by Alec Waugh
The moment, however, that Marian Eagar came into the room, his moodiness was dispelled. The door swung open and she was standing there, and it was just ridiculous to talk about being ill-tempered when there were people like Marian Eagar in the world to smile at you. And he forgot that his post had consisted entirely of bills, that his secretary had a cold, that the title deeds of a bore had become involved, that he had before him a very delicate and testing interview. He was conscious only of radiant well-being in the presence of this extremely jolly person. And, “I’ve got quite a lot of really encouraging news for you,” he said. And she was smiling happily.
“Splendid,” she said. “But you’d better, I think, read that first.” And she handed across a letter to him.
It was quite a long letter. Some fifty close-packed lines that turned the page on the fourth sheet, written in the stiff, unflowing hand of one who is unaccustomed to expressing himself with the pen. It was signed Herbert.
“Your husband?” he asked.
“My husband.”
He read the letter.
MY DEAREST MARIAN,—
I cannot say how distressed I was to return and find you gone: with no reason given for your going; only that note telling me of your address, assuring me that you were not ill and asking me not to make any attempt to join you. It was unexpected, and it was crushing. My one consolation is that you have not left me because of some other man. For I know you well enough to be certain that had you done so, you would have told me, asking me to divorce you. I feel certain that it is on account of the friction that of late there has been between us that you have decided upon this step; that you had found the strain too heavy a one to bear.
Well, my dear, I cannot pretend that things have been very happy for some while now, or that this is in any way the kind of marriage that we dreamed of four years ago. I have worried myself a great deal over it: trying to see how we can make things better. I’m afraid I’m a disappointment to you in many ways. I’m older: a good deal older. And I’m from the North. I feel ill-at-ease in London; in your London that’s to say. And I suppose I grow impatient and jealous of those pleasures that I can’t share with you. I believe it will be always like that in London. I shall be suspicious of your friends and your interests. We’ll never be in harmony.
On the other hand it would be impossible for me to attempt to transplant you to Liverpool. It would be as alien to you as this is to me. You would feel as out of place among my friends as I do among your friends. This I have been wondering, however. Would it be possible for us to be happy in an environment that would be new to both of us, where we should be starting side by side to build up new friends, and interests, and associations? I think we might. I think it would be worth trying. It seems such a pity to give up a marriage like this, on which we set out so hopefully, at the first obstacle. It’s such a confession of failure. And there’s a good chance now of our being able to make just such a fresh start. They’re sending a new manager to look after our affairs in Australia. He’ld be living in Sydney. And there’s no doubt that I could have the post if I applied for it. There would be a chance there of beginning side by side as we cannot here; of building up a new life in a new country. Don’t you think, Marian, it would be worth trying? Please, my dear, say yes. For however difficult I have been at times, I love you very truly still.
HERBERT.
Merrick read the letter quickly through the first time.
Then again more slowly, and with a grudging respect for the man who had written it.
“That’s a pretty decent kind of letter,” he said at last.
“My husband’s a pretty decent kind of man. I’ld not have married him if he hadn’t been.”
“And you’re going to Australia?”
“Oh, no.”
“You’ve written to tell him so?”
“I haven’t replied yet. That’s one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about. Ought I to?”
Merrick hesitated before he answered. On the surface the letter looked pretty straightforward and sincere, but his legal mind was wondering whether there might not be some trap concealed in it: whether it had not been dictated by some shrewd solicitor with his eye upon its effect in court.
“Your husband had no idea that you had found out that he was unfaithful?”
“None.”
“You’ve never discussed the question of divorce with him?”
“Never.”
“Then he can’t really have the slightest suspicion that you are proposing to bring this suit against him.”
“Not as far as I can see.”
Certainly it looked all right. Eagar might, of course, have seen his solicitor on discovering that his wife had gone, and it was possible that the solicitor might have suggested that the writing of some such letter would be prudent. It was possible, of course. As a lawyer Merrick recognized its possibility, but as a man he was disinclined to disbelieve in the sincerity of a letter that rang true. All the same, it would be as well to be on the safe side. The fewer documents about the better.
“I don’t think I should answer it if I were you,” he said.
She accepted his verdict uncritically.
“Right,” she said; “and you’ve got good news for me, you say?”
He told her of the reports that had come through from Liverpool, and described his interview with McMurtrie. “He’s the perfect witness,” he said. “That one man standing in the box will do your case more good than a dozen documents.”
“Then there ought not to be anything to worry over?”
“Not so far as I can see. I’ld rather have liked to have those other two men in the box.”
“They couldn’t have added anything.”
“No, but they could have corroborated; that’s always useful. And the one who was between you and your husband would have been able to report your conversation.”
“There wasn’t any conversation.”
“Well, what you said then. By the way, what did you say?”
