Dinner,” threw out Daffy; “but of course he can’t always go. He’s asked to so many things.”

Five years earlier Marjorie would have kicked her shins for that.

Instead she asked pointedly, offensively, if Magnet was any balder.

“He’s not really bald,” said Daffy unruffled, and went on to discuss the advisability of a second motor car – purely for town use. “I tell him I don’t want it,” said Daffy, “but he’s frightfully keen upon getting one.”

VIII

When Daffy had at last gone Marjorie went back into Trafford’s study and stood on the hearthrug regarding its appointments, with something of the air of one who awakens from a dream. She had developed a new, appalling thought. Was Daffy really a better wife than herself? It was dawning upon Marjorie that she hadn’t been doing the right thing by her husband, and she was as surprised as if it had been suddenly brought home to her that she was neglecting Margharita. This was her husband’s study – and it showed just a lit-

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tle dusty in the afternoon sunshine, and everything about it denied the pretensions of serene sustained work that she had always made to herself. Here were the crumpled galley proofs of his science notes; here were unanswered letters. There, she dare not touch them, were computations, under a glass paper-weight. What did they amount to now? On the table under the window were back numbers of the Scientific Bulletin in a rather untidy pile, and on the footstool by the arm-chair she had been accustomed to sit at his feet when he stayed at home to work, and look into the fire, and watch him furtively, and sometimes give way to an overmastering tenderness and make love to him. The thought of Magnet, pampered, fenced around, revered in his industrious tiresome repetitions, variations, dramatizations and so forth of the half-dozen dry little old jokes which the British public accepted as his characteristic offering and rewarded him for so highly, contrasted vividly with her new realization of Trafford’s thankless work and worried face.

And she loved him, she loved him – so. She told herself in the presence of all these facts, and without a shadow of doubt in her mind that all she wanted in the world was to make him happy.

It occurred to her as a rather drastic means to this end that she might commit suicide.

She had already gone some way in the composition of a touching letter of farewell to him, containing a luminous analysis of her own defects, before her common-sense swept away this imaginative exercise.

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Meanwhile, as if it had been working at her problem all the time that this exciting farewell epistle had occupied the foreground of her thoughts, her natural lucidity emerged with the manifest conclusion that she had to alter her way of living. She had been extraordinarily regardless of him, she only began to see that, and now she had to take up the problem of his necessities. Her self-examination now that it had begun was thorough. She had always told herself before that she had made a most wonderful and beautiful little home for him. But had she made it for him? Had he as a matter of fact ever wanted it, except that he was glad to have it through her? No doubt it had given him delight and happiness, it had been a marvellous little casket of love for them, but how far did that outweigh the burthen and limitation it had imposed upon him? She had always assumed he was beyond measure grateful to her for his home, in spite of all her bills, but was he? It was like sticking a knife into herself to ask that, but she was now in a phase heroic enough for the task – was he? She had always seen herself as the giver of bounties; greatest bounty of all was Margharita. She had faced pains and terrors and the shadow of death to give him Margharita. Now with Daffy’s illuminating conversation in her mind, she could turn the light upon a haunting doubt that had been lurking in the darkness for a long time. Had he really so greatly wanted Margharita? Had she ever troubled to get to the bottom of that before? Hadn’t she as a matter of fact wanted Margharita ten thousand times more than he had done? Hadn’t she in effect imposed Margharita upon him, as she had imposed her distinctive and delight-

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ful home upon him, regardlessly, because these things were the natural and legitimate developments of herself?

These things were not his ends.

Had she hitherto ever really cared what his ends might be? A phrase she had heard abundantly enough in current feminist discussion recurred to her mind, “the economic dependence of women,” and now for the first time it was charged with meaning. She had imposed these things upon him not because she loved him, but because these things that were the expansions and consequences of her love for him were only obtainable through him. A woman gives herself to a man out of love, and remains clinging parasitically to him out of

necessity. Was there no way of evading that necessity?

For a time she entertained dreams of marvellous social reconstructions. Suppose the community kept all its women, suppose all property in homes and furnishings and children vested in them! That was Marjorie’s version of that idea of the Endowment of Womanhood which has been creeping into contemporary thought during the last two decades. Then every woman would be a Princess to the man she loved.... He became more definitely personal. Suppose she herself was rich, then she could play the Princess to Trafford; she could have him free, unencumbered, happy and her lover! Then, indeed, her gifts would be gifts, and all her instincts and motives would but crown his unhampered life! She could not go on from that idea, she lapsed into a golden reverie, from which she was roused by the clock striking five.

