by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER THE SECOND
TRAFFORD DECIDES TO GO
Sec. 1
A haunting desire to go away into solitude grew upon Trafford verysteadily. He wanted intensely to think, and London and Marjorie wouldnot let him think. He wanted therefore to go away out of London andMarjorie's world. He wanted, he felt, to go away alone and face God, andclear things up in his mind. By imperceptible degrees this desireanticipated its realization. His activities were affected more and moreby intimations of a determined crisis. One eventful day it seemed to himthat his mind passed quite suddenly from desire to resolve. He foundhimself with a project, already broadly definite. Hitherto he hadn'tbeen at all clear where he could go. From the first almost he had feltthat this change he needed, the change by which he was to get out of thethickets of work and perplexity and distraction that held him captive,must be a physical as well as a mental removal; he must go somewhere,still and isolated, where sustained detached thinking was possible....His preference, if he had one, inclined him to some solitude among theHimalaya Mountains. That came perhaps from Kim and the precedent of theHindoo's religious retreat from the world. But this retreat hecontemplated was a retreat that aimed at a return, a clarified andstrengthened resumption of the world. And then suddenly, as if he hadalways intended it, Labrador flashed through his thoughts, like afamiliar name that had been for a time quite unaccountably forgotten.
The word "Labrador" drifted to him one day from an adjacent table as hesat alone at lunch in the Liberal Union Club. Some bore was reciting thesubstance of a lecture to a fellow-member. "Seems to be a remarkablecountry," said the speaker. "Mineral wealth hardly glanced at, you know.Furs and a few score Indians. And at our doors. Practically--at ourdoors."
Trafford ceased to listen. His mind was taking up this idea of Labrador.He wondered why he had not thought of Labrador before.
He had two or three streams of thought flowing in his mind, as a man whomuses alone is apt to do. Marjorie's desire to move had reappeared; aparticular group of houses between Berkeley Square and Park Lane hadtaken hold of her fancy, she had urged the acquisition of one upon himthat morning, and this kept coming up into consciousness like a wrongthread in a tapestry. Moreover, he was watching his fellow-members witha critical rather than a friendly eye. A half-speculative, half-hostilecontemplation of his habitual associates was one of the queer aspects ofthis period of unsettlement. They exasperated him by their massivecontentment with the surface of things. They came in one after anotherpatting their ties, or pulling at the lapels of their coats, and lookedabout them for vacant places with a conscious ease of manner thatirritated his nerves. No doubt they were all more or less successful anddistinguished men, matter for conversation and food for anecdotes, butwhy did they trouble to give themselves the air of it? They halted orsat down by friends, enunciated vapid remarks in sonorous voices, andopened conversations in trite phrases, about London architecture, aboutthe political situation or the morning's newspaper, conversations thatought, he felt, to have been thrown away unopened, so stale and needlessthey seemed to him. They were judges, lawyers of all sorts, bankers,company promoters, railway managers, stockbrokers, pressmen,politicians, men of leisure. He wondered if indeed they were as opaqueas they seemed, wondered with the helpless wonder of a man ofexceptional mental gifts whether any of them at any stage had had suchthoughts as his, had wanted as acutely as he did now to get right out ofthe world. Did old Booch over there, for example, guzzling oysters, cryat times upon the unknown God in the vast silences of the night? ButBooch, of course, was a member or something of the House of Laymen, andvery sound on the thirty-nine articles--a man who ate oysters like thatcould swallow anything--and in the vast silences of the night he wasprobably heavily and noisily asleep....
Blenkins, the gentlemanly colleague of Denton in the control of the _OldCountry Gazette_, appeared on his way to the pay-desk, gesticulatingamiably _en-route_ to any possible friend. Trafford returned hissalutation, and pulled himself together immediately after in fear thathe had scowled, for he hated to be churlish to any human being.Blenkins, too, it might be, had sorrow and remorse and periods ofpassionate self-distrust and self-examination; maybe Blenkins could weepsalt tears, as Blenkins no doubt under suitable sword-play would revealheart and viscera as quivering and oozy as any man's.
But to Trafford's jaundiced eyes just then, it seemed that if youslashed Blenkins across he would probably cut like a cheese....
Now, in Labrador----....
So soon as Blenkins had cleared, Trafford followed him to the pay-desk,and went on upstairs to the smoking-room, thinking of Labrador. Longago he had read the story of Wallace and Hubbard in that wilderness.
There was much to be said for a winter in Labrador. It was cold, it wasclear, infinitely lonely, with a keen edge of danger and hardship andnever a letter or a paper.
One could provision a hut and sit wrapped in fur, watching the NorthernLights....
"I'm off to Labrador," said Trafford, and entered the smoking-room.
It was, after all, perfectly easy to go to Labrador. One had just togo....
As he pinched the end of his cigar, he became aware of Blenkins, with agleam of golden glasses and a flapping white cuff, beckoning across theroom to him. With that probable scowl on his conscience Trafford wasmoved to respond with an unreal warmth, and strolled across to Blenkinsand a group of three or four other people, including that vigorous youngpolitician, Weston Massinghay, and Hart, K.C., about the furtherfireplace. "We were talking of you," said Blenkins. "Come and sit downwith us. Why don't you come into Parliament?"
"I've just arranged to go for some months to Labrador."
"Industrial development?" asked Blenkins, all alive.
"No. Holiday."
No Blenkins believes that sort of thing, but of course, if Traffordchose to keep his own counsel----
"Well, come into Parliament as soon as you get back."
Trafford had had that old conversation before. He pretendedinsensibility when Blenkins gestured to a vacant chair. "No," he said,still standing, "we settled all that. And now I'm up to my neckin--detail about Labrador. I shall be starting--before the month isout."
Blenkins and Hart simulated interest. "It's immoral," said Blenkins,"for a man of your standing to keep out of politics."
"It's more than immoral," said Hart; "it's American."
"Solomonson comes in to represent the firm," smiled Trafford, signalledthe waiter for coffee, and presently disentangled himself from theircompany.
For Blenkins Trafford concealed an exquisite dislike and contempt; andBlenkins had a considerable admiration for Trafford, based on extensivemisunderstandings. Blenkins admired Trafford because he was good-lookingand well-dressed, with a beautiful and successful wife, because he hadbecome reasonably rich very quickly and easily, was young and a Fellowof the Royal Society with a reputation that echoed in Berlin, and veryperceptibly did not return Blenkins' admiration. All these things filledBlenkins with a desire for Trafford's intimacy, and to become theassociate of the very promising political career that it seemed to him,in spite of Trafford's repudiations, was the natural next step in adeliberately and honourably planned life. He mistook Trafford's silencesand detachment for the marks of a strong, silent man, who was schemingthe immense, vulgar, distinguished-looking achievements that appeal tothe Blenkins mind. Blenkins was a sentimentally loyal party Liberal, andas he said at times to Hart and Weston Massinghay: "If those otherfellows get hold of him----!"
