The Passionate Friends
stripping for a medical inspection. Did I know anything of oil, of
rubber, of sugar, of substances generally, had I studied mineralogy or
geology, had I any ideas of industrial processes, of technical
chemistry, of rare minerals, of labor problems and the handling of alien
labor, of the economics of railway management or of camping out in dry,
thinly populated countries, or again could I maybe speak Spanish or
Italian or Russian? The little dons who career about Oxford afoot and
awheel, wearing old gowns and mortarboards, giggling over Spooner's
latest, and being tremendous "characters" in the intervals of concocting
the ruling-class mind, had turned my mind away from such matters
altogether. I had left that sort of thing to Germans and east-end Jews
and young men from the upper-grade board schools of Sheffield and
Birmingham. I was made to realize appalling wildernesses of
ignorance....
"You see," said old Pramley, "you don't seem to know anything whatever.
It's a deeficulty. It'll stand in your way a little now, though no
doubt you'd be quick at the uptake--after all the education they've
given ye.... But it stands in your way, if ye think of setting out to do
something large and effective, just immediately...."
Moreover it came out, I forget now how, that I hadn't clearly grasped
the difference between cumulative and non-cumulative preference
shares....
I remember too how I dined alone that evening in a mood between frantic
exasperation and utter abasement in the window of the Mediated
Universities Club, of which I was a junior member under the
undergraduate rule. And I lay awake all night in one of the austere club
bedrooms, saying to old Pramley a number of extremely able and
penetrating things that had unhappily not occurred to me during the
progress of our interview. I didn't go back to Burnmore for several
days. I had set my heart on achieving something, on returning with some
earnest of the great attack I was to make upon the separating great
world between myself and Mary. I am far enough off now from that angry
and passionate youngster to smile at the thought that my subjugation of
things in general and high finance in particular took at last the form
of proposing to go into the office of Bean, Medhurst, Stockton, and
Schnadhorst upon half commission terms. I was awaiting my father's reply
to this startling new suggestion when I got a telegram from Mary. "We
are going to Scotland unexpectedly. Come down and see me." I went home
instantly, and told my father I had come to talk things over with him. A
note from Mary lay upon the hall-table as I came in and encountered my
father. "I thought it better to come down to you," I said with my
glance roving to find that, and then I met his eye. It wasn't altogether
an unkindly eye, but I winced dishonestly.
"Talking is better for all sorts of things," said my father, and wanted
to know if the weather had been as hot in London as it had been in
Burnmore.
Mary's note was in pencil, scribbled hastily. I was to wait after eleven
that night near the great rose bushes behind the pavilion. Long before
eleven I was there, on a seat in a thick shadow looking across great
lakes of moonlight towards the phantom statuary of the Italianate garden
and the dark laurels that partly masked the house. I waited nearly an
hour, an hour of stillness and small creepings and cheepings and goings
to and fro among the branches.
In the bushes near by me a little green glow-worm shared my vigil.
And then, wrapped about in a dark velvet cloak, still in her white
dinner dress, with shining, gleaming, glancing stones about her dear
throat, warm and wonderful and glowing and daring, Mary came flitting
out of the shadows to me.
"My dear," she whispered, panting and withdrawing a little from our
first passionate embrace, "Oh my dear!... How did I come? Twice before,
when I was a girl, I got out this way. By the corner of the conservatory
and down the laundry wall. You can't see from here, but it's easy--easy.
There's a tree that helps. And now I have come that way to you.
_You!..._
"Oh! love me, my Stephen, love me, dear. Love me as if we were never to
love again. Am I beautiful, my dear? Am I beautiful in the moonlight?
Tell me!...
"Perhaps this is the night of our lives, dear! Perhaps never again will
you and I be happy!...
"But the wonder, dear, the beauty! Isn't it still? It's as if nothing
really stood solid and dry. As if everything floated....
"Everyone in all the world has gone to sleep to-night and left the world
to us. Come! Come this way and peep at the house, there. Stoop--under
the branches. See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and
its eyes shut. One window is open, _my_ little window, Stephen! but that
is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black.
"Along here a little further is night-stock. Now--Now! Sniff, Stephen!
Sniff! The scent of it! It lies--like a bank of scented air.... And
Stephen, there! Look!... A star--a star without a sound, falling out of
the blue! It's gone!"
There was her dear face close to mine, soft under the soft moonlight,
and the breath of her sweet speech mingled with the scent of the
night-stock....