In half an hour perhaps Trafford would be home again. She could at least be so much of a princess as to make his home

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sweet for his home-coming. There should be tea in here, where callers did not trouble. She glanced at an empty copper vase. It ached. There was no light in the room. There would be just time to dash out into High Street and buy some flowers for it before he came....

IX

Spring and a renewed and deepened love for her husband were in Marjorie’s blood. Her mind worked rapidly during the next few days, and presently she found herself clearly decided upon her course of action. She had to pull herself together and help him, and if that meant a Spartan and strenuous way of living, then manifestly she must be Spartan and strenuous. She must put an end once for all to her recurrent domestic deficits, and since this could only be done by getting rid of May, she must get rid of May and mind the child herself. (Every day, thank Heaven! Margharita became more intelligent, more manageable, and more interesting.) Then she must also make a far more systematic and thorough study of domestic economy than she had hitherto done, and run the shopping and housekeeping on severer lines; she bought fruit carelessly, they had far too many joints; she never seemed able to restrain herself when it came to flowers. And in the evenings, which would necessarily be very frequently lonely evenings if Trafford’s researches were to go on, she would typewrite, and either acquire great speed at that or learn shorthand, and so

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save Trafford’s present expenditure on a typist. That unfortunately would mean buying a typewriter.

She found one afternoon in a twopenny book-box, with which she was trying to allay her craving for purchases, a tattered little pamphlet entitled: “Proposals for the Establishment of an Order of Samurai,” which fell in very exactly with her mood. The title “dated”; it carried her mind back to her middle girlhood and the defeats of Kuropatki and the futile earnest phase in English thought which followed the Boer War. The order was to be a sort of self-appointed nobility serving the world. It shone with the light of a generous dawn, but cast, I fear, the shadow of the prig. Its end was the Agenda Club.... She read and ceased to read – and dreamt.

The project unfolded the picture of a new method of conduct to her, austere, yet picturesque and richly noble. These Samurai, it was intimated, were to lead lives of hard discipline and high effort, under self-imposed rule and restraint. They were to stand a little apart from the excitements and temptations of everyday life, to eat sparingly, drink water, resort greatly to self-criticism and self-examination, and harden their spirits by severe and dangerous exercises. They were to dress simply, work hard, and be the conscious and deliberate salt of the world. They were to walk among mountains. Incidentally, great power was to be given them. Such systematic effort and self-control as this, seemed to Marjorie to give just all she wasn’t and needed to be, to save her life and Trafford’s from a common disaster....

It particularly appealed to her that they were to walk among mountains....

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But it is hard to make a change in the colour of one’s life amidst the routine one has already established about oneself, in the house that is grooved by one’s weaknesses, amidst hangings and ornaments living and breathing with the life of an antagonistic and yet insidiously congenial ideal. A great desire came upon Marjorie to go away with Trafford for a time, out of their everyday life into strange and cool and spacious surroundings. She wanted to leave London and its shops, and the home and the movements and the callers and rivalries, and even dimpled little Margharita’s insistent claims, and get free and think. It was the first invasion of their lives by this conception, a conception that was ever afterwards to leave them altogether, of retreat and reconstruction. She knelt upon the white sheepskin hearthrug at Trafford’s feet one night, and told him of her desire. He, too, was tired of his work and his vexations, and ripe for this suggestion of an altered life. The Easter holiday was approaching, and nearly twenty unencumbered days. Mrs. Trafford, they knew, would come into the house, meanwhile, and care for Margharita. They would go away somewhere together and walk, no luggage but a couple of knapsacks, no hotel but some homely village inn. They would be in the air all day, until they were saturated with sweet air and spirit of clean restraints. They would plan out their new rule, concentrate their aims. “And I could think,” said Trafford, “of this new work I can’t begin here. I might make some notes.” Presently came the question of where the great walk should be. Manifestly, it must be among mountains, manifestly, and Marjorie’s eye saw those mountains with snow upon their summits and cold glaciers on their flanks. Could they

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