Blenkins was the fine flower of Oxford Liberalism and the Tennysoniandays. He wanted to be like King Arthur and Sir Galahad, with the meresttouch of Launcelot, and to be perfectly upright and splendid and very,very successful. He was a fair, tenoring sort of person with anArthurian moustache and a disposition to long frock coats. It had beensaid of him that he didn't dress like a gentleman, but that he dressedmore like a gentleman than a gentleman ought to dress. It might havebeen added that he didn't behave like a gentleman, but that he behavedmore like
a gentleman than a gentleman ought to behave. He didn't think,but he talked and he wrote more thoughtfully in his leaders, and in thelittle dialogues he wrote in imitation of Sir Arthur Helps, than anyother person who didn't think could possibly do. He was an orthodoxChurchman, but very, very broad; he held all the doctrines, adistinguished sort of thing to do in an age of doubt, but there was aquality about them as he held them--as though they had been run over bysomething rather heavy. It was a flattened and slightly obliteratedbreadth--nothing was assertive, but nothing, under examination, provedto be altogether gone. His profuse thoughtfulness was not confined tohis journalistic and literary work, it overflowed into Talks. He was aman for Great Talks, interminable rambling floods of boyish observation,emotional appreciation, and silly, sapient comment. He loved to discuss"Who are the Best Talkers now Alive?" He had written an essay, _Talk inthe Past_. He boasted of week-ends when the Talk had gone on from themoment of meeting in the train to the moment of parting at Euston, orPaddington, or Waterloo; and one or two hostesses with embitteredmemories could verify his boasting. He did his best to make the club aTalking Club, and loved to summon men to a growing circle of chairs....
Trafford had been involved in Talks on one or two occasions, and now, ashe sat alone in the corridor and smoked and drank his coffee, he couldimagine the Talk he had escaped, the Talk that was going on in thesmoking room--the platitudes, the sagacities, the digressions, thesudden revelation of deep, irrational convictions. He reflected upon thevarious Talks at which he had assisted. His chief impression of them allwas of an intolerable fluidity. Never once had he known a Talk thickento adequate discussion; never had a new idea or a new view come to himin a Talk. He wondered why Blenkins and his like talked at all.Essentially they lived for pose, not for expression; they did notgreatly desire to discover, make, or be; they wanted to seem andsucceed. Talking perhaps was part of their pose of great intellectualactivity, and Blenkins was fortunate to have an easy, unforced runningof mind....
Over his cigar Trafford became profoundly philosophical about Talk. Andafter the manner of those who become profoundly philosophical he spreadout the word beyond its original and proper intentions to all sorts ofkindred and parallel things. Blenkins and his miscellany of friends intheir circle of chairs were, after all, only a crude rendering of verymuch of intellectual activity of mankind. Men talked so often as dogsbark. Those Talkers never came to grips, fell away from topic to topic,pretended depth and evaded the devastating horrors of sincerity.Listening was a politeness amongst them that was presently rewarded withutterance. Tremendously like dogs they were, in a dog-fancyingneighborhood on a summer week-day afternoon. Fluidity, excessiveabundance, inconsecutiveness; these were the things that made Talkhateful to Trafford.
Wasn't most literature in the same class? Wasn't nearly all presentphilosophical and sociological discussion in the world merely a Blenkinscircle on a colossal scale, with every one looming forward to get in adeeply thoughtful word edgeways at the first opportunity? Imagine anyone in distress about his soul or about mankind, going to a professor ofeconomics or sociology or philosophy! He thought of the endless, big,expensive, fruitless books, the windy expansions of industrious pedantrythat mocked the spirit of inquiry. The fields of physical and biologicalscience alone had been partially rescued from the floods of humaninconsecutiveness. There at least a man must, on the whole, join on tothe work of other men, stand a searching criticism, justify himself.Philosophically this was an age of relaxed schoolmen. He thought ofDoctor Codger at Cambridge, bubbling away with his iridescentHegelianism like a salted snail; of Doctor Quiller at Oxford, ignoringBergson and fulminating a preposterous insular Pragmatism. Eachcontradicted the other fundamentally upon matters of universal concern;neither ever joined issue with the other. Why in the name of humanitydidn't some one take hold of those two excellent gentlemen, and bangtheir busy heads together hard and frequently until they eithercompromised or cracked?
Sec. 2
He forgot these rambling speculations as he came out into the springsunshine of Pall Mall, and halting for a moment on the topmost step,regarded the tidy pavements, the rare dignified shops, the waitingtaxicabs, the pleasant, prosperous passers-by. His mind lapsed back tothe thought that he meant to leave all this and go to Labrador. His mindwent a step further, and reflected that he would not only go toLabrador, but--it was highly probable--come back again.
And then?
Why, after all, should he go to Labrador at all? Why shouldn't he make asupreme effort here?
Something entirely irrational within him told him with conclusiveemphasis that he had to go to Labrador....
He remembered there was this confounded business of the proposed housein Mayfair to consider....
Sec. 3
It occurred to him that he would go a little out of his way, and look atthe new great laboratories at the Romeike College, of which his oldbottle-washer Durgan was, he knew, extravagantly proud. Romeike's widowwas dead now and her will executed, and her substance half turnedalready to bricks and stone and glazed tiles and all those excesses ofspace and appliance which the rich and authoritative imagine must needsgive us Science, however ill-selected and underpaid and slighted theusers of those opportunities may be. The architects had had great funwith the bequest; a quarter of the site was devoted to a huge squaresurrounded by dignified, if functionless, colonnades, and adorned withthose stone seats of honour which are always so chill and unsatisfactoryas resting places in our island climate. The Laboratories, except thatthey were a little shaded by the colonnades, were everything alaboratory should be; the benches were miracles of convenience, therewasn't anything the industrious investigator might want, steam, highpressures, electric power, that he couldn't get by pressing a button orturning a switch, unless perhaps it was inspiring ideas. And the newlibrary at the end, with its greys and greens, its logarithmiccomputators at every table, was a miracle of mental convenience.
Durgan showed his old professor the marvels.
"If he _chooses_ to do something here," said Durgan not too hopefully,"a man can...."
"What's become of the little old room where we two used to work?" askedTrafford.
"They'll turn 'em all out presently," said Durgan, "when this part isready, but just at present it's very much as you left it. There's beenprecious little research done there since you went away--not what _I_call research. Females chiefly--and boys. Playing at it. Makingthemselves into D.Sc.'s by a baby research instead of a man'sexamination. It's like broaching a thirty-two gallon cask full of Pap tothink of it. Lord, sir, the swill! Research! Counting and weighingthings! Professor Lake's all right, I suppose, but his work was mostlymathematical; he didn't do much of it here. No, the old days ended, sir,when you...."
He arrested himself, and obviously changed his words. "Got busy withother things."
Trafford surveyed the place; it seemed to him to have shrunken a littlein the course of the three years that had intervened since he resignedhis position. On the wall at the back there still hung, fly-blown and alittle crumpled, an old table of constants he had made for hiselasticity researches. Lake had kept it there, for Lake was a man ofgenerous appreciations, and rather proud to follow in the footsteps ofan investigator of Trafford's subtlety and vigor. The old sink in thecorner where Trafford had once swilled his watch glasses and filled hisbeakers had been replaced by one of a more modern construction, and thecombustion cupboard was unfamiliar, until Durgan pointed out that it hadbeen enlarged. The ground-glass window at the east end showed still themarks of an explosion that had banished a clumsy student from thissanctuary at the very beginning of Trafford's career.
"By Jove!" he said after a silence, "but I did some good work here."
