The Passionate Friends
and the Mores made none of their entire approval of me. I walked over on
the second occasion, and Ridinghanger opened out, a great flower of
genial appreciation that I came alone, hiding nothing of its dawning
perception that it was Rachel in particular I came to see.
Your grandmother's match-making was as honest as the day. There was the
same salad of family and visitors as on the former afternoon, and this
time I met Freshman, who was destined to marry Alice; there was tea,
tennis, and, by your grandmother's suggestion, a walk to see the sunset
from the crest of the hill. Rachel and I walked across the breezy
moorland together, while I talked and tempted her to talk.
What, I wonder, did we talk about? English scenery, I think, and African
scenery and the Weald about us, and the long history of the Weald and
its present and future, and at last even a little of politics. I had
never explored the mind of a girl of seventeen before; there was a
surprise in all she knew and a delight in all she didn't know, and about
herself a candor, a fresh simplicity of outlook that was sweeter than
the clear air about us, sweeter than sunshine or the rising song of a
lark. She believed so gallantly and beautifully, she was so perfectly,
unaffectedly and certainly prepared to be a brave and noble person--if
only life would let her. And she hadn't as yet any suspicion that life
might make that difficult....
I went to Ridinghanger a number of times in the spring and early summer.
I talked a great deal with Rachel, and still I did not make love to her.
It was always in my mind that I would make love to her, the heavens and
earth and all her family were propitious, glowing golden with consent
and approval, I thought she was the most wonderful and beautiful thing
in life, and her eyes, the intonation of her voice, her hurrying color
and a hundred little involuntary signs told me how she quickened at my
coming. But there was a shyness. I loved her as one loves and admires a
white flower or a beautiful child--some stranger's child. I felt that I
might make her afraid of me. I had never before thought that to make
love is a coarse thing. But still at high summer when I met Mary again
no definite thing had been said between myself and Rachel. But we knew,
each of us knew, that somewhere in a world less palpable, in fairyland,
in dreamland, we had met and made our vows.
§ 5
You see how far my imagination had gone towards readjustment when Mary
returned into my life. You see how strange and distant it was to meet
her again, changed completely into the great lady she had intended to
be, speaking to me with the restrained and practised charm of a woman
who is young and beautiful and prominent and powerful and secure. There
was no immediate sense of shock in that resumption of our broken
intercourse, it seemed to me that night simply that something odd and
curious had occurred. I do not remember how we parted that evening or
whether we even saw each other after dinner was over, but from that hour
forth Mary by insensible degrees resumed her old predominance in my
mind. I woke up in the night and thought about her, and next day I found
myself thinking of her, remembering things out of the past and recalling
and examining every detail of the overnight encounter. How cold and
ineffective we had been, both of us! We had been like people resuming a
disused and partially forgotten language. Had she changed towards me?
Did she indeed want to see me again or was that invitation a mere
demonstration of how entirely unimportant seeing me or not seeing me had
become?
Then I would find myself thinking with the utmost particularity of her
face. Had it changed at all? Was it altogether changed? I seemed to have
forgotten everything and remembered everything; that peculiar slight
thickness of her eyelids that gave her eyes their tenderness, that light
firmness of her lips. Of course she would want to talk to me, as now I
perceived I wanted to talk to her.
Was I in love with her still? It seemed to me then that I was not. It
had not been that hesitating fierceness, that pride and demand and
doubt, which is passionate love, that had made all my sensations strange
to me as I sat beside her. It had been something larger and finer,
something great and embracing, a return to fellowship. Here beside me,
veiled from me only by our transient embarrassment and the tarnish of
separation and silences, was the one person who had ever broken down the
crust of shy insincerity which is so incurably my characteristic and
talked intimately of the inmost things of life to me. I discovered now
for the first time how intense had been my loneliness for the past five
years. I discovered now that through all those years I had been hungry
for such talk as Mary alone could give me. My mind was filled with talk,
filled with things I desired to say to her; that chaos began to take on
a multitudinous expression at the touch of her spirit. I began to
imagine conversations with her, to prepare reports for her of those new
worlds of sensation and activity I had discovered since that boyish
parting.
But when at last that talk came it was altogether different from any of
those I had invented.
She wrote to me when she came down into Surrey and I walked over to
Martens the next afternoon. I found her in her own sitting-room, a
beautiful characteristic apartment with tall French windows hung with
blue curtains, a large writing-desk and a great litter of books. The
room gave upon a broad sunlit terrace with a balustrading of yellowish
stone, on which there stood great oleanders. Beyond was a flower garden
and then the dark shadows of cypresses. She was standing as I came in to
her, as though she had seen me coming across the lawns and had been
awaiting my entrance. "I thought you might come to-day," she said, and
told the manservant to deny her to other callers. Again she produced
that queer effect of being at once altogether the same and altogether
different from the Mary I had known. "Justin," she said, "is in Paris.
