The Passionate Friends
was to be a secret cavern, Endymion's cave. I was ready enough to do
what I could to please her, and for a time I served that secrecy, lied,
pretended, agreed to false addresses, assumed names, and tangled myself
in a net-work of furtive proceedings. These are things that poison and
consume honest love.
You will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the
respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate
world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,--for all passion
that wears a mask is perversion--and that thousands of people of our
sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications,
their true relationships. I do not mean the open offenders, for they are
mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the
shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and
respectable. This underworld is not for us. I wish that I who have
looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the
repetition of my misadventure. We Strattons are daylight men, and if I
work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and
independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because
I know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness,
that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code
to-day.
And I want to tell you too of something altogether unforeseen that
happened to us, and that was this, that from the day that passion
carried us and we became in the narrower sense of the word lovers, all
the wider interests we had in common, our political intentions, our
impersonal schemes, began to pass out of our intercourse. Our situation
closed upon us like a trap and hid the sky. Something more intense had
our attention by the feet, and we used our wings no more. I do not think
that we even had the real happiness and beauty and delight of one
another. Because, I tell you, there is no light upon kiss or embrace
that is not done with pride. I do not know why it should be so, but
people of our race and quality are a little ashamed of mere
gratification in love. Always we seem in my memory to have been
whispering with flushed cheeks, and discussing
interminably--_situation_. Had something betrayed us, might something
betray, was this or that sufficiently cunning? Had we perhaps left a
footmark or failed to burn a note, was the second footman who was
detailed as my valet even now pausing astonished in the brushing of my
clothes with our crumpled secret in his hand? Between myself and the
clear vision of this world about me this infernal net-work of
precautions spread like a veil.
And it was not only a matter of concealments but of positive deceptions.
The figure of Justin comes back to me. It is a curious thing that in
spite of our bitter antagonism and the savage jealousy we were to feel
for one another, there has always been, and there remains now in my
thought of him, a certain liking, a regret at our opposition, a quality
of friendliness. His broad face, which the common impression and the
caricaturist make so powerful and eagle-like, is really not a brutal or
heavy face at all. It is no doubt aquiline, after the fashion of an
eagle-owl, the mouth and chin broad and the eyes very far apart, but
there is a minute puckering of the brows which combines with that queer
streak of brown discoloration that runs across his cheek and into the
white of his eyes, to give something faintly plaintive and pitiful to
his expression, an effect enhanced by the dark softness of his eyes.
They are gentle eyes; it is absurd to suppose them the eyes of a
violently forceful man. And indeed they do not belie Justin. It is not
by vehemence or pressure that his wealth and power have been attained;
it is by the sheer detailed abundance of his mind. In that queer big
brain of his there is something of the calculating boy and not a little
of the chess champion; he has a kind of financial gift, he must be rich,
and grows richer. What else is there for him to do? How many times have
I not tried to glance carelessly at his face and scrutinize that look in
his eyes, and ask myself was that his usual look, or was it lit by an
instinctive jealousy? Did he perhaps begin to suspect? I had become a
persistent visitor in the house, he might well be jealous of such minor
favors as she showed me, for with him she talked but little and shared
no thoughts. His manner with her was tinctured by an habituated despair.
They were extraordinarily polite and friendly with one another....
I tried a hundred sophistications of my treachery to him. I assured
myself that a modern woman is mistress and owner of herself; no chattel,
and so forth. But he did not think so, and neither she nor I were
behaving as though we thought so. In innumerable little things we were
doing our best tacitly to reassure him. And so you see me shaking hands
with this man, affecting an interest in his topics and affairs, staying
in his house, eating his food and drinking his wine, that I might be the
nearer to his wife. It is not the first time that has been done in the
world, there are esoteric codes to justify all I did; I perceive there
are types of men to whom such relationships are attractive by the very
reason of their illicit excitement. But we Strattons are honest people,
there is no secretive passion in our blood; this is no game for us;
never you risk the playing of it, little son, big son as you will be
when you read this story. Perhaps, but I hope indeed not, this may reach
you too late to be a warning, come to you in mid-situation. Go through
with it then, inheritor of mine, and keep as clean as you can, follow
the warped honor that is still left to you--and if you can, come out of
the tangle....
It is not only Justin haunts the memories of that furtive time, but
Rachel More. I see her still as she was then, a straight, white-dressed
girl with big brown eyes that regarded me now with perplexity, now with
a faint dismay. I still went over to see her, and my manner had changed.
I had nothing to say to her now and everything to hide. Everything
between us hung arrested, and nothing could occur to make an end.
I told Mary I must cease my visits to the Mores. I tried to make her
feel my own sense of an accumulating cruelty to Rachel. "But it explains
away so much," she said. "If you stop going there--everyone will talk.
