And Even Now
supposed him quite poor; and I was surprised when he told me that he
had from his guardian (his parents being dead) an allowance of £350, and
that when he came of age he would have an income of £400. ‘All out of
dividends,’ he would groan. I would hint that Mr. Hines and similar
zealots might disembarrass him of this load, if he asked them nicely.
‘No,’ he would say quite seriously, ‘I can’t do that,’ and would read
out passages from ‘Fabian Essays’ to show that in the present anarchical
conditions only mischief could result from sporadic dispersal of rent.
‘Ten, twelve years hence--’ he would muse more hopefully. ‘But by that
time,’ I would say, ‘you’ll probably be married, and your wife mightn’t
quite--‘, whereat he would hotly repeat what he had said many times:
that he would never marry. Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I
think its survival wasin some part due to the machinations of Capital.
Anyway, it was doomed. Temporary civil contracts between men and women
would be the rule ‘ten, twelve years hence’; pending which time the lot
of any man who had civic sense must be celibacy, tempered perhaps with
free love.
Long before that time was up, nevertheless, William married. One
afternoon in the spring of ‘95 I happened to meet him at a corner of
Cockspur Street. I wondered at the immense cordiality of his greeting;
for our friendship, such as it was, had waned in our two final years at
Oxford. ‘You look very flourishing, and,’ I said, ‘you’re wearing a
new suit!’ ‘I’m married,’ he replied, obviously without a twinge of
conscience. He told me he had been married just a month. He declared
that to be married was the most splendid thing in all the world; but he
weakened the force of this generalisation by adding that there never was
any one like his wife. ‘You must see her,’ he said; and his impatience
to show her proudly off to some one was so evident, and so touching,
that I could but accept his invitation to go and stay with them for two
or three days--‘why not next week?’ They had taken and furnished ‘a sort
of cottage’ in ----shire, and this was their home. He had ‘run up for
the day, on business--journalism’ and was now on his way to Charing
Cross. ‘I know you’ll like my wife,’ he said at parting. She’s--well,
she’s glorious.’
As this was the epithet he had erst applied to ‘Beowulf’ and to ‘Sigurd
the Volsung’ it raised no high hopes. And indeed, as I was soon to find,
he had again misused it. There was nothing glorious about his bride.
Some people might even have not thought her pretty. I myself did not,
in the flash of first sight. Neat, insignificant, pleasing, was what she
appeared to me, rather than pretty, and far rather than glorious. In an
age of fringes, her brow was severely bare. She looked ‘practical.’ But
an instant later, when she smiled, I saw that she was pretty, too. And
presently I thought her delightful. William had met me in a ‘governess
cart,’ and we went to see him unharness the pony. He did this in a
fumbling, experimental way, confusing the reins with the traces, and
profiting so little by his wife’s directions that she began to laugh.
And her laugh was a lovely thing; quite a small sound, but exquisitely
clear and gay, coming in a sequence of notes that neither rose nor fell,
that were quite even; a trill of notes, and then another, and another,
as though she were pulling repeatedly a little silver bell... As I
describe it, perhaps the sound may be imagined irritating. I can only
say it was enchanting.
I wished she would go on laughing; but she ceased, she darted forward
and (William standing obediently aside, and I helping unhelpfully)
unharnessed the pony herself, and led it into its small stable.
Decidedly, she was ‘practical,’ but--I was prepared now to be lenient to
any quality she might have.
Had she been feckless, no doubt I should have forgiven her that, too;
but I might have enjoyed my visit less than I did, and might have been
less pleased to go often again. I had expected to ‘rough it’ under
William’s roof. But everything thereunder, within the limits of a strict
Arcadian simplicity, was well-ordered. I was touched, when I went to my
bedroom, by the precision with which the very small maid had unpacked
and disposed my things. And I wondered where my hostess had got the lore
she had so evidently imparted. Certainly not from William. Perhaps (it
only now strikes me) from a handbook. For Mary was great at handbooks.
She had handbooks about gardening, and others about poultry, and one
about ‘the stable,’ and others on cognate themes. From these she had
filled up the gaps left in her education by her father, who was a
widower and either a doctor or a solicitor--I forget which--in one of
the smallest towns of an adjoining county. And I daresay she may have
had, somewhere hidden away, a manual for young hostesses. If so, it must
have been a good one. But to say this is to belittle Mary’s powers of
intuition. It was they, sharpened by her adoration of William, and by
her intensity for everything around him, that made her so efficient a
housewife.
If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not
by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed
in. The ‘sort of cottage’ had been vacant for many years--an unpromising
and ineligible object, a mile away from a village, and three miles away
from a railway station. The main part of it was an actual cottage, of
seventeenth-century workmanship; but a little stuccoed wing had been
added to each side of it, in 1850 or thereabouts, by an eccentric old
gentleman who at that time chose to make it his home. He had added
also the small stable, a dairy, and other appanages. For these, and for
garden, there was plenty of room, as he had purchased and enclosed half
an acre of the surrounding land Those two stuccoed, very Victorian
wings of his, each with a sash-window above and a French window below,
consorted queerly with the old red brick and the latticed panes. And the
long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But
one didn’t want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The
wrongness was right--at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William.