“Nothing of the least importance. Something about being happy and hoping that he was. It just happened to rile him, I suppose. He didn’t like me to be happy unless he was responsible for it. He was jealous of my enjoying myself.”
“It seems a pretty violent form of it.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. We were at outs pretty badly about that time. And when you’re at outs it doesn’t take much to send you off. I daresay I was pretty difficult at times. We’re both well out of it. In eighteen months he’ll be agreeing so.” And she smiled gaily and rested her hand on the arm of the chair as though she were going to lift herself out of it. “That is all, isn’t it?” she asked.
He shook his head. During the morning when he had been losing his temper over bills and secretaries and title deeds, he had told himself that it was the imminent strain of the extremely delicate questions that he had to put to Mrs. Eagar that was battering his nerves. Now that the time for the setting of them had come, however, he was thankful for the opportunity they gave him for a longer talk. He was reluctant to let her go. He was feeling so happy. Although they had been discussing in the most matter-of-fact fashion the details of a divorce suit, he had felt that they were communing beneath their talk in the extremest intimacy with one another. There was harmony between them. And when she went she would take that harmony away with her.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that there are one or two more things to be settled first. There’s the question of alimony. How much are you thinking of applying for?”
“I hadn’t thought of applying for any. Alimony. Why, that just hadn’t occurred to me.”
“You’re entitled to it.”
“I daresay, legally. But I don’t need it. I’ve got close on four hundred of my own a year. That’s plenty for anything I may be likely to be wanting. Besides, I don’t see that a woman’s any right to take money from a man that she’s refused to live with. If he’s run away from her,
that’s another matter. Or if there are children. But even so, it’s a bit undignified. If a woman’s going to let a man support her, she ought to give some value in return. Oh, no, I don’t want there to be any bother about alimony.”
A good deal that had been said in the course of their conversation had come to Merrick as the surprising vindication of what without proof he had felt intuitively to be true about her. Nothing so much, however, as this waiving of her right to alimony. But he gave no sign of his relief.
“That’s going to make it all a very great deal easier,” he said quickly. “That removes half the difficulties.”
“All, I should say.”
“Unless you raise some.”
“I… I raise difficulties! How do you mean?”
Merrick smiled. The time had come, he knew, to settle the doubt that his father had raised for him, to set the question that in his imagination he had dreaded. But now that the time had come, he knew that they had reached a point of such complete intimacy that the setting of the question would be made without embarrassment or offence.
“There’s such a person,” he said, “as the King’s Proctor.”
“I don’t see how he’s going to affect me.”
“Most people only want to be divorced so that they may remarry.”
He made the remark casually enough, as might one friend to another, but as he made it he felt a tension of nervous anticipation very similar to that which he had experienced when he had asked her if she would accept her husband’s offer to go to Australia. He did not know why, but he had felt that life would be grown emptier, had she said “yes” to that first question; would grow emptier now were she to admit that there was a second marriage awaiting her. “It’s silly of me,” he thought. “But she’s so lovely and so wild a thing; in the same way that one doesn’t like to think of some wild bird being caged, one likes to think of her at liberty.” And it was with relief, with a surprisingly large measure of relief, that he heard her laughing answer.
“Not this time, anyhow. There won’t be any secrets for the King’s Proctor to ferret out.”
“You’ll have to be careful. He has a way of mistaking and misinterpreting a situation.”
And Merrick blushed, for he knew, as her eyes met his mockingly, that she was remembering the party where they had met, and the interpretation he had put on her behaviour.
“Embracing people in public, for example,” he suggested.
She only laughed.
“But, my dear, I kiss lots of people. I don’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s apt to be misunderstood.”
She shook her head.
“You needn’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be terribly circumspect.”
“And terribly bored, most likely.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll acquire a taste for quiet things.”
“And quiet people?”
“Even, perhaps, for quiet people.”
They spoke lightly, jestingly; playing across and obliterating the memory of that first meeting.
“In that case,” he said, “a staid solicitor might quite properly suggest to his quiet client that they might occasionally discuss her case in the sort of haunt where quiet people go to amuse themselves.”
“And where would he suggest that they should go?”
“Oh, somewhere not too frivolous. Summer is coming. They might watch cricket together at the Oval.”
She laughed outright at that.
“If she were to do that,” she cried, “her reputation would be lost for ever. For no one would believe that she was anything but desperately in love with even a staid solicitor if she sat next him on a hard seat on a hot day watching nothing happen on a piece of grass for hour after hour! The staid solicitor must think of something more innocent.”
“And when he does, perhaps he might ring her up?”
“Perhaps.”
