Night and Day
herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for luncheon; but she
could see him paying the bill more vividly than she could remember the
phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see the truth is our
great chance in this world.
“If you don’t want to marry me,” Ralph now began again, without
abruptness, with diffidence rather, “there is no need why we should
cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should
keep apart for the present?”
“Keep apart? I don’t know—I must think about it.”
“Tell me one thing, Mary,” he resumed; “have I done anything to make
you change your mind about me?”
She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him,
revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tell
him of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemed
likely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty
that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal,
forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herself
unable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that she
longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman would
have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks attached to
it; but to one of Mary’s firm and resolute temperament there was
degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves of emotion
rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she conceived to
be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his memory for
words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him. In his
present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them this
culminating proof of his baseness—that he had asked her to marry him
when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and half-hearted.
“You needn’t answer,” he said grimly. “There are reasons enough, I
know. But must they kill our friendship, Mary? Let me keep that, at
least.”
“Oh,” she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of anguish which
threatened disaster to her self-respect, “it has come to this—to
this—when I could have given him everything!”
“Yes, we can still be friends,” she said, with what firmness she could
muster.
“I shall want your friendship,” he said. He added, “If you find it
possible, let me see you as often as you can. The oftener the better. I
shall want your help.”
She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of things that had
no reference to their feelings—a talk which, in its constraint, was
infinitely sad to both of them.
One more reference was made to the state of things between them late
that night, when Elizabeth had gone to her room, and the two young men
had stumbled off to bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly felt
the floor beneath their feet after a day’s shooting.
Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs were
burning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while to
replenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some time
that his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather above
the page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind.
She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection had
only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it would be
to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined that there was
no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were the cause of his
suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, she spoke:
“You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph,” she said. “I
think there’s only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don’t
think you meant it. That made me angry—for the moment. Before, you’d
always spoken the truth.”
Ralph’s book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He rested
his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was trying to
recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to Mary.
“I never said I loved you,” he said at last.
She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this,
after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.
“And to me marriage without love doesn’t seem worth while,” she said.
“Well, Mary, I’m not going to press you,” he said. “I see you don’t
want to marry me. But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense
about it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely
than nine men out of ten care for the women they’re in love with. It’s
only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one
knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s
always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to
see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together.
It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of
marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in
love with is something colossal.”
“I don’t believe a word of that, and what’s more you don’t, either,”
she replied with anger. “However, we don’t agree; I only wanted you to
understand.” She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An
instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph rise
at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty kitchen,
checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open it and step
out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at this point his
mind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he had
caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confused
impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but efficiently
frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human life. The
obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely artificial, and
yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary’s words, the tone of her
voice even, angered him, for she would not help him. She was part of
the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which impedes the sensible life.
He would have liked to slam the door or break the hind legs of a chair,
for the obstacles had taken some such curiously substantial shape in
his mind.
“I doubt that one human being ever understands another,” he said,
stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few feet.
“Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you
don’t want to marry me, don’t; but the position you take up about love,
and not seeing each other—isn’t that mere sentimentality? You think
I’ve behaved very badly,” he continued, as she did not speak. “Of
course I behave badly; but you can’t judge people by what they do. You
can’t go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule.
That’s what you’re always doing, Mary; that’s what you’re doing now.”
She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting out
right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the
charge, although it did not affect her main position.
“I’m not angry with you,” she said slowly. “I will go on seeing you, as
I said I would.”
It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was
difficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted—some intimacy,
some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something that he
knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his chair and
looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he had been
defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt himself thrown
back to the beginning of life again, where everything has yet to be
won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He was no longer
certain that he would triumph.
CHAPTER XX
Happily for Mary Datchet she returned to the office to find that by
some obscure Parliamentary maneuver the vote had once more slipped
beyond the attainment of women. Mrs. Seal was in a condition bordering
upon frenzy. The duplicity of Ministers, the treachery of mankind, the
insult to womanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of her
life’s work, the feelings of her father’s daughter—all these topics
were discussed in turn, and the office was littered with newspaper
cuttings branded with the blue, if ambiguous, marks of her displeasure.
She confessed herself at fault in her estimate of human nature.
“The simple elementary acts of justice,” she said, waving her hand
towards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibuses
then passing down the far side of Russell Square, “are as far beyond
them as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, as
pioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting the truth
before them. It isn’t _them_,” she continued, taking heart from her
sight of the traffic, “it’s their leaders. It’s those gentlemen sitting
in Parliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people’s money. If
we had to put our case to the people, we should soon have justice done
to us. I have always believed in the people, and I do so still. But—”
She shook her head and implied that she would give them one more
chance, and if they didn’t take advantage of that she couldn’t answer
for the consequences.
Mr. Clacton’s attitude was more philosophical and better supported by
statistics. He came into the room after Mrs. Seal’s outburst and
pointed out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had
happened in every political campaign of any importance. If anything,
his spirits were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had
taken the offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the
enemy. He gave Mary to understand that he had taken the measure of
their cunning, and had already bent his mind to the task which, so far
as she could make out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she
came to think, when invited into his room for a private conference,
upon a systematic revision of the card-index, upon the issue of certain
new lemon-colored leaflets, in which the facts were marshaled once more
in a very striking way, and upon a large scale map of England dotted
with little pins tufted with differently colored plumes of hair
according to their geographical position. Each district, under the new
system, had its flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of documents
tabulated and filed for reference in a drawer, so that by looking under
M or S, as the case might be, you had all the facts with respect to the
Suffrage organizations of that county at your fingers’ ends. This would
require a great deal of work, of course.
“We must try to consider ourselves rather in the light of a telephone
exchange—for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet,” he said; and taking
pleasure in his image, he continued it. “We should consider ourselves
the center of an enormous system of wires, connecting us up with every
district of the country. We must have our fingers upon the pulse of the
community; we want to know what people all over England are thinking;
we want to put them in the way of thinking rightly.” The system, of
course, was only roughly sketched so far—jotted down, in fact, during
the Christmas holidays.
“When you ought to have been taking a rest, Mr. Clacton,” said Mary
dutifully, but her tone was flat and tired.
“We learn to do without holidays, Miss Datchet,” said Mr. Clacton, with
a spark of satisfaction in his eye.
He wished particularly to have her opinion of the lemon-colored
leaflet. According to his plan, it was to be distributed in immense
quantities immediately, in order to stimulate and generate, “to
generate and stimulate,” he repeated, “right thoughts in the country
before the meeting of Parliament.”
“We have to take the enemy by surprise,” he said. “They don’t let the
grass grow under their feet. Have you seen Bingham’s address to his
constituents? That’s a hint of the sort of thing we’ve got to meet,
Miss Datchet.”