The Passionate Friends
"If I can't come one morning I may come another," she spoke hastily, and
I perceived that Guy and Maxton had turned and were waiting for us.
"You know the old Ice House?"
"Towards the gardens?"
"Yes. On the further side. Don't come by the road, come across by the
end of the mere. Lie in the bracken until you see me coming.... I've not
played tennis a dozen times this year. Not half a dozen."
This last was for the boys.
"You've played twenty times at least since you've been here," said Guy,
with the simple bluntness of a brother. "I'm certain."
§ 2
To this day a dewy morning in late August brings back the thought of
Mary and those stolen meetings. I have the minutest recollection of the
misty bloom upon the turf, and the ragged, filmy carpet of gossamer on
either hand, of the warm wetness of every little blade and blossom and
of the little scraps and seeds of grass upon my soaking and discolored
boots. Our footsteps were dark green upon the dew-grey grass. And I feel
the same hungry freshness again at the thought of those stolen meetings.
Presently came the sunrise, blinding, warming, dew-dispelling arrows of
gold smiting through the tree stems, a flood of light foaming over the
bracken and gilding the under sides of the branches. Everything is
different and distinctive in those opening hours; everything has a
different value from what it has by day. All the little things upon the
ground, fallen branches, tussocks, wood-piles, have a peculiar intensity
and importance, seem magnified, because of the length of their shadows
in the slanting rays, and all the great trees seem lifted above the
light and merged with the sky. And at last, a cool grey outline against
the blaze and with a glancing iridescent halo about her, comes Mary,
flitting, adventurous, friendly, wonderful.
"Oh Stevenage!" she cries, "to see you again!"
We each hold out both our hands and clasp and hesitate and rather shyly
kiss.
"Come!" she says, "we can talk for an hour. It's still not six. And
there is a fallen branch where we can sit and put our feet out of the
wet. Oh! it's so good to be out of things again--clean out of
things--with you. Look! there is a stag watching us."
"You're glad to be with me?" I ask, jealous of the very sunrise.
"I am always glad," she says, "to be with you. Why don't we always get
up at dawn, Stevenage, every day of our lives?"
We go rustling through the grass to the prostrate timber she has chosen.
(I can remember even the thin bracelet on the wrist of the hand that
lifted her skirt.) I help her to clamber into a comfortable fork from
which her feet can swing....
Such fragments as this are as bright, as undimmed, as if we had met this
morning. But then comes our conversation, and that I find vague and
irregularly obliterated. But I think I must have urged her to say she
loved me, and beat about the bush of that declaration, too fearful to
put my heart's wish to the issue, that she would promise to wait three
years for me--until I could prove it was not madness for her to marry
me. "I have been thinking of it all night and every night since I have
been here," I said. "Somehow I will do something. In some way--I will
get hold of things. Believe me!--with all my strength."
I was standing between the forking boughs, and she was looking down upon
me.
"Stephen dear," she said, "dear, dear Boy; I have never wanted to kiss
you so much in all my life. Dear, come close to me."
She bent her fresh young face down to mine, her fingers were in my hair.
"My Knight," she whispered close to me. "My beautiful young Knight."
I whispered back and touched her dew fresh lips....
"And tell me what you would do to conquer the world for me?" she asked.
I cannot remember now a word of all the vague threatenings against the
sundering universe with which I replied. Her hand was on my shoulder as
she listened....
But I do know that even on this first morning she left me with a sense
of beautiful unreality, of having dipped for some precious moments into
heroic gossamer. All my world subjugation seemed already as evanescent
as the morning haze and the vanishing dews as I stood, a little hidden
in the shadows of the Killing Wood and ready to plunge back at the first
hint of an observer, and watched her slender whiteness flit
circumspectly towards the house.
§ 3
Our next three or four meetings are not so clearly defined. We did not
meet every morning for fear that her early rising should seem too
punctual to be no more than a chance impulse, nor did we go to the same
place. But there stands out very clearly a conversation in a different
mood. We had met at the sham ruins at the far end of the great
shrubbery, a huge shattered Corinthian portico of rather damaged stucco
giving wide views of the hills towards Alfridsham between its three
erect pillars, and affording a dry seat upon its fallen ones. It was an
overcast morning, I remember probably the hour was earlier; a kind of
twilight clearness made the world seem strange and the bushes and trees
between us and the house very heavy and still and dark. And we were at
cross purpose, for now it was becoming clear to me that Mary did not
mean to marry me, that she dreaded making any promise to me for the
future, that all the heroic common cause I wanted with her, was quite
alien to her dreams.
"But Mary," I said looking at her colorless delicate face, "don't you
love me? Don't you want me?"
"You know I love you, Stevenage," she said. "You know."
"But if two people love one another, they want to be always together,
they want to belong to each other."
She looked at me with her face very intent upon her meaning.
"Stevenage," she said after one of those steadfast pauses of hers, "I
want to belong to myself."