"You did, sir," said Durgan.
"I wonder--I may take it up again presently."
"I doubt it, sir," said Durgan.
"Oh! But suppose I come back?"
"I don't think you would find yourself coming back, sir," said Durganafter judicious consideration
.
He adduced no shadow of a reason for his doubt, but some mysteriousquality in his words carried conviction to Trafford's mind. He knew thathe would never do anything worth doing in molecular physics again. Heknew it now conclusively for the first time.
Sec. 4
He found himself presently in Bond Street. The bright May day hadbrought out great quantities of people, so that he had to come down fromaltitudes of abstraction to pick his way among them.
He was struck by the prevailing interest and contentment in the faces hepassed. There was no sense of insecurity betrayed, no sense of the deepsand mysteries upon which our being floats like a film. They lookedsolid, they looked satisfied; surely never before in the history of theworld has there been so great a multitude of secure-feeling,satisfied-looking, uninquiring people as there is to-day. All the tragicgreat things of life seem stupendously remote from them; pain is rare,death is out of sight, religion has shrunken to an inconsiderable,comfortable, reassuring appendage of the daily life. And with thebright small things of immediacy they are so active and alert. Neverbefore has the world seen such multitudes, and a day must come when itwill cease to see them for evermore.
As he shouldered his way through the throng before the Oxford Streetshop windows he appreciated a queer effect, almost as it were ofinsanity, about all this rich and abundant and ultimately aimless life,this tremendous spawning and proliferation of uneventful humanity. Theseindividual lives signified no doubt enormously to the individuals, butdid all the shining, reflecting, changing existence that went by likebubbles in a stream, signify collectively anything more than theleaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlitafternoon? The pretty girl looking into the window schemed picturesqueachievements with lace and ribbon, the beggar at the curb was alert forany sympathetic eye, the chauffeur on the waiting taxi-cab watched thetwopences ticking on with a quiet satisfaction; each followed a keenlysought immediate end, but altogether? Where were they going altogether?Until he knew that, where was the sanity of statecraft, the excuse ofany impersonal effort, the significance of anything beyond a life ofappetites and self-seeking instincts?
He found that perplexing suspicion of priggishness affecting him again.Why couldn't he take the gift of life as it seemed these people took it?Why was he continually lapsing into these sombre, dimly religiousquestionings and doubts? Why after all should he concern himself withthese riddles of some collective and ultimate meaning in things? Was hefor all his ability and security so afraid of the accidents of life thaton that account he clung to this conception of a larger impersonal issuewhich the world in general seemed to have abandoned so cheerfully? Atany rate he did cling to it--and his sense of it made the aboundingactive life of this stirring, bristling thoroughfare an almostunendurable perplexity....
By the Marble Arch a little crowd had gathered at the pavement edge. Heremarked other little knots towards Paddington, and then still others,and inquiring, found the King was presently to pass. They promisedthemselves the gratification of seeing the King go by. They would see acarriage, they would see horses and coachmen, perhaps even they mightcatch sight of a raised hat and a bowing figure. And this would be agratification to them, it would irradiate the day with a sense ofexperiences, exceptional and precious. For that some of them had alreadybeen standing about for two or three hours.
He thought of these waiting people for a time, and then he fell into aspeculation about the King. He wondered if the King ever lay awake atthree o'clock in the morning and faced the riddle of the eternities orwhether he did really take himself seriously and contentedly as being inhimself the vital function of the State, performed his ceremonies, wenthither and thither through a wilderness of gaping watchers, slept wellon it. Was the man satisfied? Was he satisfied with his empire as it wasand himself as he was, or did some vision, some high, ironicalintimation of the latent and lost possibilities of his empire and of theworld of Things Conceivable that lies beyond the poor tawdry splendoursof our present loyalties, ever dawn upon him?
Trafford's imagination conjured up a sleepless King Emperor agonizingfor humanity....
He turned to his right out of Lancaster Gate into Sussex Square, andcame to a stop at the pavement edge.
From across the road he surveyed the wide white front and portals of thehouse that wasn't big enough for Marjorie.
Sec. 5
He let himself in with his latchkey.
Malcolm, his man, hovered at the foot of the staircase, and came forwardfor his hat and gloves and stick.
"Mrs. Trafford in?" asked Trafford.
"She said she would be in by four, sir."
Trafford glanced at his watch and went slowly upstairs.
On the landing there had been a rearrangement of the furniture, and hepaused to survey it. The alterations had been made to accommodate a bigcloisonne jar, that now glowed a wonder of white and tinted whites andluminous blues upon a dark, deep-shining stand. He noted now the curtainof the window had been changed from something--surely it had been areddish curtain!--to a sharp clear blue with a black border, thatreflected upon and sustained and encouraged the jar tremendously. Andthe wall behind--? Yes. Its deep brown was darkened to an absolute blackbehind the jar, and shaded up between the lacquer cabinets on eitherhand by insensible degrees to the general hue. It was wonderful,perfectly harmonious, and so subtly planned that it seemed it all mighthave grown, as flowers grow....
He entered the drawing-room and surveyed its long and handsome spaces.Post-impressionism was over and gone; three long pictures by youngRogerson and one of Redwood's gallant bronzes faced the tall windowsbetween the white marble fireplaces at either end. There were two leanjars from India, a young boy's head from Florence, and in a great bowlin the remotest corner a radiant mass of azaleas....
His mood of wondering at familiar things was still upon him. It came tohim as a thing absurd and incongruous that this should be his home. Itwas all wonderfully arranged into one dignified harmony, but he felt nowthat at a touch of social earthquake, with a mere momentary lapsetowards disorder, it would degenerate altogether into litter, lie heapedtogether confessed the loot it was. He came to a stop opposite one ofthe Rogersons, a stiffly self-conscious shop girl in her Sunday clothes,a not unsuccessful emulation of Nicholson's wonderful Mrs. Stafford ofParadise Row. Regarded as so much brown and grey and amber-gold, it wascoherent in Marjorie's design, but regarded as a work of art, as a pieceof expression, how madly irrelevant was its humour and implications tothat room and the purposes of that room! Rogerson wasn't perhaps tryingto say much, but at any rate he was trying to say something, and Redwoodtoo was asserting freedom and adventure, and the thought of thatFlorentine of the bust, and the patient, careful Indian potter, andevery maker of all the little casual articles about him, produced aneffect of muffled, stifled assertions. Against this subdued anddisciplined background of muted, inarticulate cries,--cries for beauty,for delight, for freedom, Marjorie and her world moved and rustled andchattered and competed--wearing the skins of beasts, the love-plumage ofbirds, the woven cocoon cases of little silkworms....
"Preposterous," he whispered.
He went to the window and stared out; turned about and regarded thegracious variety of that long, well-lit room again, then strolledthoughtfully upstairs. He reached the door of his study, and a sound ofvoices from the schoolroom--it had recently been promoted from the rankof day nursery to this level--caught his mood. He changed his mind,crossed the landing, and was welcomed with shouts.
