Part 39 (1/2)

”He said, 'Oh, Lord, take 'em off! Here, let me have a look!' He swung me round, with his hands on my shoulders, into the light from the hall gas, and I met his look. 'They might be worse, I suppose, but for goodness' sake take them off!' he said; 'you don't have to wear them, you know!' I said nothing, but broke away and went down the steps. He came after me and continued to look in the street. 'I say, you look just like your mother in them!' he went on. That was the cruellest thing he could have said, because he knew my mother ... he only did it because he did not think I really had to wear them, and he thought it would make me leave off. I told him what the oculist had said, and he said he would call on me again after I was forty. I pretended to laugh, but I was feeling like death. Later on I slipped them off, and he had the tact not to say anything when he saw what I had done. I never wore them again with him, and went over the world unable to see the things he was raving about, and having perpetually to pretend that I did and guess at the right thing to say. Now--it doesn't matter. I prefer wearing them to having blinding headaches.”

”It was pretty rotten of him to let it make a difference,” said Ishmael.

”No, I understand what he felt so well. I knew it myself. There is always something ridiculous about making love to a woman in gla.s.ses. It destroys atmosphere. If you're married, and either you're so one with the man that he really does love you through everything or else is so dull that he doesn't feel their ugliness, it wouldn't make a difference.

But I was not married--he had not the married temperament. And you must admit that it is impossible to imagine a mistress in gla.s.ses....”

”Don't!” said Ishmael sharply.

”Don't what? Did you think I was speaking bitterly? I wasn't. There isn't a sc.r.a.p of bitterness in me, I'm thankful to say. I couldn't have lived if there had been. I saw that almost at the beginning, as I did about jealousy. If you have much to be bitter and jealous about, you can't be; it would kill you. It's only the people who can indulge in a little of it who dare to. I have not been unhappy for the most part, and I wouldn't undo it, which is the great thing. You knew I had given up having times away with him years ago?”

”Yes, I wondered why.”

”The thing had somehow lost something ... what is lost in marriage just the same--rapture, glow, fragrance.... And in marriage, with luck, something else comes to take its place ... domesticity, which is very sweet to a woman. Looking after him instead of being looked after--a deep quiet something. You and Georgie are getting it. But in a relation outside marriage you can't get that. You can in those extraordinary _menages_ in France where the little mistress is so domesticated and lives with her lover for years, but that would have been as bad to him as marriage. So I thought it was best to let it all come to an end. It wasn't easy, for though I had got so that it was torture to be with him, because all the time I was feeling our dead selves between us, yet directly I was away I knew that, even though he was the man he was and I the me I had become, we were still nearer to what had been than anything else could be. But I did it. It was only when he was dying I went to Paris to him.”

”And that...?”

”Oh, it was quite a success. I don't mean to be brutal, but it was. He was glad to have me, and showed it.... A deathbed is so terribly egoistic; it can't be helped, but he forgot himself more than ever before. I was touched profoundly, but all the time I saw that he was rising to the occasion without knowing it himself. Not that he was emotional; he was never that. But he showed me something deeper than he ever had before. With all his pa.s.sion he was always so English, always so much the critic, in spite of his powers of enjoyment. He had always made love in caresses, never in words. Till this last time, as he was dying.”

Judy was speaking in a quiet voice that sounded as though all her tears had been shed, yet they were pouring down her face, making havoc of the paint and powder, of which she was quite aware and for which she cared not at all. Ishmael thought she had never shown her triumphant naturalness, her stark candour, more finely. As on that evening when he had met her in Paradise Lane, he was conscious that they understood each other almost as well as anyone ever can understand any other human being, because they were in some respects so alike. Something quiet and incurably reserved in him--he could never have talked as bravely as she did--yet was the same as the quality in her that enabled her to bear her secret relations with Killigrew, that had enabled her to break those relations off when she thought it best. And now she seemed to have won through to some calm, he wondered what it was and how she had come to it....

”What you said about marriage,” he said at last, ”struck me rather. It's true. One loses something, but one finds something.”

”Marriage, even the most idealistic of marriages, must blunt the edges to a certain extent,” said Judy. ”You may call it growing into a saner, more wholesome, view of life, or you may call it a blunting of the edges--the fact is the same. Marriage is a terribly clumsy inst.i.tution, but it's the most possible way this old world has evolved. It always comes back to it after brave but fated sallies into other paths.”

”Such as yours?” asked Ishmael. It was impossible to pretend to fence with honesty such as hers.

”No, not such as mine, because I cannot say I did it for any exalted reason, such as wis.h.i.+ng to reform the world. I had no splendid ideas on mutual freedom or anything like that. I did it simply because I loved Joe and it was the only way I could have him without making him tired of me and unhappy. It had to be secret, not only because the sordidness of wagging tongues would have spoilt it so, but because my life would have been so unbearable in the world. A woman's sin is always blamed so heavily. That's a commonplace, isn't it? Yet a woman's sin should be the more forgivable. She sins because it is _the_ man; he sins because it is _a_ woman.”

”Sin!” said Ishmael. ”Don't you get to that point in life when the word 'sin' becomes extraordinarily meaningless, like the word 'time' in that chapter of Ecclesiastes where it occurs so often that when one comes to the end of the chapter 't-i-m-e' means nothing to one. Sin seems to come so often in life it grows meaningless too.”

”Sin, technically speaking, does, to all but the theologian; but playing the game, doing the decent thing, not only to others, but to oneself, and keeping one's spiritual taste unspoiled, these things remain, and they really mean the same.”

”I suppose they do. I like talking to you, Judy. It's not like talking to a woman, although one's conscious all the time that you are very much of a woman. But you seem to meet one on common ground.”

”There's not so much difference between men and women as people are apt to think. People are always saying 'men are more this and women are more that' when really it's the case of the individual, irrespective of s.e.x.

A favourite cry is that men are more selfish. I really rather doubt it.

Perhaps, if one must generalise, men are more selfish and women are more egotistical, and of the two the former is the easier vice to overcome.

But all this talk of men and women, women and men, seems to me like something I was in the middle of years ago, and that now means nothing.”

”What does mean anything to you now?”

”I'm not quite sure I can tell you yet,” said Judy slowly; ”and I don't think it would be any good to you--there'd be too much against it. What does mean anything to you, personally?”

”I don't know.... I only know that for real youth again, for perfect ease of body, I would give everything short of my immortal soul.”

”Ah! then you still feel the soul's the most important?”