That was indeed the most beautiful night of my life, a night of
moonlight and cool fragrance and adventurous excitement. We were
transported out of this old world of dusty limitations; it was as if for
those hours the curse of man was lifted from our lives. No one
discovered us, no evil thing came near us. For a long time we lay close
in one another's arms upon a bank of thyme. Our heads were close
together; her eyelashes swept my cheek, we spoke rarely and in soft
whispers, and our hearts were beating, beating. We were as solemn as
great mountains and as innocent as sleeping children. Our kisses were
kisses of moonlight. And it seemed to me that nothing that had ever
happened or could happen afterwards, mattered against that happiness....
It was nearly three when at last I came back into my father's garden. No
one had missed me from my room and the house was all asleep, but I could
not get in because I had closed a latch behind me, and so I stayed in
the little arbor until day, watching the day break upon long beaches of
pale cloud over the hills towards Alfridsham. I slept at last with my
head upon my arms upon the stone table, until the noise of shooting
bolts and doors being unlocked roused me to watch my chance and slip
back again into the house, and up the shuttered darkened staircase to my
tranquil, undisturbed bedroom.
§ 5
It was in the vein of something evasive in Mary's character that she let
me hear first of her engagement to Justin through the _Times_. Away
there in Scotland she got I suppose new perspectives, new ideas; the
glow of our immediate passion faded. The thing must have been drawing in
upon her for some time. Perhaps she had meant to tell me of it all that
night when she had summoned me to Burnmore. Looking back now I am the
more persuaded that she did. But the thing came to me in London with the
effect of an immense treachery. Within a day or so of the newspaper's
announcement she had written me a long letter answering some argument of
mine, and saying nothing whatever of the people about her. Even then
Justin must have been asking her to marry him. Her mind must have been
full of that question. Then came a storm of disappointment, humiliation
and anger with this realization. I can still feel myself writing and
destroying letters to her, letters of satire, of protest. Oddly enough I
cannot recall the letter that at last I sent her, but it is eloquent of
the weak boyishness of my position that I sent it in our usual furtive
manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of
our relationship. "No," she scribbled back, "you do not understand. I
cannot write. I must talk to you."
We had a secret meeting.
With Beatrice Normandy's connivance she managed to get away for the
better part of the day, and we spent a long morning in argument in the
Botanical Gardens--that obvious solitude--and afterwards we lunched upon
ham and ginger beer at a little open-air restaurant near the Broad Walk
and talked on until nearly four. We were so young that I think we both
felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of
romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. There is
something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too,
naïvely noble and adventurous. I can never determine if older people are
less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. I still recall the
autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which I
had never been before, and which I have never revisited--a memory of
walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial
channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going
nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly
decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon
a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of
conservatory.
I must have been resentful and bitter in the beginning of that talk. I
do not remember that I had any command of the situation or did anything
but protest throughout that day. I was too full of the egotism of the
young lover to mark Mary's moods and feelings. It was only afterwards
that I came to understand that she was not wilfully and deliberately
following the course that was to separate us, that she was taking it
with hesitations and regrets. Yet she spoke plainly enough, she spoke
with a manifest sincerity of feeling. And while I had neither the grasp
nor the subtlety to get behind her mind I perceive now as I think things
out that Lady Ladislaw had both watched and acted, had determined her
daughter's ideas, sown her mind with suggestions, imposed upon her a
conception of her situation that now dominated all her thoughts.
"Dear Stephen," reiterated Mary, "I love you. I do, clearly, definitely,
deliberately love you. Haven't I told you that? Haven't I made that
plain to you?"
"But you are going to marry Justin!"
"Stephen dear, can I possibly marry you? Can I?"
"Why not? Why not make the adventure of life with me? Dare!"
She looked down on me. She was sitting upon a parapet of the brickwork
and I was below her. She seemed to be weighing possibilities.
"Why not?" I cried. "Even now. Why not run away with me, throw our two
lives together? Do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of
things! Let us go somewhere together----"
"But Stephen," she asked softly, "_where_?"
"Anywhere!"
She spoke as an elder might do to a child. "No! tell me where--exactly.
Where would it be? Where should we go? How should we live? Tell me. Make
me see it, Stephen."
"You are too cruel to me, Mary," I said. "How can I--on the spur of the
moment--arrange----?"
"But dear, suppose it was somewhere very grimy and narrow!
Something--like some of those back streets I came through to get here.
Suppose it was some dreadful place. And you had no money. And we were
both worried and miserable. One gets ill in such places. If I loved you,
Stephen--I mean if you and I--if you and I were to be together, I should
want it to be in sunshine, I should want it to be among beautiful
forests and mountains. Somewhere very beautiful...."
"Why not?"
"Because--to-day I know. There are no such places in the world for us.
Stephen, they are dreams."
"For three years now," I said, "I have dreamed such dreams.
"Oh!" I cried out, stung by my own words, "but this is cowardice! Why
should we submit to this old world! Why should we give up--things you
have dreamed as well as I! You said once--to hear my voice--calling in