The rogues had been dressing up. Margharita, that child of the dreadfuldawn, was now a sturdy and domineering girl of eight, and she wasattired in a gilt paper mitre and her governess's white muslin blouse sotied at the wrists as to suggest long sleeves, a broad crimson banddoing duty as a stole. She was Becket prepared for martyrdom at the footof the altar. Godwin, his eldest son, was a hot-tempered,pretty-featured pleasantly self-conscious boy of nearly seven and veryhappy now in a white dragoon's helmet and rude but effective brown paperbreast
plate and greaves, as the party of assassin knights. A smallacolyte in what was in all human probably one of the governess's moreintimate linen garments assisted Becket, while the general congregationof Canterbury was represented by Edward, aged two, and the governess,disguised with a Union Jack tied over her head after the well-knownfashion of the middle ages. After the children had welcomed their fatherand explained the bloody work in hand, they returned to it with solemnearnestness, while Trafford surveyed the tragedy. Godwin slew withadmirable gusto, and I doubt if the actual Thomas of Canterbury showedhalf the stately dignity of Margharita.
The scene finished, they went on to the penance of Henry the Second; andthere was a tremendous readjustment of costumes, with much consultationand secrecy. Trafford's eyes went from his offspring to the long,white-painted room, with its gay frieze of ships and gulls and itsrug-variegated cork carpet of plain brick red. Everywhere it showed hiswife's quick cleverness, the clean serviceable decorativeness of itall, the pretty patterned window curtains, the writing desks, the littlelibrary of books, the flowers and bulbs in glasses, the counting blocksand bricks and jolly toys, the blackboard on which the children learntto draw in bold wide strokes, the big, well-chosen German colour printsupon the walls. And the children did credit to their casket; they werenot only full of vitality but full of ideas, even Edward was already aperson of conversation. They were good stuff anyhow....
It was fine in a sense, Trafford thought, to have given up his ownmotives and curiosities to afford this airy pleasantness of upbringingfor them, and then came a qualifying thought. Would they in their turnfor the sake of another generation have to give up fine occupations formean occupations, deep thoughts for shallow? Would the world get them inturn? Would the girls be hustled and flattered into advantageousmarriages, that dinners and drawing-rooms might still prevail? Would theboys, after this gracious beginning, presently have to swim submerged inanother generation of Blenkinses and their Talk, toil in arduousself-seeking, observe, respect and manipulate shams, succeed or fail,and succeeding, beget amidst hope and beautiful emotions yet anothergeneration doomed to insincerities and accommodations, and so die atlast--as he must die?...
He heard his wife's clear voice in the hall below, and went down to meether. She had gone into the drawing-room, and he followed her in andthrough the folding doors to the hinder part of the room, where shestood ready to open a small bureau. She turned at his approach, andsmiled a pleasant, habitual smile....
She was no longer the slim, quick-moving girl who had come out of theworld to him when he crawled from beneath the wreckage of Solomonson'splane, no longer the half-barbaric young beauty who had been revealed tohim on the staircase of the Vevey villa. She was now a dignified,self-possessed woman, controlling her house and her life with a skilful,subtle appreciation of her every point and possibility. She was wearingnow a simple walking dress of brownish fawn colour, and her hat wastouched with a steely blue that made her blue eyes seem handsome andhard, and toned her hair to a merely warm brown. She had, as it were,subdued her fine colours into a sheath in order that she might presentlydraw them again with more effect.
"Hullo, old man!" she said, "you home?"
He nodded. "The club bored me--and I couldn't work."
Her voice had something of a challenge and defiance in it. "I've beenlooking at a house," she said. "Alice Carmel told me of it. It isn't inBerkeley Square, but it's near it. It's rather good."
He met her eye. "That's--premature," he said.
"We can't go on living in this one."
"I won't go to another."
"But why?"
"I just won't."
"It isn't the money?"
"No," said Trafford, with sudden fierce resentment. "I've overtaken youand beaten you there, Marjorie."
She stared at the harsh bitterness of his voice. She was about to speakwhen the door opened, and Malcom ushered in Aunt Plessington and UncleHubert. Husband and wife hung for a moment, and then realized their talkwas at an end....
Marjorie went forward to greet her aunt, careless now of all that oncestupendous Influence might think of her. She had long ceased to feeleven the triumph of victory in her big house, her costly, dignifiedclothes, her assured and growing social importance. For five years AuntPlessington had not even ventured to advise; had once or twice admired.All that business of Magnet was--even elaborately--forgotten....
Seven years of feverish self-assertion had left their mark upon both thePlessingtons. She was leaner, more gauntly untidy, more aggressivelyill-dressed. She no longer dressed carelessly, she defied the world withher clothes, waved her tattered and dingy banners in its face. UncleHubert was no fatter, but in some queer way he had ceased to be thin.Like so many people whose peripheries defy the manifest quaint purposeof Providence, he was in a state of thwarted adiposity, and with all thedisconnectedness and weak irritability characteristic of his condition.He had developed a number of nervous movements, chin-strokings,cheek-scratchings, and incredulous pawings at his more salient features.
"Isn't it a lark?" began Aunt Plessington, with something like a note ofapprehension in her highpitched voice, and speaking almost from thedoorway, "we're making a call together. I and Hubert! It's an attack inforce."
Uncle Hubert goggled in the rear and stroked his chin, and tried to gettogether a sort of facial expression.
The Traffords made welcoming noises, and Marjorie advanced to meet heraunt.
"We want you to do something for us," said Aunt Plessington, taking twohands with two hands....
In the intervening years the Movement had had ups and downs; it had hada boom, which had ended abruptly in a complete loss of voice for AuntPlessington--she had tried to run it on a patent non-stimulating food,and then it had entangled itself with a new cult of philanthropictheosophy from which it had been extracted with difficulty and in adamaged condition. It had never completely recovered from that unhappyassociation. Latterly Aunt Plessington had lost her nerve, and she hadtaken to making calls upon people with considerable and sometimesembarrassing demand for support, urging them to join committees, takechairs, stake reputations, speak and act as foils for her. If theyrefused she lost her temper very openly and frankly, and becameindustriously vindictive. She circulated scandals or created them. Herold assurance had deserted her; the strangulated contralto was losingits magic power, she felt, in this degenerating England it had ruled solong. In the last year or so she had become extremely snappy with UncleHubert. She ascribed much of the Movement's futility to the decline ofhis administrative powers and the increasing awkwardness of hisgestures, and she did her utmost to keep him up to the mark. Her onlymethod of keeping him up to the mark was to jerk the bit. She had nowcome to compel Marjorie to address a meeting that was to inaugurate anew phase in the Movement's history, and she wanted Marjorie because sheparticularly wanted a daring, liberal, and spiritually amorous bishop,who had once told her with a note of profound conviction that Marjoriewas a very beautiful woman. She was so intent upon her purpose that shescarcely noticed Trafford. He slipped from the room unobserved undercover of her playful preliminaries, and went to the untidy littleapartment overhead which served in that house as his study. He sat downat the big desk, pushed his methodically arranged papers back, anddrummed on the edge with his fingers.
"I'm damned if we have that bigger house," said Trafford.
Sec. 6
He felt he wanted to confirm and establish this new resolution, to goright away to Labrador for a year. He wanted to tell someone the thingdefinitely. He would have gone downstairs again to Marjorie, but she wassubmerged and swimming desperately against the voluble rapids of AuntPlessington's purpose. It might be an hour before that attack withdrew.Presently there would be other callers. He decided to have tea with hismother and talk to her about this new break in the course of his life.