He comes back on Friday." I saw then that the change lay in her bearing,
that for the easy confidence of the girl she had now the deliberate
dignity and control of a married woman--a very splendidly and spaciously
married woman. Her manner had been purged of impulse. Since we had met
she had stood, the mistress of great houses, and had dealt with
thousands of people.
"You walked over to me?"
"I walked," I said. "It is nearly a straight path. You know it?"
"You came over the heather beyond our pine wood," she confirmed. And
then I think we talked some polite unrealities about Surrey scenery and
the weather. It was so formal that by a common impulse we let the topic
suddenly die. We stood through a pause, a hesitation. Were we indeed to
go on at that altitude of cold civility? She turned to the window as if
the view was to serve again.
"Sit down," she said and dropped into a chair against the light, looking
away from me across the wide green space of afternoon sunshine. I sat
down on a little sofa, at a loss also.
"And so," she said, turning her face to me suddenly, "you come back into
my life." And I was amazed to see that the brightness of her eyes was
tears. "We've lived--five years."
"You," I said clumsily, "have done all sorts of things. I hear of
you--patronizing young artists--organizing experiments in village
education."
"Yes," she said, "I've done all sorts of things. One has to. Forced,
unreal things for the most part. You I expect have done--all sorts of
things also.... But yours have been real things...."
"All things," I remarked sententiously, "are real. And all of them a
little unreal. South Africa has been wonderful. And now it is all over
one doubts if it really happened. Like that incredulous mood after a
storm of passion."
"You've come back for good?"
"For good. I want to do things in England."
"Politics?"
"If I can get into that."
Again a pause. There came the characteristic moment of deliberation that
I remembered so well.
"I never meant you," she said, "to go away.... You could have written.
You never answered the notes I sent."
"I was frantic," I said, "with loss and jealousy. I wanted to forget."
"And you forgot?"
"I did my best."
"I did my best," said Mary. "And now---- Have you forgotten?"
"Nothing."
"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you
endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together.
But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was
nothing--not worth having. You--you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You
made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man--and how little
else...."
She paused.
"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with
you.... I don't know--if you remember everything...."
She looked me in the eyes for a moment.
"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation.
"But you know, Stephen, that night---- I meant to explain. And
afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected them to go,
even the things one has planned to say. I suppose--I treated
you--disgustingly."
I protested.
"Yes," she said. "I treated you as I did--and I thought you would stand
it. I _knew_, I knew then as well as you do now that male to my female
you wouldn't stand it, but somehow--I thought there were other things.
Things that could override that...."
"Not," I said, "for a boy of one-and-twenty."
"But in a man of twenty-six?"
I weighed the question. "Things are different," I said, and then, "Yes.
Anyhow now--if I may come back penitent,--to a friendship."
We looked at one another gravely. Faintly in our ears sounded the music
of past and distant things. We pretended to hear nothing of that, tried
honestly to hear nothing of it. I had not remembered how steadfast and
quiet her face could be. "Yes," she said, "a friendship."
"I've always had you in my mind, Stephen," she said. "When I saw I
couldn't marry you, it seemed to me I had better marry and be free of
any further hope. I thought we could get over that. 'Let's get it over,'
I thought. Now--at any rate--we have got over that." Her eyes verified
her words a little doubtfully. "And we can talk and you can tell me of
your life, and the things you want to do that make life worth living.
Oh! life has been _stupid_ without you, Stephen, large and expensive and
aimless....Tell me of your politics. They say--Justin told me--you think
of parliament?"
"I want to do that. I have been thinking---- In fact I am going to
stand." I found myself hesitating on the verge of phrases in the quality
of a review article. It was too unreal for her presence. And yet it was
this she seemed to want from me. "This," I said, "is a phase of great
opportunities. The war has stirred the Empire to a sense of itself, to a
sense of what it might be. Of course this Tariff Reform row is a squalid
nuisance; it may kill out all the fine spirit again before anything is
done. Everything will become a haggle, a chaffering of figures.... All
the more reason why we should try and save things from the commercial
traveller. If the Empire is anything at all, it is something infinitely
more than a combination in restraint of trade...."
"Yes," she said. "And you want to take that line. The high line."
"If one does not take the high line," I said, "what does one go into
politics for?"
"Stephen," she smiled, "you haven't lost a sort of simplicity---- People
go into politics because it looks important, because other people go
into politics, because they can get titles and a sense of influence
and--other things. And then there are quarrels, old grudges to serve."
"These are roughnesses of the surface."