by Alec Waugh
“If every woman looked on marriage in that light there would be very few marriages that would keep clear of the divorce courts.”
She caught him up quickly. “You mean to say then that most men are like that; that most men have affairs with women that mean nothing to them; women that they pretend afterwards that they despise?”
Merrick shrugged his shoulders.
“A great many do,” he said. “I don’t mean that they make a practice of it. But I suppose that there are episodes of some sort or other in most men’s lives.”
“And you think that that is inevitable?”
Merrick hesitated for a moment. It was a question to which a few weeks earlier he would have answered readily enough. Men were polygamous, he would have said. Desire was fleeting. You could not expect to feel five years after marriage the rapture of a honeymoon. Tenderness there might be; and gratitude for a happiness that had been shared; companionship and the secure feeling of alliance; of mutually held interests and ambitions. Those there might be. But the glow, the thrill of living; inevitably that must pass. And when the new attraction came your way was there any particular reason why you should not yield to it? No one need be hurt. No one was being robbed: you merely gave that of which your wife had no further need. Why should one deny oneself a happiness? That was how he would have argued four weeks earlier. But with Marian’s grey-brown eyes looking deeply, questioningly into his, those arguments seemed singularly unconvincing. He could not, he felt, repeat those arguments to Marian. Not because he wished to appear in any particularly favourable light to her, but just because he no longer believed them true. The whole attitude seemed tawdry. Ninety-nine times in a hundred it might go that way. Inevitable though? No, not that.
“Surely it would be possible,” he thought, “for two people to care so deeply for each other that any other intimacy would be impossible; they would be the perfect lovers and the perfect friends. And year by year they would dig, by the very fact of that intimacy, deeper and deeper into each other’s natures, so that their life together would be a constant novelty, a constant condition of discovery.”
That was what he felt: but somehow it did not seem to him that those were of the things one said.
“I don’t think,” he said instead, “that the sentimentalists are always wrong.” And in his smile was implied all that his lips had left unsaid.
And the grey-brown of Marian’s eyes grew soft, and the feather boa that hung over her neck across her breast stirred slightly, as though she sighed.
“I’m glad you think that,” she said. And, “Do you think,” she added, “that I should be likely to find with my husband anything that the true sentimentalist would approve of?”
To that question there could be one answer only, and Merrick shook his head. He had promised, however, to do his best for Eagar.
“Most of us,” he said, “have to be content in most things with a compromise.”
Marian lifted her hands despairingly. “Is that a reason for flinging up the sponge in the early twenties? My dear, what’s the good of going on? I can’t feel about him again as I did once. Not after that. I’ld only make him unhappy and myself too. There’s no reason why we should stay together. I can understand that there are situations where a wife has to make the best of a bad job. There may be children; there may be family ties and obligations; there may be the question of money; there may be the knowledge that a man will go to bits if a particular woman leaves him. I can imagine a hundred and one different situations in which divorce would be morally unjustified. But this isn’t one of them. There are no children, I’ve no parents to hurt. He’s scarcely seen anything of his for twenty years. It’s simply a matter between ourselves. We’ve made a mistake. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t remedy it. I’m young and he’s scarcely middle-aged. It may hurt him for a bit, but he’ll get over it. I can’t matter so awfully much to him.”
It was said simply, logically, and decisively: in a tone from which there could be no appeal.
“Then I’m to tell your husband,” said Merrick, “that the case is to go on?”
And it was only as she nodded her assent that he realized how immense was his relief at the knowledge that their friendship was to be continued
“He’ll be grateful to me in the end,” she said. “He’ll meet some girl who’ll make him far happier than ever I could have.”
“And you?”
“And I?”
“You too, I suppose, sooner or later, you’ll remarry.”
“I wonder.”
“Was it as bad, then, as all that?”
She smiled, and leaning forward across the desk, her face rested against the back of a gloved hand, she looked pensively towards the window.
“I wonder,” she repeated. “In time I expect I shall. I’ll be careful, though. And I’ll go into it in a different spirit. I didn’t give Herbert a chance. I went into marriage haphazardly as most young people do, wondering how much I could get out of it. Romance, freedom, security, companionship: that’s what I told myself I should get. I was like a child ransacking a larder. I never thought that there were any obligations on my side, that there was any giving to be done by me. And going into it in that spirit how could it have possibly turned out a success? By the time I’d discovered my mistake it was too late. It still is too late. One can’t begin again with the same person.”
“A second time, though?”
“I think if I marry a second time I shall make rather a good wife.”
A few minutes later she had said good-bye. There was a pile of papers waiting to be examined on Merrick’s desk, but he felt in no mood for work. He felt in no particular mood for anything. He was happy and at rest: in a trance almost of tranquillity. He wanted to maintain that trance, not shattering it by the introduction of alien influences. He wanted to retain his thoughts on the level where Marian had left them. So instead of opening envelopes and adjusting contracts, he walked across to the window and looked out over the grey and green of Lincoln’s Inn.