Except that her hair was now grey and her brown eyes by so much contrastbrighter, Mrs. Trafford's appearance had altered very little in the tenyears of her only son's
marriage. Whatever fresh realizations of theinevitably widening separation between parent and child these years hadbrought her, she had kept to herself. She had watched herdaughter-in-law sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with perplexity,always with a jealous resolve to let no shadow of jealousy fall betweenthem. Marjorie had been sweet and friendly to her, but after the firstoutburst of enthusiastic affection, she had neither offered nor invitedconfidences. Old Mrs. Trafford had talked of Marjorie to her songuardedly, and had marked and respected a growing indisposition on hispart to discuss his wife. For a year or so after his marriage she hadached at times with a sense of nearly intolerable loneliness, and thenthe new interests she had found for herself had won their way againstthis depression. The new insurrectionary movement of women that haddistinguished those years had attacked her by its emotion and repelledher by its crudity, and she had resolved, quite in the spirit of theman who had shaped her life, to make a systematic study of all thecontributory strands that met in this difficult tangle. She tried towrite, but she found that the poetic gift, the gift of the creative andilluminating phrase which alone justifies writing, was denied to her,and so she sought to make herself wise, to read and hear, and discussand think over these things, and perhaps at last inspire and encouragewriting in others.
Her circle of intimates grew, and she presently remarked with a curiousinterest that while she had lost the confidences of her own son and hiswife, she was becoming the confidant of an increasing number of otherpeople. They came to her, she perceived, because she was receptive andsympathetic and without a claim upon them or any interest to complicatethe freedoms of their speech with her. They came to her, because she didnot belong to them nor they to her. It is, indeed, the defect of allformal and established relationship, that it embarrasses speech, andtaints each phase in intercourse with the flavour of diplomacy. One canbe far more easily outspoken to a casual stranger one may never seeagain than to that inseparable other, who may misinterpret, who maydisapprove or misunderstand, and who will certainly in the measure ofthat discord remember....
It became at last a matter of rejoicing to Mrs. Trafford that the tiesof the old instinctive tenderness between herself and her son, thememories of pain and tears and the passionate conflict of childhood,were growing so thin and lax and inconsiderable, that she could evenhope some day to talk to him again--almost as she talked to the youngmen and young women who drifted out of the unknown to her and sat inher little room and sought to express their perplexities and listened toher advice....
It seemed to her that afternoon the wished-for day had come.
Trafford found her just returned from a walk in Kensington Gardens andwriting a note at her desk under the narrow sunlit window that lookedupon the High Street. "Finish your letter, little mother," he said, andtook possession of the hearthrug.
When she had sealed and addressed her letter, she turned her head andfound him looking at his father's portrait.
"Done?" he asked, becoming aware of her eyes.
She took her letter into the hall and returned to him, closing the doorbehind her.
"I'm going away, little mother," he said with an unconvincingoff-handedness. "I'm going to take a holiday."
"Alone?"
"Yes. I want a change. I'm going off somewhere--untrodden ground as nearas one can get it nowadays--Labrador."
Their eyes met for a moment.
"Is it for long?"
"The best part of a year."
"I thought you were going on with your research work again."
"No." He paused. "I'm going to Labrador."
"Why?" she asked.
"I'm going to think."
She found nothing to say for a moment. "It's good," she remarked, "tothink." Then, lest she herself should seem to be thinking tooenormously, she rang the bell to order the tea that was already on itsway.
"It surprises a mother," she said, when the maid had come and gone,"when her son surprises her."
"You see," he repeated, as though it explained everything, "I want tothink."
Then after a pause she asked some questions about Labrador; wasn't itvery cold, very desert, very dangerous and bitter, and he answeredinformingly. How was he going to stay there? He would go up the countrywith an expedition, build a hut and remain behind. Alone? Yes--thinking.Her eyes rested on his face for a time. "It will be--lonely," she saidafter a pause.
She saw him as a little still speck against immense backgrounds of snowywilderness.
The tea-things came before mother and son were back at essentials again.Then she asked abruptly: "Why are you going away like this?"
"I'm tired of all this business and finance," he said after a pause.
"I thought you would be," she answered as deliberately.
"Yes. I've had enough of things. I want to get clear. And begin againsomehow."
She felt they both hung away from the essential aspect. Either he or shemust approach it. She decided that she would, that it was a lessdifficult thing for her than for him.
"And Marjorie?" she asked.
He looked into his mother's eyes very quietly. "You see," he went ondeliberately disregarding her question, "I'm beached. I'm aground. I'mspoilt now for the old researches--spoilt altogether. And I don't likethis life I'm leading. I detest it. While I was struggling it had a kindof interest. There was an excitement in piling up the first twentythousand. But _now_--! It's empty, it's aimless, it's incessant...."
He paused. She turned to the tea-things, and lit the spirit lamp underthe kettle. It seemed a little difficult to do, and her hand trembled.When she turned on him again it was with an effort.
"Does Marjorie like the life you are leading?" she asked, and pressedher lips together tightly.
He spoke with a bitterness in his voice that astonished her. "Oh, _she_likes it."
"Are you sure?"
He nodded.
"She won't like it without you."
"Oh, that's too much! It's her world. It's what she's done--what she'smade. She can have it; she can keep it. I've played my part and got itfor her. But now--now I'm free to go. I will go. She's got everythingelse. I've done my half of the bargain. But my soul's my own. If I wantto go away and think, I will. Not even Marjorie shall stand in the wayof that."
She made no answer to this outburst for a couple of seconds. Then shethrew out, "Why shouldn't Marjorie think, too?"
He considered that for some moments. "She doesn't," he said, as thoughthe words came from the roots of his being.
"But you two----"
"We don't talk. It's astonishing--how we don't. We don't. We can't. Wetry to, and we can't. And she goes her way, and now--I will go mine."
"And leave her?"
He nodded.
"In London?"
"With all the things she cares for."
"Except yourself."
"I'm only a means----"
She turned her quiet face to him. "You know," she said, "that isn'ttrue."...
"No," she repeated, to his silent contradiction.
"I've watched her," she went on. "You're _not_ a means. I'd have spokenlong ago if I had thought that. Haven't I watched? Haven't I lain awakethrough long nights thinking about her and you, thinking over everycasual mood, every little sign--longing to help--helpless." ... Shestruggled with herself, for she was weeping. "_It has come to this_,"she said in a whisper, and choked back a flood of tears.
Trafford stood motionless, watching her. She became active. She movedround the table. She looked at the kettle, moved the cups needlessly,made tea, and stood waiting for a moment before she poured it out. "It'sso hard to talk to you," she said, "and about all this.... I care somuch. For her. And for you.... Words don't come, dear.... One saysstupid things."
She poured out the tea, and left the cups steaming, and came and stoodbefore him.
"You see," she said, "you're ill. You aren't just. You've come to anend. You don't know where you are and what you want to do. Neither doesshe, my dear. She's as aimless as you--and les
s able to help it. Ever somuch less able."
"But she doesn't show it. She goes on. She wants things and wantsthings----"
"And you want to go away. It's the same thing. It's exactly the samething. It's dissatisfaction. Life leaves you empty and craving--leavesyou with nothing to do but little immediate things that turn to dust asyou do them. It's her trouble, just as it's your trouble."