Everything will swing round--and point here."
"Rachel!" I protested.
"No," she said, overbearing me, "you must keep on going to Ridinghanger.
You must. You must." ...
For a long time I had said nothing to Mary of the burthen these
pretences were to me; it had seemed a monstrous ingratitude to find the
slightest flaw in the passionate love and intimacy she had given me. But
at last the divergence of our purposes became manifest to us both. A
time came when we perceived it clearly and discussed it openly. I have
still a vivid recollection of a golden October day when we had met at
the edge of the plantation that overlooks Bearshill. She had come
through the gardens into the pine-wood, and I had jumped the rusty
banked stream that runs down the Bearshill valley, and clambered the
barbed wire fence. I came up the steep bank and through a fringe of
furze to where she stood in the shade; I kissed her hand, and discovered
mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was
dripping blood. "Mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed
with my arm held aloof.
We sat down side by side upon the warm pine needles that carpeted the
sand, and she made a mothering fuss about my petty wound, and bound it
in my handkerchief. We looked together across the steep gorge at the
blue ridge of trees beyond. "Anyone," she said, "might have seen us this
minute."
"I never thought," I said, and moved a foot away from her.
"It's too late if they have," said she, pulling me back to her. "Over
beyond there, that must be Hindhead. Someone with a telescope----!"
"That's less credible," I said. And it occurred to me that the grey
stretch of downland beyond must be the ridge to the west of
Ridinghanger.
"I wish," I said, "it didn't matter. I wish I could come and go and
fear nobody--and spend long hours with you--oh! at our ease."
"Now," she said, "we spend short hours. I wonder if I would like----
It's no good, Stephen, letting ourselves think of things that can't be.
Here we are. Kiss that hand, my lover, there, just between wrist and
thumb--the little hollow. Yes, exactly there."
But thoughts had been set going in my mind. "Why," I said presently,
"should you always speak of things that can't be? Why should we take all
this as if it were all that there could be? I want long hours. I want
you to shine all the day through on my life. Now, dear, it's as if the
sun was shown ever and again, and then put back behind an eclipse. I
come to you half-blinded, I go away unsatisfied. All the world is dark
in between, and little phantom _yous_ float over it."
She rested her cheek on her hand and looked at me gravely.
"You are hard to satisfy, brother heart," she said.
"I live in snatches of brightness and all the rest of life is waiting
and thinking and waiting."
"What else is there? Haven't we the brightness?"
"I want you," I said. "I want _you_ altogether."
"After so much?"
"I want the more. Mary, I want you to come away with me. No, listen!
this life--don't think I'm not full of the beauty, the happiness, the
wonder---- But it's a suspense. It doesn't go on. It's just a dawn,
dear, a splendid dawn, a glory of color and brightness and freshness and
hope, and--no sun rises. I want the day. Everything else has stopped
with me and stopped with you. I do nothing with my politics now,--I
pretend. I have no plans in life except plans for meeting you and again
meeting you. I want to go on, I want to go on with you and take up work
and the world again--you beside me. I want you to come out of all this
life--out of all this immense wealthy emptiness of yours----"
"Stop," she said, "and listen to me, Stephen."
She paused with her lips pressed together, her brows a little knit.
"I won't," she said slowly. "I am going on like this. I and you are
going to be lovers--just as we are lovers now--secret lovers. And I am
going to help you in all your projects, hold your party together--for
you will have a party--my house shall be its centre----"
"But Justin----"
"He takes no interest in politics. He will do what pleases me."
I took some time before I answered. "You don't understand how men feel,"
I said.
She waited for what else I had to say. I lay prone, and gathered
together and shaped and reshaped a little heap of pine needles. "You
see---- I can't do it. I want you."
She gripped a handful of my hair, and tugged hard between each word.
"Haven't you got me?" she asked between her teeth. "What more _could_
you have?"
"I want you openly."
She folded her arms beneath her. "_No_," she said.
For a little while neither of us spoke.
"It's the trouble of the deceit?" she asked.
"It's--the deceit."
"We can stop all that," she said.
I looked up at her face enquiringly.
"By having no more to hide," she said, with her eyes full of tears. "If
it's nothing to you----"
"It's everything to me," I said. "It's overwhelming me. Oh Mary, heart
of my life, my dear, come out of this! Come with me, come and be my
wife, make a clean thing of it! Let me take you away, and then let me
marry you. I know it's asking you--to come to a sort of poverty----"
But Mary's blue eyes were alight with anger. "Isn't it a clean thing
_now_, Stephen?" she was crying. "Do you mean that you and I aren't
clean now? Will you never understand?"