As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern
villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange
genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this
added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a
thing she must coddle to the utmost in a proper setting. She was a year
older than he (though, being so small and slight, she looked several
years younger), and in her devotion the maternal instinct played a
great part. William, as I have already conveyed to you, was not
greatly gifted. Mary’s instinct, in this one matter, was at fault. But
endearingly, rightly at fault. And, as William was outwardly odd, wasn’t
it well that his home should be so, too? On the inside, comfort was what
Mary always aimed at for him, and achieved.
The ground floor had all been made one room, into which you stepped
straight from the open air. Quite a long big room (or so it seemed, from
the lowness of the ceiling), and well-freshened in its antiquity, with
rush-mats here and there on the irregular red tiles, and very white
whitewash on the plaster between the rafters. This was the dining-room,
drawing-room, and general focus throughout the day, and was called
simply the Room. William had a ‘den’ on the ground floor of the left
wing; and there, in the mornings, he used to write a great deal. Mary
had no special place of her own: her place was wherever her duties
needed her. William wrote reviews of books for the Daily --. He did
also creative work. The vein of poetry in him had worked itself out--or
rather, it expressed itself for him in Mary. For technical purposes,
the influence of Ibsen had superseded that of Morris. At the time of
my first visit, he was writing an extraordinarily gloomy play about an
extraordinarily unhappy marriage. In subsequent seasons (Ibsen’s disc
having been somehow eclipsed for him by George Gissing’s) he was usually
writing novels in which every one--or do I exaggerate?--had made a
disastrous match. I think Mary’s belief in his genius had made him less
diffident than he was at Oxford. He was always emerging from his den,
with fresh pages of MS., into the Room. ‘You don’t mind?’ he would say,
waving his pages, and then would shout ‘Mary!’ She was always promptly
forthcoming--sometimes from the direction of the kitchen, in a white
apron, sometimes from the garden, in a blue one. She never looked at him
while he read. To do so would have been lacking in respect for his work.
It was on this that she must concentrate her whole mind, privileged
auditor that she was. She sat looking straight before her, with her lips
slightly compressed, and her hands folded on her lap. I used to wonder
that there had been that first moment when I did not think her pretty.
Her eyes were of a very light hazel, seeming all the lighter because her
hair was of so dark a brown; and they were beautifully set in a face
of that ‘pinched oval’ kind which is rather rare in England. Mary as
listener would have atoned to me for any defects there may have been in
dear old William’s work. Nevertheless, I sometimes wished this work had
some comic relief in it. Publishers, I believe, shared this wish; hence
the eternal absence of William’s name from among their announcements.
For Mary’s sake, and his, I should have liked him to be ‘successful.’
But at any rate he didn’t need money. He didn’t need, in addition to
what he had, what he made by his journalism. And as for success--well,
didn’t Mary think him a genius? And wasn’t he Mary’s husband? The main
reason why I wished for light passages in what he read to us was that
they would have been cues for Mary’s laugh. This was a thing always
new to me. I never tired of that little bell-like euphony; those funny
little lucid and level trills.
There was no stint of that charm when William was not reading to us.
Mary was in no awe of him, apart from his work, and in no awe at all of
me: she used to laugh at us both, for one thing and another--just the
same laugh as I had first heard when William tried to unharness the
pony. I cultivated in myself whatever amused her in me; I drew out
whatever amused her in William; I never let slip any of the things
that amused her in herself. ‘Chaff’ is a great bond; and I should have
enjoyed our bouts of it even without Mary’s own special obbligato. She
used to call me (for I was very urban in those days) the Gentleman from
London. I used to call her the Brave Little Woman. Whatever either of us
said or did could be twisted easily into relation to those two titles;
and our bouts, to which William listened with a puzzled, benevolent
smile, used to cease only because Mary regarded me as a possible
purveyor of what William, she was sure, wanted and needed, down there in
the country, alone with her: intellectual conversation, after his work.
She often, I think, invented duties in garden or kitchen so that he
should have this stimulus, or luxury, without hindrance. But when
William was alone with me it was about her that he liked to talk, and
that I myself liked to talk too. He was very sound on the subject of
Mary; and so was I. And if, when I was alone with Mary, I seemed to be
sounder than I was on the subject of William’s wonderfulness, who shall
blame me?
Had Mary been a mother, William’s wonderfulness would have been less
greatly important. But he was her child as well as her lover. And I
think, though I do not know, she believed herself content that this
should always be, if so it were destined. It was not destined so. On the