"But she doesn't show it."
"Women don't. Not so much. Perhaps even she doesn't know it. Half thewomen in our world don't know--and for a woman it's so much easier to goon--so many little things."...
Trafford tried to grasp the intention of this. "Mother," he said, "Imean to go away."
"But think of her!"
"I've thought. Now I've got to think of myself."
"You can't--without her."
"I will. It's what I'm resolved to do."
"Go right away?"
"Right away."
"And think?"
He nodded.
"Find out--what it all means, my boy?"
"Yes. So far as I'm concerned."
"And then----?"
"Come back, I suppose. I haven't thought."
"To her?"
He didn't answer. She went and stood beside him, leaning upon themantel. "Godwin," she said, "she'd only be further behind.... You've gotto take her with you."
He stood still and silent.
"You've got to think things out with her. If you don't----"
"I can't."
"Then you ought to go away with her----" She stopped.
"For good?" he asked.
"Yes."
They were both silent for a space. Then Mrs. Trafford gave her mind tothe tea that was cooling in the cups, and added milk and sugar. Shespoke again with the table between them.
"I've thought so much of these things," she said with the milk-jug inher hand. "It's not only you two, but others. And all the movement aboutus.... Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing becausewomen have become human beings. Only----You know, Godwin, all thesethings are so difficult to express. Woman's come out of being a slave,and yet she isn't an equal.... We've had a sort of sham emancipation,and we haven't yet come to the real one."
She put down the milk-jug on the tray with an air of grave deliberation."If you go away from her and make the most wonderful discoveries aboutlife and yourself, it's no good--unless she makes them too. It's no goodat all.... You can't live without her in the end, any more than she canlive without you. You may think you can, but I've watched you. You don'twant to go away from her, you want to go away from the world that's gothold of her, from the dresses and parties and the competition and allthis complicated flatness we have to live in.... It wouldn't worry you abit, if it hadn't got hold of her. You don't want to get out of it foryour own sake. You _are_ out of it. You are as much out of it as any onecan be. Only she holds you in it, because she isn't out of it. Yourgoing away will do nothing. She'll still be in it--and still have herhold on you.... You've got to take her away. Or else--if you go away--inthe end it will be just like a ship, Godwin, coming back to itsmoorings."
She watched his thoughtful face for some moments, then arrested herselfjust in time in the act of putting a second portion of sugar into eachof the cups. She handed her son his tea, and he took it mechanically."You're a wise little mother," he said. "I didn't see things in thatlight.... I wonder if you're right."
"I know I am," she said.
"I've thought more and more,--it was Marjorie."
"It's the world."
"Women made the world. All the dress and display and competition."
Mrs. Trafford thought. "Sex made the world. Neither men nor women. Butthe world has got hold of the women tighter than it has the men. They'redeeper in." She looked up into his face. "Take her with you," she said,simply.
"She won't come," said Trafford, after considering it.
Mrs. Trafford reflected. "She'll come--if you make her," she said.
"She'll want to bring two housemaids."
"I don't think you know Marjorie as well as I do."
"But she can't----"
"She can. It's you--you'll want to take two housemaids for her. Evenyou.... Men are not fair to women."
Trafford put his untasted tea upon the mantelshelf, and confronted hismother with a question point blank. "Does Marjorie care for me?" heasked.
"You're the sun of her world."
"But she goes her way."
"She's clever, she's full of life, full of activities, eager to make andarrange and order; but there's nothing she is, nothing she makes, thatdoesn't centre on you."
"But if she cared, she'd understand!"
"My dear, do _you_ understand?"
He stood musing. "I had everything clear," he said. "I saw my way toLabrador...."
Her little clock pinged the hour. "Good God!" he said, "I'm to be atdinner somewhere at seven. We're going to a first night. With theBernards, I think. Then I suppose we'll have a supper. Always life isbeing slashed to tatters by these things. Always. One thinks in snatchesof fifty minutes. It's dementia...."
Sec. 7
They dined at the Loretto Restaurant with the Bernards and RichardHampden and Mrs. Godwin Capes, the dark-eyed, quiet-mannered wife of thedramatist, a woman of impulsive speech and long silences, who hadsubsided from an early romance (Capes had been divorced for her whileshe was still a mere girl) into a markedly correct and exclusive motherof daughters. Through the dinner Marjorie was watching Trafford andnoting the deep preoccupation of his manner. He talked a little to Mrs.Bernard until it was time for Hampden to entertain her, then findingMrs. Capes was interested in Bernard, he lapsed into thought. PresentlyMarjorie discovered his eyes scrutinizing herself.
She hoped the play would catch his mind, but the play seemed devised tointensify his sense of the tawdry unreality of contemporary life.Bernard filled the intervals with a conventional enthusiasm. Capesdidn't appear.
"He doesn't seem to care to see his things," his wife explained.
"It's so brilliant," said Bernard.
"He has to do it," said Mrs. Capes slowly, her sombre eyes estimatingthe crowded stalls below. "It isn't what he cares to do."
The play was in fact an admirable piece of English stagecraft, and itdealt exclusively with that unreal other world of beings the Englishtheatre has for its own purposes developed. Just as Greece through theages evolved and polished and perfected the idealized life of itsHomeric poems, so the British mind has evolved their Stage Land toembody its more honourable dreams, full of heroic virtues, incrediblehonour, genial worldliness, childish villainies, profound but amiablewaiters and domestics, pathetic shepherds and preposterous crimes.Capes, needing an income, had mastered the habits and customs of thisimagined world as one learns a language; success endorsed his mastery;he knew exactly how deeply to underline an irony and just when it is fitand proper for a good man to call upon "God!" or cry out "Damn!" In thisplay he had invented a situation in which a charming and sympatheticlady had killed a gross and drunken husband in self-defence, almost butnot quite accidentally, and had then appealed to the prodigious hero forassistance in the resulting complications. At a great cost of mentalsuffering to himself he had told his First and Only Lie to shield her.Then years after he had returned to England--the first act happened, ofcourse in India--to find her on the eve of marrying, without any of thepreliminary confidences common among human beings, an old school friendof his. (In plays all Gentlemen have been at school together, and onehas been the other's fag.) The audience had to be interested in theproblem of what the prodigious hero was to do in this prodigioussituation. Should he maintain a colossal silence, continue hisshielding, and let his friend marry the murderess saved by his perjury,or----?... The dreadful quandary! Indeed, the absolute--inconvenience!
Marjorie watched Trafford in the corner of the box, as he listenedrather contemptuously to the statement of the evening's Problem and thenlapsed again into a brooding quiet. She wished she
understood his moodsbetter. She felt there was more in this than a mere resentment at herpersistence about the new house....
Why didn't he go on with things?...
This darkling mood of his had only become manifest to her during thelast three or four years of their life. Previously, of course, he hadbeen irritable at times.
Were they less happy now than they had been in the little house inChelsea? It had really been a horrible little house. And yet there hadbeen a brightness then--a nearness....
She found her mind wandering away upon a sort of stock-takingexpedition. How much of real happiness had she and Trafford hadtogether? They ought by every standard to be so happy....