"Naturally," I said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then
paused.
"Why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?"
she asked. "Why must it be like that?"
I do not remember how I tried to meet this extraordinary idea. "One
loves," I may have said. The subtle scepticisms of her mind went
altogether beyond my habits of thinking; it had never occurred to me
that there was any other way of living except in these voluntary and
involuntary mutual servitudes in which men and women live and die. "If
you love me," I urged, "if you love me---- I want nothing better in all
my life but to love and serve and keep you and make you happy."
She surveyed me and weighed my words against her own.
"I love meeting you," she said. "I love your going because it means
that afterwards you will come again. I love this--this slipping out to
you. But up there, there is a room in the house that is _my_
place--me--my own. Nobody follows me there. I want to go on living,
Stevenage, just as I am living now. I don't want to become someone's
certain possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. No, not
even to you."
"But if you love," I cried.
"To you least of all. Don't you see?--I want to be wonderful to you,
Stevenage, more than to anyone. I want--I want always to make your heart
beat faster. I want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating
faster. Always and always I want it to be like that. Just as it has been
on these mornings. It has been beautiful--altogether beautiful."
"Yes," I said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues I had
never faced before.
"It isn't," I said, "how people live."
"It is how I want to live," said Mary.
"It isn't the way life goes."
"I want it to be. Why shouldn't it be? Why at any rate shouldn't it be
for me?"
§ 4
I made some desperate schemes to grow suddenly rich and powerful, and I
learnt for the first time my true economic value. Already my father and
I had been discussing my prospects in life and he had been finding me
vague and difficult. I was full of large political intentions, but so
far I had made no definite plans for a living that would render my
political ambitions possible. It was becoming apparent to me that for a
poor man in England, the only possible route to political distinction is
the bar, and I was doing my best to reconcile myself to the years of
waiting and practice that would have to precede my political début.
My father disliked the law. And I do not think it reconciled him to the
idea of my being a barrister that afterwards I hoped to become a
politician. "It isn't in our temperament, Stephen," he said. "It's a
pushing, bullying, cramming, base life. I don't see you succeeding
there, and I don't see myself rejoicing even if you do succeed. You have
to shout, and Strattons don't shout; you have to be smart and tricky and
there's never been a smart and tricky Stratton yet; you have to snatch
opportunities and get the better of the people and misrepresent the
realities of every case you touch. You're a paid misrepresenter. They
say you'll get a fellowship, Stephen. Why not stay up, and do some
thinking for a year or so. There'll be enough to keep you. Write a
little."
"The bar," I said, "is only a means to an end."
"If you succeed."
"If I succeed. One has to take the chances of life everywhere."
"And what is the end?"
"Constructive statesmanship."
"Not in that way," said my father, pouring himself a second glass of
port, and turned over my high-sounding phrase with a faint hint of
distaste; "Constructive Statesmanship. No. Once a barrister always a
barrister. You'll only be a party politician.... Vulgar men....
Vulgar.... If you succeed that is...."
He criticized me but he did not oppose me, and already in the beginning
of the summer we had settled that I should be called to the bar.
Now suddenly I wanted to go back upon all these determinations. I began
to demand in the intellectual slang of the time "more actuality," and to
amaze my father with talk about empire makers and the greatness of Lord
Strathcona and Cecil Rhodes. Why, I asked, shouldn't I travel for a year
in search of opportunity? At Oxford I had made acquaintance with a son
of Pramley's, the big Mexican and Borneo man, and to him I wrote,
apropos of a half-forgotten midnight talk in the rooms of some common
friend. He wrote back with the suggestion that I should go and talk to
his father, and I tore myself away from Mary and went up to see that
great exploiter of undeveloped possibilities and have one of the most
illuminating and humiliating conversations in the world. He was, I
remember, a little pale-complexioned, slow-speaking man with a humorous
blue eye, a faint, just perceptible northern accent and a trick of
keeping silent for a moment after you had finished speaking, and he
talked to me as one might talk to a child of eight who wanted to know
how one could become a commander-in-chief. His son had evidently
emphasized my Union reputation, and he would have been quite willing, I
perceived, to give me employment if I had displayed the slightest
intelligence or ability in any utilizable direction. But quite
dreadfully he sounded my equipment with me and showed me the emptiness
of my stores.
"You want some way that gives you a chance of growing rich rapidly," he
said. "Aye. It's not a bad idea. But there's others, you know, have
tried that game before ye.
"You don't want riches just for riches but for an end. Aye! Aye! It's
the spending attracts ye. You'd not have me think you'd the sin of
avarice. I'm clear on that about ye.
"Well," he explained, "it's all one of three things we do, you
know--prospecting and forestalling and--just stealing, and the only
respectable way is prospecting. You'd prefer the respectable way, I
suppose?... I knew ye would. Well, let's see what chances ye have."
And he began to probe my practical knowledge. It was like an unfit man