Part 18 (1/2)
Presently Jack said, ”Now, about the Governor--rather a douche, I expect? But I see you can take care of yourself; he's hugely delighted--the intellectual temperature rises in every letter I get from him. But I want to make sure of one thing. I'm not going to stay on here much longer. I don't want a degree--it isn't the slightest use, plain or coloured. I want to get to work. If you come up again next term, I can stand it, not otherwise.”
”Very well,” said Howard, ”that's a bargain. I must just talk things over with Maud. If we come up to Cambridge in October, you will stay till next June. If we don't, you shall be planted in the business. They will take you in, I believe, at any time, but would prefer you to finish your time here.”
”Yes, that's it,” said Jack, ”but I want work: this is all right, in a way, but it's mostly piffle. How all these Johnnies can dangle on, I don't know; it's not my idea of life.”
”Well, there's no hurry,” said Howard, ”but it shall be arranged as you wish.”
x.x.xI
MAKING THE BEST OF IT
Howard became aware that with his colleagues he had suddenly become rather a person of importance. His ”place” in the country was held in some dim way to increase the grandeur of the College. He found himself deferred to and congratulated. Mr. Redmayne was both caustic and affectionate.
”You look very well, I must say,” he said. ”You have a touch of the landed personage about you which becomes you. I should like you to come back here for our sakes, but I shan't press it. And how is Madam? I hope you have got rid of your first illusions? No? Well you must make haste and be reasonable. I am not learned in the vagaries of feminine temperament, but I imagine that the fair s.e.x like to be dominated, and you will do that. You have a light hand on the reins--I always said that you rode the boys on the snaffle, but the curb is there! and in matrimony--well, well, I am an old bachelor of course, and I have a suspicion of all nooses. Never mind my nonsense, Kennedy--what I like about you, if I may say so, is that you have authority without pretensions. People will do as you wish, just to please you; now I have always to be cracking the whip. These fellows here are very worthy men, but they are not men of the world! They are honest and sober--indeed one can hardly get one of them to join one in a gla.s.s of port--but they are limited, very limited. Now if only you could have kept clear of matrimony--no disrespect to Madam--what a comfortable time we might have had here! Man appoints and G.o.d disappoints--I suppose it is all for the best.”
”Well,” said Howard, ”I think you will me see back here in October--my wife is quite ready to come, and there isn't really much for me to do at Windlow. I believe I am to be on the bench shortly; but if I live there in the vacations, that will be enough; and I don't feel that I have finished with Beaufort yet.”
”Excellent!” said Mr. Redmayne. ”I commend Madam's good sense and discretion. Pray give her my regards, and say that we shall welcome her at Cambridge. We will make the best of it--and I confess that in your place--well, if all women were like Madam, I could view marriage with comparative equanimity--though of course, I make the statement without prejudice.”
x.x.xII
HOWARD'S PROFESSION
When Howard came back from Cambridge he had a long talk with Maud over the future; it seemed almost tacitly agreed that he should return to his work there, at all events for a time.
”I feel very selfish and pompous about all this,” said Howard; ”MY work, MY sphere--what nonsense it all is! Why should I come down to Windlow, take possession, and having picked the sweetest flower in the garden, stick it in my b.u.t.tonhole and march away?”
Maud laughed and said, ”Oh, no, it isn't that--it is quite a simple matter. You have learnt a trade, a difficult trade; why should you give it up? We don't happen to need the money, but that doesn't matter. My business is to take off your shoulders, if I can, all the trouble entailed on you by marrying me--it's simply a division of labour. You can't just settle down in the country as a small squire, with nothing much to do. People must do the work they can do, and I should be miserable if I thought I had pulled you out of your place in the world.”
”I don't know,” said Howard; ”there seems to me to be something rather stuffy about it: why can't we just live? Women do; there is no fuss made about their work, and their need to express themselves; yet they do it even more than men, and they do it without priggishness. My work at Cambridge is just what everyone else is doing, and if I don't do it, there will be half a dozen men capable of doing it and glad to do it.
The great men of the world don't talk about the importance of their work: they just do whatever comes to hand--it's only the second-rate men who say that their talents haven't full scope. Do you remember poor Chambers, who was at lunch the other day? He told me that he had migrated from a town parish to a country parish, and that he missed the organisation so much. 'There seems nothing to organise down in the country!' he said. 'Now in my town parish there was the whole machine to keep going--I enjoyed that, and I don't feel I am giving effect to the best part of myself.' That seemed to me such a pompous line, and I felt that I didn't want to be like that. One's work! how little it matters! No one is indispensable--the disappearance of one man just gives another his chance.”
”Yes, of course, it is rather hard to draw the line,” said Maud, ”and I think it is a pity to be solemn about it; but it seems to me so simple in this case. You can do the work--they want you back--there is no reason why you should not go back.”
”Perhaps it is mere laziness,” said Howard, ”but I feel as if I wanted a different sort of life now, a quieter life; and yet I know that there is a snare about that. I rather mistrust the people who say they must get time to think out things. It's like the old definition of metaphysics--the science of muddling oneself systematically. I don't think one can act by reason; one must act by instinct, and reason just prevents one's making a fool of oneself.”
”I believe the time for the other life will come quite naturally later,” said Maud. ”At your age, you have got to do things. Of course it's the same with women in a way, but marriage is their obvious career, and the pity is that there don't seem enough husbands to go round. I can sit in my corner and placidly survey the overstocked market now!”
Howard got up and leaned against the chimneypiece, surveying his wife with delight. ”Ah, child,” he said, ”I was lucky to come in when I did.
I s.h.i.+ver at the thought that if I had arrived a little later there would have been 'no talk of thee and me' as Omar says. You would have been a devoted wife, and I should have been a hopeless bachelor!”
”It's unthinkable,” said Maud, ”it's horrible even to speculate about such things--a mere question of proximity! Well, it can't be mended now; and the result is that I not only drive you back to work, but you have to carry me back as well, like Sindbad and the old man of the sea.”