Part 28 (1/2)
”They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I never see any advertis.e.m.e.nt of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest appearance of being animated by you. And equally perplexing is your being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so forth. It's so--Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the _Fortnightly_. I can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean, Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English politics--speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning, taking up that work you dropped--it's six years now ago. I've been acc.u.mulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our side,”--this you will remember was in 1909--”still steers our devious party courses, and the Tariff Reformers have still to capture us. Weston Ma.s.singhay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the Clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good seaman in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the p.o.o.p, white and shrieking with pa.s.sion and the motion, and all the capitalists armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons were fixed.... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?
”We are in it so far as I can contrive. But I contrive very little. We are pillars of the Conservative party--on that Justin's mind is firmly settled--and every now and then I clamor urgently that we must do more for it. But Justin's ideas go no further than writing cheques--doing more for the party means writing a bigger cheque--and there are moments when I feel we shall simply bring down a peerage upon our heads and bury my ancient courtesy t.i.tle under the ignominy of a new creation. He would certainly accept it. He writes his cheque and turns back at the earliest opportunity to his miniature gardens and the odd little freaks of collecting that attract him. Have you ever heard of chintz oil jars?
'No,' you will say. Nor has anyone else yet except our immediate circle of friends and a few dealers who are no doubt industriously increasing the present scanty supply. We possess three. They are matronly shaped jars about two feet or a yard high, of a kind of terra-cotta with wooden tops surmounted by gilt acorns, and they have been covered with white paint and on this flowers and birds and figures from some very rich old chintz have been stuck very cunningly, and then everything has been varnished--and there you are. Our first and best was bought for seven-and-sixpence, brought home in the car, put upon a console table on the second landing and wors.h.i.+pped. It's really a very pleasant mellow thing to see. n.o.body had ever seen the like. Guests, sycophantic people of all sorts were taken to consider it. It was looked at with heads at every angle, one man even kept his head erect and one went a little upstairs and looked at it under his arm. Also the most powerful lenses have been used for a minute examination, and one expert licked the varnish and looked extremely thoughtful and wise at me as he turned the booty over his gifted tongue. And now, G.o.d being with us, we mean to possess every specimen in existence--before the Americans get hold of the idea. Yesterday Justin got up and motored sixty miles to look at an alleged fourth....
”Oh my dear! I am writing chatter. You perceive I've reached the chattering stage. It is the fated end of the clever woman in a good social position nowadays, her mind beats against her conditions for the last time and breaks up into this carping talk, this spume of observation and comment, this anecdotal natural history of the restraining husband, as waves burst out their hearts in a foam upon a reef. But it isn't chatter I want to write to you.
”Stephen, I'm intolerably wretched. No creature has ever been gladder to have been born than I was for the first five and twenty years of my life. I was full of hope and I was full, I suppose, of vanity and rash confidence. I thought I was walking on solid earth with my head reaching up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the smiling. And I am nothing and worse than nothing, I am the ineffectual mother of two children, a daughter whom I adore--but of her I may not tell you--and a son,--a son who is too like his father for any fury of wors.h.i.+p, a stolid little creature.... That is all I have done in the world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue Persian who is scarcely two years old, has already had nine kittens. My husband and I have never forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other; that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our role; I have done my duty to the great new line of Justin by giving it the heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen between us. We hardly speak except in company. I have not been so much married, Stephen, I find, as collected, and since our tragic misadventure--but there were beautiful moments, Stephen, unforgettable glimpses of beauty in that--thank G.o.d, I say impenitently for that--the door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is not locked, is very discreetly--watched. I have no men friends, no social force, no freedom to take my line. My husband is my official obstacle. We barb the limitations of life for one another. A little while ago he sought to chasten me--to rouse me rather--through jealousy, and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous interest. I was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired.
'This,' I said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for _me_, Justin,'--and the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible celerity. I hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with by a minion, but I become more and more aware of my ignorance of a great financier's methods as I become more and more aware of them....
”Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not; and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me, write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.
”Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore, and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publis.h.i.+ng a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul alive.”
-- 3
I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room.
Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.
And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a character in the story.
I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. ”It's a letter from Mary Justin,” I said.
She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what she had to do with that and then remarked, ”I thought you two were not to correspond.”
”Yes,” I said, putting the letter down; ”that was the understanding.”
There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.
”I suppose,” said Rachel, ”she wants to hear from you again.”
”She thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great friends.”
”Of course,” said Rachel with lips a little awry, ”of course. You must have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write.”
”I suppose,” she added, ”her husband knows.”
”She's told him, she says....”
Her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a second, and it was as if hastily she s.n.a.t.c.hed away a thought from my observation. I had a moment of illuminating embarra.s.sment. So far we had contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. If perhaps I had been largely silent to her about Mary it was not so much that I sought to hide things from her as that I myself sought to forget.
It is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. But we had maintained a convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.
I wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read--and to do so was manifestly impossible. Something had arisen between us that made out of our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. Here were things I knew and understood completely and that I could not even describe to Rachel. What would she make of Mary's ”Write to me. Write to me”? A mere wish to resume.... I would not risk the exposure of Mary's mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....
That letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted convention of our complete mutual understanding. In my memory it seems to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.
Then I put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy a.s.sumption of carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.
”It will be curious,” I said, ”to write to her again.... To tell her about things....”
And then with immense interest, ”Are these Chichester sausages you've got here, Rachel, or some new kind?”