He reached the window at about the moment that Marian had turned out of Stone Buildings to walk across the Square to Kingsway. With a profound sensation of happiness and well-being he watched her, walking quickly, for the air was fresh, her slim shadow cast in front of her, and as he saw her turn round the angle of the wall, that old sense of emptiness returned to him. He did not want to turn back to his work and all that work represented of a life in which she had no share. He was going that evening to a party of bachelors. It would be a lively show. Plenty of good wine: and there’ld be a lot of lively ladies turning up when the curtain had fallen on the Gaiety Ballet. He had accepted the invitation enthusiastically, but now suddenly he felt that he did not want to go.
“I’m tired of that kind of show,” he thought.
And he smiled, remembering that the day after to-morrow—in forty-eight hours—he and Marian would be dining quietly together, away from the strain and storm of everything that a month back his life had been.
“I suppose I oughtn’t to be,” he thought, “but I’m infernally glad that she decided not to go back to Eagar.”
§
“Infernally glad that she had not gone back to her husband.” It may be that something of that relief entered into Merrick’s manner when he conveyed, a couple of days later, the information to Herbert Eagar.
Anyhow, from the very start the interview went wrong.
“What,” Eagar cried, “she won’t? She’s going through with the case? But she can’t understand. Surely you explained my point of view to her?”
For Herbert Eagar was a gentleman who had usually managed to get his way. He had the dour resolution of the northern counties. And at first he could scarcely believe that Merrick’s diplomacy on his behalf had been unsuccessful.
“You’re quite sure,” he repeated, “that you explained?”
He spoke truculently, and Merrick, on account of that truculence, was less conciliatory than he might have been.
Eagar clicked his tongue impatiently against his teeth.
“Then if you did… I can’t understand… I mean, after all, if she sees the way I look at it, she must realize that… why, heavens, it’s ridiculous to go on with the case.”
“Your wife happens to disagree.”
Eagar’s forehead wrinkled into a frown.
“But why, in heaven’s name, why? What’s she got to complain about? I’ve treated her all right. I give her what she wants. She’s free to choose her friends. I don’t know what’s the matter with her.”
His voice had risen to a high, fretful note, not unlike that of a child when it is denied a plaything. It was a note that irritated Merrick.
“You seem to forget,” he said, “that you have given her very abundant grounds for divorcing you.”
“Oh, that! I daresay I have. So’ve most husbands at one time or another.”
It was the argument that Merrick himself had put to Marian. But as before it irritated him that Eagar should base his defence on it. It gave the impression that Marian was just any woman.
“People don’t get divorced the moment they’ve got legal grounds for it,” Eagar was continuing. “They get divorced because they can’t get on: or because they want to marry someone else. They start looking round for the legal grounds afterwards. By the by, does Marian want to marry someone else?”
“I don’t imagine so.”
“Then in that case I can’t see what’s the matter with her. I’m ready enough to go on with it.”
The old insensitiveness, Merrick thought, the old masculine assumption that provided the man was content, the woman had got to be. Marian was probably well rid of him.
“As far as I can gather,” Merrick said, “your wife feels that you’ll never really be happy together, that you’re both young enough to begin again elsewhere, that at any rate you should have the chance of finding a real happiness. She doesn’t see why either of you should be bound to a mistake for ever.”
“Mistake!” Eagar snapped out the word. “Mistake! She’s a wilful, feather-brained, pleasure-seeking little fool who does not know her mind from one half-hour to the next. That’s all that there is to it.” And he leant forward, biting at his nails angrily. “It’s preposterous,” he said, “preposterous!”
His face was uglily dark, wearing the same cruel expression of the eyes and mouth that it must have worn when he struck Marian. The knowledge of this inflamed Merrick.
“Well, anyhow,” he said, “I don’t see that there’s anything for you to do about it.”
He could hardly have chosen his words less wisely. They were practically a challenge. And Herbert Eagar was an extremely obstinate as well as an extremely forceful man.
“Nothing to be done,” he sneered. “I should make certain of that if I were you!”
And without saying good-bye, he picked up his hat and strode angrily from the room, leaving Merrick to tap his fingers thoughtfully against his chin.
“I’m afraid,” was his conclusion, “that I’ve done a pretty bad day’s work for Marian.”
§
Which, could he have seen Herbert Eagar’s face at that moment, he would have known of a surety that he had. He could scarcely, in fact, have tackled him in a more unfortunate manner. Had he taken him by the arm and talked to him in the man-to-man manner that Eagar understood, all would have been well. Had he said,“ This is a bad show, old son, but you know what women are. They’re unaccountable creatures. One’s got to take them in one’s stride as one takes the weather. Let’s go and drink it off.” Had he said that, Eagar would have walked out of Stone Buildings not happy, but consoled. One couldn’t account for women, he would have thought. That was the whole matter; that, no more than that. Men just had to stick together and make the best of it. It was in that spirit that Eagar should have been sent away. But the words that would have done that for him were the very words that Merrick could not say. He could not sit still in patience and hear Marian abused; he could not simulate friendship for the man who had ill-used her. He was angry and irritated and on edge. He had to stand up for Marian. He had to hit back where she was abused. And chance had fatally led his spear to the point where Eagar was most vulnerable.