She declined the Bernard's invitation to a chafing-dish supper, andbegan to talk so soon as she and Trafford had settled into the car.
"Rag," she said, "something's the matter?"
"Well--yes."
"The house?"
"Yes--the house."
Marjorie considered through a little interval.
"Old man, why are you so prejudiced against a bigger house?"
"Oh, because the one we have bores me, and the next one will bore memore."
"But try it."
"I don't want to."
"Well," she said and lapsed into silence.
"And then," he asked, "what are we going to do?"
"Going to do--when?"
"After the new house----"
"I'm going to open out," she said.
He made no answer.
"I want to open out. I want you to take your place in the world, theplace you deserve."
"A four-footman place?"
"Oh! the house is only a means."
He thought upon that. "A means," he asked, "to what? Look here,Marjorie, what do you think you are up to with me and yourself? What doyou see me doing--in the years ahead?"
She gave him a silent and thoughtful profile for a second or so.
"At first I suppose you are going on with your researches."
"Well?"
"Then----I must tell you what I think of you, Rag. Politics----"
"Good Lord!"
"You've a sort of power. You could make things noble."
"And then? Office?"
"Why not? Look at the little men they are."
"And then perhaps a still bigger house?"
"You're not fair to me."
He pulled up the bearskin over his knees.
"Marjorie!" he said. "You see----We aren't going to do any of thosethings at all.... _No!_..."
"I can't go on with my researches," he explained. "That's what you don'tunderstand. I'm not able to get back to work. I shall never do any goodresearch again. That's the real trouble, Marjorie, and it makes all thedifference. As for politics----I can't touch politics. I despisepolitics. I think this empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons andpatriotism and social reform and all the rest of it, silly, _silly_beyond words; temporary, accidental, foolish, a mere stop-gap--like agipsey's roundabout in a place where one will presently build ahouse.... You don't help make the house by riding on the roundabout....There's no clear knowledge--no clear purpose.... Only researchmatters--and expression perhaps--I suppose expression is a sort ofresearch--until we get that--that sufficient knowledge. And you see, Ican't take up my work again. I've lost something...."
She waited.
"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "andI feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I'vebeen prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Businessand prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort ofprostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should onesell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy tosucceed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one'sattention or imagination wander--and it's so degrading. Hopelesslydegrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. _I_ don't want to buythings. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It'sexactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came ona passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened--on nothing!Nothing!"
"This is a mood," she whispered to his pause.
"It isn't a mood, it's a fact.... I've got nothing ahead, and I don'tknow how to get back. My life's no good to me any more. I've spentmyself."
She looked at him with dismayed eyes. "But," she said, "this _is_ amood."
"No," he said, "no mood, but conviction. I _know_...."
He started. The car had stopped at their house, and Malcolm was openingthe door of the car. They descended silently, and went upstairs insilence.
He came into her room presently and sat down by her fireside. She hadgone to her dressing-table and unfastened a necklace; now with thiswinking and glittering in her hand she came and stood beside him.
"Rag," she said, "I don't know what to say. This isn't so much of asurprise.... I _felt_ that somehow life was disappointing you, that Iwas disappointing you. I've felt it endless times, but more so lately. Ihaven't perhaps dared to let myself know just how much.... But isn't itwhat life is? Doesn't every wife disappoint her husband? We're none ofus inexhaustible. After all, we've had a good time; isn't it a littleungrateful to forget?..."
"Look here, Rag," she said. "I don't know what to do. If I did know, Iwould do it.... What are we to do?"
"Think," he suggested.
"We've got to live as well as think."
"It's the immense troublesome futility of--everything," he said.
"Well--let us cease to be futile. Let us _do_. You say there is no gripfor you in research, that you despise politics.... There's no end oftrouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, changethe lives of others less fortunate than ourselves...."
"Who are we that we should tamper with the lives of others?"
"But one must do something."
He thought that over.
"No," he said "that's the universal blunder nowadays. One must do theright thing. And we don't know the right thing, Marjorie. That's thevery heart of the trouble.... Does this life satisfy _you?_ If it didwould you always be so restless?..."
"But," she said, "think of the good things in life?"
"It's just the good, the exquisite things in life, that make me rebelagainst this life we are leading. It's because I've seen the streaks ofgold that I know the rest for dirt. When I go cheating and scheming tomy office, and come back to find you squandering yourself upon a hordeof chattering, overdressed women, when I think that that is oursubstance and everyday and what we are, then it is I remember most thedeep and beautiful things.... It is impossible, dear, it is intolerablethat life was made beautiful for us--just for these vulgarities."
"Isn't there----" She hesitated. "Love--still?"
"But----Has it been love? Love is a thing that grows. But we took it--aspeople take flowers out of a garden, cut them off, put them in water....How much of our daily life has been love? How much of it mereconsequences of the love we've left behind us?... We've just cohabitedand 'made love'--you and I--and thought of a thousand other things...."
He looked up at her. "Oh, I love a thousand things about you," he said."But do I love _you_, Marjorie? Have I got you? Haven't I lostyou--haven't we both lost something, the very heart of it all? Do youthink that we were just cheated by instinct, that there wasn't somethingin it we felt and thought was there? And where is it now? Where is thatbrightness and wonder, Marjorie, and the pride and the immense unlimitedhope?"
She was still for a moment, then knelt very swiftly before him and heldout her arms.
"Oh Rag!" she said, with a face of tender beauty. He took her fingertips in his, dropped them and stood up above her.
"My dear," he cried, "my dear! why do you always want to turn loveinto--touches?... Stand up again. Stand up there, my dear; don't thinkI've ceased to love you, but stand up there and let me talk to you asone man to another. If we let this occasion slide to embraces...."
He stopped short.
She crouched before the fire at his feet. "Go on," she said, "go on."
"I feel now that all our lives now, Marjorie----We have come to acrisis. I feel that now----_now_ is the time. Either we shall saveourselves now or we shall never save ourselves. It is as if somethinghad gathered and accumulated and could wait no longer. If we do notseize this opportunity----Then our lives will go on as they have goneon, will become more and more a matter of small excitements andelaborate comforts and distraction...."
He stopped this halting speech and then broke out again.
"Oh! why _should_ the life of every day conquer us? Why shouldgeneration after generation of men have these fine beginnings, thesesplendid dreams of youth, attempt so much, achieve so much and then,then become--_this!_ Look at this room, this litter of littlesatisfactions! Look at your pretty books there, a hundred minds you havepecked at, bright things of the spirit that attracted you as jewelsattract a jackdaw. Look at the glass and silver, and that silk fromChina! And we are in the full tide of our years, Marjorie. Now is thevery crown and best of our lives. And this is what we do, we sample, weaccumulate. For this we loved, for this we hoped. Do you remember whenwe were young--that life seemed so splendid--it was intolerable weshould ever die?... The splendid dream! The intimations of greatness!...The miserable failure!"
He raised clenched fists. "I won't stand it, Marjorie. I won't endureit. Somehow, in some way, I will get out of this life--and you with me.I have been brooding upon this and brooding, but now I know...."
"But how?" asked Marjorie, with her bare arms about her knees, staringinto the fire. "_How?_"
"We must get out of its constant interruptions, its incessant vivid,petty appeals...."