A moment later she was gone. But the room felt less empty than he had feared it might. She had left something of herself behind her: the promise that she would come again. It was odd that that promise should have meant so much to him. They had only met three times, the first time they had quarrelled through his foolishness. The second time she had kissed him good-bye in comradeship. And the third and last time with a laugh and a wave of her chinchilla muff she had been gone quickly. He had wondered as she had risen from her chair if she would kiss him. He was surprised to find himself rather glad that she had not.
III
The progress of the law is slow.
To those who have never been concerned with litigation, the filing of a divorce petition sounds the most easy matter beneath the sun. It seems most admirably swift, most admirably simple. You dine with a couple who seem completely satisfied with life and one another; and before you have time to realize that a number of weeks have passed, you read a paragraph in the evening paper announcing that they have been divorced. And almost the next day you meet them at some party with different partners and the pack re-shuffled. And you shrug your shoulders and “With divorce as easy as all that, I can’t think why anyone bothers to get married,” you remark. For you have been so busy with your own affairs that you have not realized how many weeks have passed between that first meeting and that brief paragraph in the evening paper. Nor can anyone who has not been concerned in the stress of a contested or even of an uncontested suit realize how much drama, anxiety and suspense are concealed behind those few bald lines. They are like the synopsis at the head of a newspaper serial: when into a hundred words the essence of some sixty thousand words, and endless hours of the author’s time have been compressed. They present the facts, but of the time and labour, the strain and effort, that has gone to their appearance they tell nothing.
In that respect Herbert Eagar was no different from the majority of his contemporaries. A certain number of his friends had been divorced; from one or two of them he had been in receipt of confidences, but nothing had ever come into his life to make him suspect that a decree absolute was anything more than a marketable commodity for which you applied through a solicitor’s office in the same way that you applied through your broker for shares in an industrial venture. He was quite unprepared for the reality; for the arrival one morning of a letter bearing the signature Merrick, Hay, Merrick.
In a dazed, uncomprehending way he read it.
DEAR SIR (the letter ran),—
Our client, Mrs. Herbert Eagar, has instructed us to commence proceedings against you for divorce. The petition is now ready for service, and we shall be glad if you will let us know the name of your solicitors. If, however, you do not intend to instruct solicitors to represent you, service could be effected here.
Yours truly,
MERRICK, JOHN AND MERRICK.
At first he could scarcely understand what he was reading. Divorce, and on what counts? Madge, he supposed, for one. Somehow or other, through Madge herself possibly, Marian had found out. And for the other? Desertion? Scarcely? She would never surely have the effrontery to put that over. And if not desertion, then what else? Cruelty? His face coloured at the unwelcome memory. Cruelty; could she have brought that against him? Was it that that was to be declaimed in court, before a judge, before a gallery of prurient spectators, to be reported in the evening papers so that a work-weary world might be given five minutes of facile entertainment? And was that to be the end of the long dream that Marian and he had shared?
He could not believe it. He had never thought that it could end like this. He had known for a long time, he had been forced to know, that Marian was not really happy; had recognized that their life together would never be the thing that he had hoped for it. She was so much younger than he was; she asked different things of life. He had not been, he supposed, too tactful. There were times when he could not help getting angry at her.
It had been in one of those moods that he had let himself drift into that ridiculous affair with Madge Carruther; an affair that he had ended almost as soon as
he had begun it, in disgust and weariness. There had been no solace for him in that kind of thing. He had, in fact, needed that kind of affair to teach him that there could be no solace for him in any other woman. There had been times, he was ready enough to admit, when he had wondered whether it would be possible to continue the strain of a marriage such as his, when he had asked himself whether he had not been happier in his old bachelor life with an agreeable flat, an agreeably dimensioned income, a varied, amusing life enlivened by such casually pleasant and undisturbing romances as a man of his age and position periodically encounters. Had he been happier before? in a way perhaps he had. But in these days he had not met Marian. And though he might have been happier had he never met her; now that he had met her, he knew that he could never be really happy away from her. Marian was the first woman that he had loved wholeheartedly, and he was pretty sure she would be the last. Her wilfulness might make him wretched enough at times, but without her he would be more wretched still. He must make the best of it. And he had been convinced that eventually they would be able to reach some condition of harmony together.
Even when she had left the house he had been convinced of it. He had not believed that she had gone for good. She had needed a change of atmosphere, that was all. It was in a spirit of sincerely attempted reconciliation that he had written to her, in the belief that in a new country they could lay the foundations of a new life together. And he had been hopeful when she had not answered him. She was thinking the matter over, he had told himself. And if she were to put herself to that trouble she would, he felt confident, accept. The more she pondered, the more she would be sure to see the wisdom of it. An instantaneous and abrupt refusal to consider the possibility of such a change; that alone he had feared when he had written. He had not been worried as the days passed by bringing him no answer. He had been calmly confident, had even begun preparations for the change; and now on the summit of that confidence, to receive such a document as this!