The northern competitive temper was aroused. Nothing to be done, indeed. The insolence of the challenge maddened him… the insolence… the injustice of it. For it was unjust, damnably unjust. He couldn’t see that he had treated Marian badly. He hadn’t badgered her into marrying him. It had been her doing as much as his. She hadn’t needed much persuading. “Were you surprised when I proposed?” he had once asked her. And she had laughed, and told him that if he hadn’t proposed to her soon, she would have done something desperate to make him. She had fallen in love with him every bit as quickly as he had with her. And because she had been in love with him she had wanted to be married. And now because she was not in love with him she wanted to be unmarried. And it wasn’t fair. A woman hadn’t the right to mess up a man’s life like that: coming into it and going out of it just as she chose at her own convenience. It wasn’t just. You took a wife. You gave her your name, your house, your income. You respected her and cherished her. You quarrelled sometimes. How could you help quarrelling? It was inevitable that two people living in such proximity should find themselves now and again at odds. And now and again perhaps one might find another woman attractive. Was one to be blamed for that? A wife couldn’t expect you to feel about her for ever as you did on your wedding night. And provided one didn’t mix that sort of thing up with one’s home life, provided one didn’t make love to one’s wife’s friends; no really, he couldn’t see that a wife had any reason to complain. As long as a man treated her decently, and was ready to go on treating her decently, her place was beside her husband. That was the human and natural way of looking at it. And yet the law came in and told him that he had no right to his wife, and proposed to take his wife away from him on grounds that no sensible person would consider worth the while of bothering over.
Well, he was not going to sit down under that. He was not going to let anyone take his wife away without putting up a fight for her.
The law might come and say, “She’s your wife no longer,” and it might be that was the law, but he was going to make damned certain it was first. If the law could do that, there was no damned thing the law couldn’t do.
“And before I quit,” decided Eagar, “I’m damned well going to see if the law can’t do anything to keep her for me.”
§
The solicitor to whom Eagar had resort—Mr. Joshua Ephraim of Gray’s Inn Square—had an ambiguous reputation amongst his colleagues. He was, they admitted, a very brilliant lawyer. So far as they knew, he had never been connected with a transaction of even dubious nature; at the same time they were unable to face with equanimity the prospect of a case in which Mr. Ephraim was conducting the opposition. They could never be certain what he would do next. It was not that he did not play according to the laws. It was just that .… But what was it, solicitor after solicitor had grumbled at the end of a defeated case. There was never anything specific. “Fellow’s a Jew. Suppose that must be what it is.” In the end it amounted to their being able to find no more substantial basis for complaint. “The most annoying kind of Jew too,” it would be added sometimes. “You can’t be dead certain that he is one.” For apart from the name Ephraim, there was no real reason for classifying as Hebraic the thin, bloodless nose that was actually no more bent than aquiline. “Something odd about him,” that was usually the final verdict. And indeed the little thin, hunched figure with watery and protruding eyes, and dry, cold hands that he kept passing over and beneath each other, did make on you at a first meeting a disagreeably sinister impression. Certainly it did on Eagar.
“Looks as though I’ve let myself in for a tolerably grubby business,” was his first thought, as he walked across the ominously deep carpet to the small huddled figure b
eside the roll-topped desk.
“So you have come to see about defending the petition for divorce that your wife is bringing against you,” said Mr. Ephraim quietly. “If you will tell me the facts, I will tell you how—or rather, whether —I shall be able to assist you.”
They say that the law is a machine for complicating the most straightforward of situations, and it may be that in its later stages it is. But few laymen can leave a solicitor’s office for the first time without feeling that a trouble which had appeared to them a maze of involved motives and reactions has been miraculously simplified into a fact or two. The story that Eagar had prepared would have filled sixteen pages of a magazine, consisting mainly of “she thought”s and “I imagined”s. The story that Ephraim extracted with a series of questions could have been told on half a sheet of note-paper.
“Now I think that’s quite clear,” said Ephraim. “They’ve got, I imagine, all the evidence about your adultery they need. You didn’t go to Liverpool, I take it?”
“No, we stayed in London.”
“Then they’ll probably have found that out. Of course, their evidence isn’t absolutely convincing. The letter’s not signed, and there’s no address to it. At the same time I think it would be a mistake to contest that. It’s as well to admit everything that isn’t absolutely damning. One ought to give the impression of laying one’s cards upon the table. It predisposes the Judge towards you. We’ll admit the adultery and concentrate on the cruelty. Now, what made you strike your wife? What did she say to you?”
“I forget. Something about enjoying herself and finding pleasant partners.”
“That doesn’t sound much, Mr. Eagar.”
“Perhaps not. But I was worked up.”
“The last straw, in fact. And what had gone before to make it the last straw?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things. We weren’t getting on well.”
“An unsatisfactory wife in other ways. Now, in what way was she unsatisfactory?”
“I didn’t like her friends.”
