I was rumoured to be dreadfully “clever,” and there were doubts—not altogether without justification—of the sweetness of my temper. - novel fiction
Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidity, must be in her. I think she thought me the maddest of sane men; “clever,” in fact, which at Smithie’s was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating incomprehensible and incalculable motives....
We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined again. We went through a succession of such phases. We had no sort of idea what was wrong with us. Presently we were formally engaged. I had a wonderful interview with her father, in which he was stupendously grave and h—less, wanted to know about my origins and was tolerant because my mother was a servant, and afterwards her mother took to kissing me, and I bought a ring.
“If,” I said, “we could have a double-fronted, detached house—at Ealing, say—with a square patch of lawn in front and a garden behind—and—and a tiled bathroom.”“Which means five hundred a year.... Yes, well, you see, I told my uncle I wanted that, and I’ve got it.”I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.“Yes,” she said, a little flushed; “but be sensible! Do you really mean you’ve got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?”She scrutinised me a moment.
We furnished that double-fronted house from attic—it ran to an attic—to cellar, and created a garden.“You shall have Pampas Grass,” I declared. And there were moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when my whole being cried out to take her in my arms—now. But I refrained. On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons. She promised to marry me within two months’ time.
“Ewart, you old Fool,” I said, “knock off and come for a day’s gossip. I’m rotten. There’s a sympathetic sort of lunacy about you. Let’s go to Staines and paddle up to Windsor.”“I’ve got no money,” he remarked, to clear up ambiguity in my invitation. “Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long lean knuckly hands pointing and gesticulating! ‘They’re still thinking of things—thinking of things! It’s dreadful. They get it out of books. I can’t imagine where they get it! I must watch! There’re people over there whispering! Nobody ought to whisper!—There’s something suggestive in the mere act! Then, pictures! In the museum—things too dreadful for words.
“And then he’s frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude—like me—and so back to his panic again.”“No? I’m not so sure.... But, bless her heart she’s a woman.... She’s a woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile—like an accident to a butter tub—all over his face, being Liberal Minded—Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, ‘trying not to see Harm in it’—Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure.
“Move him on,” said Ewart, “by a special regulation. As one does organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it—make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... And people obey etiquette sooner than laws...” “Oh! damn it!” he remarked, “Walham Green! What a chap you are, Ponderevo!” and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He wouldn’t even reply to my tentatives for a time.“For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Cæsars. Only not heads, you know. We don’t see the people who do things to us nowadays...”“Hands—a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I’ll do it. Some day some one will discover it—go there—see what I have done, and what is meant by it.”“On the tombs.
You see I had told him nothing about Marion until about a week before the wedding; both he and my aunt had been taken altogether by surprise. They couldn’t, as people say, “make it out.” My aunt was intensely interested, much more than my uncle; it was then, I think, for the first time that I really saw that she cared for me. She got me alone, I remember, after I had made my announcement. “Now, George,” she said, “tell me everything about her.
Neighbours in London! The Ramboats did not know the names of the people on either side of them. As I waited for Marion before we started off upon our honeymoon flight, Mr. Ramboat, I remember, came and stood beside me and stared out of the window. “Well,” said I, as the train moved out of the station, “That’s all over!” And I turned to Marion—a little unfamiliar still, in her unfamiliar clothes—and smiled.“At having it all proper.”
I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That life of intimate emotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs from an ugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear.
You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change; she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her peculiar class.
“You think too much,” he would say. “If you was to let in a bit with a spade, you might soon ’ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers. That’s better than thinking, George.” My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was really anxious to know Marion. At first she would arrive like a whirlwind and pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She dressed already with that cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalised her accession to fortune, and dressed her best for these visits.
“Your aunt makes Game of people,” was Marion’s verdict, and, open-mindedly: “I suppose it’s all right... for her.” Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard, now tender. It was in those days that I first became critical of my life and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lie awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my unsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterprise and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams.
One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was alone, sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I entered, and then became very still, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table. I walked right by her to the door of the inner office, stopped, came back and stood over her.“Is that one of the new typewriters?” I asked at last for the sake of speaking.
We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when there was none to overhear; we came to an understanding. It was strangely unlike any dream of romance I had ever entertained.I came back after a week’s absence to my home again—a changed man. I had lived out my first rush of passion for Effie, had come to a contemplation of my position. I had gauged Effie’s place in the scheme of things, and parted from her for a time.
I became aware of some one moving about in the passage, and went and shut the door of the room, then I walked back to the hearthrug and turned. And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations hanging over us, we presently had tea with the unsuspecting Mrs. Ramboat and the spaniel. Mrs. Ramboat was too well trained in her position to remark upon our somber preoccupation. She kept a thin trickle of talk going, and told us, I remember, that Mr. Ramboat was “troubled” about his cannas.
Of course there was quarreling between us, bitter quarreling, and we said things to one another—long pent-up things that bruised and crushed and cut. But over it all in my memory now is an effect of deliberate confrontation, and the figure of Marion stands up, pale, melancholy, tear-stained, injured, implacable and dignified.I struggled with tangled ideas and emotions. “I don’t know what love is. It’s all sorts of things—it’s made of a dozen strands twisted in a thousand ways.
“We can’t as a matter of fact,” I said, “get divorced as things are. Apparently, so far as the law goes you’ve got to stand this sort of thing. It’s silly but that is the law. However, it’s easy to arrange a divorce. In addition to adultery there must be desertion or cruelty. To establish cruelty I should have to strike you, or something of that sort, before witnesses. That’s impossible—but it’s simple to desert you legally. I have to go away from you; that’s all.
I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last it came to Marion that she was parting from me for ever. That overbore all other things, had turned our last hour to anguish. She forgot for a time the prospect of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride. For the first time in her life she really showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps, they really came to her. She began to weep slow, reluctant tears.
We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of deepening gold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always, very close, glancing up ever and again at my face. I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time in my life, at least so it seems to me now in this retrospect, I looked at my existence as a whole.I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay—the business I had taken up to secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our intimate separation—and snatching odd week-ends and nights for Orpington, and all the while I struggled with these obstinate interrogations.
But I’m talking of things I can’t expect the reader to understand, because I don’t half understand them myself. There is something links things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in Marion’s form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna’s pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make.
I came into the inner office suddenly one day—it must have been just before the time of Marion’s suit for restitution—and sat down before my uncle.“What’s up, George?”“She’s been a stupid girl, George,” he said; “I partly understand. But you’re quit of her now, practically, and there’s just as good fish in the sea—”