"We might go away--to Switzerland."
"We _went_ to Switzerland. Didn't we agree--it was our second honeymoon.It isn't a honeymoon we need. No, we'll have to go further than that."
A sudden light broke upon Marjorie's mind. She realized he had a plan.She lifted a fire-lit face to him and looked at him with steady eyes andasked----
"Where?"
"Ever so much further."
"Where?"
"I don't know."
"You do. You've planned something."
"I don't know, Marjorie. At least--I haven't made up my mind. Where itis very lonely. Cold and remote. Away from all this----" His mindstopped short, and he ended with a cry: "Oh! God! how I want to get outof all this!"
He sat down in her arm-chair, and bowed his face on his hands.
Then abruptly he stood up and went out of the room.
Sec. 8
When in five minutes' time he came back into her room she was still uponher hearthrug before the fire, with her necklace in her hand, the redreflections of the flames glowing and winking in her jewels and in hereyes. He came and sat again in her chair.
"I have been ranting," he said. "I feel I've been--eloquent. You make mefeel like an actor-manager, in a play by Capes.... You are the mostdifficult person for me to talk to in all the world--because you mean somuch to me."
She moved impulsively and checked herself and crouched away from him. "Imustn't touch your hand," she whispered.
"I want to explain."
"You've got to explain."
"I've got quite a definite plan.... But a sort of terror seized me. Itwas like--shyness."
"I know. I knew you had a plan."
"You see.... I mean to go to Labrador."
He leant forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands extended,explanatory. He wanted intensely that she should understand and agreeand his desire made him clumsy, now slow and awkward, now glibly andunsatisfyingly eloquent. But she comprehended his quality better than heknew. They were to go away to Labrador, this snowy desert of which shehad scarcely heard, to camp in the very heart of the wilderness, twohundred miles or more from any human habitation----
"But how long?" she asked abruptly.
"The better part of a year."
"And we are to talk?"
"Yes," he said, "talk and think ourselves together--oh!--the old phrasescarry it all--find God...."
"It is what I dreamt of, Rag, years ago."
"Will you come," he cried, "out of all this?"
She leant across the hearthrug, and seized and kissed his hand....
Then, with one of those swift changes of hers, she was in revolt. "But,Rag," she exclaimed, "this is dreaming. We are not free. There are thechildren! Rag! We cannot leave the children!"
"We can," he said. "We must."
"But, my dear!--our duty!"
"_Is_ it a mother's duty always to keep with her children? They will belooked after, their lives are organized, there is my mother close athand.... What is the good of having children at all--unless their worldis to be better than our world?... What are we doing to save them fromthe same bathos as this--to which we have come? We give them food andhealth and pictures and lessons, that's all very well while they arejust little children; but we've got no religion to give them, no aim, nosense of a general purpose. What is the good of bread and health--and noworship?... What can we say to them when they ask us why we brought theminto the world?--_We_ happened--_you_ happened. What are we to tell themwhen they demand the purpose of all this training, all these lessons?When they ask what we are preparing them for? Just that _you_, too, mayhave children! Is that any answer? Marjorie, it's common-sense to trythis over--to make this last supreme effort--just as it will becommon-sense to separate if we can't get the puzzle solved together."
"Separate!"
"Separate. Why not? We can afford it. Of course, we shall separate."
"But Rag!--separate!"
He faced her protest squarely. "Life is not worth living," he said,"unless it has more to hold it together than ours has now. If we cannotescape together, then--_I will go alone_."...
Sec. 9
They parted that night resolved to go to Labrador together, with thebroad outline of their subsequent journey already drawn. Each lay awakefar into the small hours thinking of this purpose and of one another,with a strange sense of renewed association. Each woke to a morning ofsunshine heavy-eyed. Each found that overnight decision remote andincredible. It was like something in a book or a play that had movedthem very deeply. They came down to breakfast, and helped themselvesafter the wonted fashion of several years, Marjorie with a skilful eyeto the large order of her household; the _Times_ had one or twocharacteristic letters which interested them both; there was the usualpicturesque irruption of the children and a distribution of earlystrawberries among them. Trafford had two notes in his correspondencewhich threw a new light upon the reconstruction of the Norton-Batsfordcompany in which he was interested; he formed a definite conclusion uponthe situation, and went quite normally to his study and the telephone toact upon that.
It was only as the morning wore on that it became real to him that heand Marjorie had decided to leave the world. Then, with theNorton-Batsford business settled, he sat at his desk and mused. Hisapathy passed. His imagination began to present first one picture andthen another of his retreat. He walked along Oxford Street to his Clubthinking--"soon we shall be out of all this." By the time he was atlunch in his Club, Labrador had become again the magic refuge it hadseemed the day before. After lunch he went to work in the library,finding out books about Labrador, and looking up the details of thejourney.
But his sense of futility and hopeless oppression had vanished. Hewalked along the corridor and down the great staircase, and without atrace of the despairful hostility of the previous day, passed Blenkins,talking grey bosh with infinite thoughtfulness. He nodded easily toBlenkins. He was going out of it all, as a man might do who discoversafter years of weary incarceration that the walls of his cell are madeof thin paper. The time when Blenkins seemed part of a prison-house ofroutine and invincible stupidity seemed ten ages ago.
In Pall Mall Trafford remarked Lady Grampians and the Countess ofClaridge, two women of great influence, in a big green car, on the wayno doubt to create or sustain
or destroy; and it seemed to him that itwas limitless ages since these poor old dears with their ridiculous hatsand their ridiculous airs, their luncheons and dinners and dirtyaggressive old minds, had sent tidal waves of competitive anxiety intohis home....
He found himself jostling through the shopping crowd on the sunny sideof Regent Street. He felt now that he looked over the swarming,preoccupied heads at distant things. He and Marjorie were going out ofit all, going clean out of it all. They were going to escape fromsociety and shopping, and petty engagements and incessant triviality--asa bird flies up out of weeds.
Sec. 10
But Marjorie fluctuated more than he did.
There were times when the expedition for which he was now preparingrapidly and methodically seemed to her the most adventurously-beautifulthing that had ever come to her, and times when it seemed the maddestand most hopeless of eccentricities. There were times when she haddevastating premonitions of filth, hunger, strain and fatigue, damp andcold, when her whole being recoiled from the project, when she couldeven think of staying secure in London and letting him go alone. Shedeveloped complicated anxieties for the children; she found reasons forfurther inquiries, for delay. "Why not," she suggested, "wait a year?"
"No," he said, "I won't. I mean we are to do this, and do it now, andnothing but sheer physical inability to do it will prevent my carryingit out.... And you? Of course you are to come. I can't drag youshrieking all the way to Labrador; short of that I'm going to _make_ youcome with me."
She sat and looked up at him with dark lights in her upturned eyes, anda little added warmth in her cheek. "You've never forced my will likethis before," she said, in a low voice. "Never."
He was too intent upon his own resolve to heed her tones.
"It hasn't seemed necessary somehow," he said, considering herstatement. "Now it does."
"This is something final," she said.
"It is final."
She found an old familiar phrasing running through her head, as she satcrouched together, looking up at his rather gaunt, very intent face, thespeech of another woman echoing to her across a vast space of years:"Whither thou goest I will go----"
"In Labrador," he began....
