The Passionate Friends
Riddling, it's quite another sort of lady has set us by the ears."
Riddling stuck his chin out, tucked in the corners of his mouth, made
round eyes at the breakfast things and, hands in pockets, rocked from
heels to toes and from toes to heels. "I see Stratton, yes, I see. Yes,
all this makes it very plain, of course. Very plain.... Stupid thing,
scandal is.... Thanks! no, I won't have a cigarette."
And he left me presently with an uncomfortable sense that he did see,
and didn't for one moment intend to restrain his considerable histrionic
skill in handing on his vision to others. For some moments I stood
savoring this all too manifest possibility, and then my thoughts went
swirling into another channel. At last the curtain was pierced. I was no
longer helplessly in the dark. I got out my Bradshaw, and sat with the
map spread out over the breakfast things studying the routes to Mayo.
Then I rang for Williams, the man I shared with the two adjacent
flat-holders, and told him to pack my kit-bag because I was suddenly
called away.
§ 13
Many of the particulars of my journey to Ireland have faded out of my
mind altogether. I remember most distinctly my mood of grim elation that
at last I had to deal with accessible persons again....
The weather was windy and violent, and I was sea-sick for most of the
crossing, and very tired and exhausted when I landed. Williams had
thought of my thick over-coat and loaded me with wraps and rugs, and I
sat in the corner of a compartment in that state of mental and bodily
fatigue that presses on the brows like a painless headache. I got to
some little junction at last where I had to wait an hour for a
branch-line train. I tasted all the bitterness of Irish hospitality, and
such coffee as Ireland alone can produce. Then I went on to a station
called Clumber or Clumboye, or some such name, and thence after some
difficulty I got a car for my destination. It was a wretched car in
which hens had been roosting, and it was drawn by a steaming horse that
had sores under its mended harness.
An immense wet wind was blowing as we came over the big hill that lies
to the south of Mirk. Everything was wet, the hillside above me was
either intensely green sodden turf or great streaming slabs of
limestone, seaward was a rocky headland, a ruin of a beehive shape, and
beyond a vast waste of tumbling waters unlit by any sun. Not a tree
broke that melancholy wilderness, nor any living thing but ourselves.
The horse went stumblingly under the incessant stimulation of the
driver's lash and tongue....
"Yonder it is," said my man, pointing with his whip, and I twisted
round to see over his shoulder, not the Rhine-like castle I had
expected, but a long low house of stone upon a headland, backed by a
distant mountain that vanished in a wild driven storm of rain as I
looked. But at the sight of Mirk my lassitude passed, my nerves
tightened, and my will began to march again. Now, thought I, we bring
things to an issue. Now we come to something personal and definite. The
vagueness is at an end. I kept my eyes upon the place, and thought it
more and more like a prison as we drew nearer. Perhaps from that window
Mary was looking for me now. Had she wondered why I did not come to her
before? Now at any rate I had found her. I sprang off the car, found a
bell-handle, and set the house jangling.
The door opened, and a little old man appeared with his fingers thrust
inside his collar as though he were struggling against strangulation. He
regarded me for a second, and spoke before I could speak.
"What might you be wanting?" said he, as if he had an answer ready.
"I want to see Lady Mary Justin," I said.
"You can't," he said. "She's gone."
"Gone!"
"The day before yesterday she went to London. You'll have to be getting
back there."
"She's gone to London."
"No less."
"Willingly?"
The little old man struggled with his collar. "Anyone would go
willingly," he said, and seemed to await my further commands. He eyed me
obliquely with a shadow of malice in his eyes.
It was then my heart failed, and I knew that we lovers were beaten. I
turned from the door without another word to the janitor. "Back," said I
to my driver, and got up behind him.
But it is one thing to decide to go back, and another to do it. At the
little station I studied time-tables, and I could not get to England
again without a delay of half a day. Somewhere I must wait. I did not
want to wait where there was any concourse of people. I decided to stay
in the inn by the station for the intervening six hours, and get some
sleep before I started upon my return, but when I saw the bedroom I
changed my plan and went down out of the village by a steep road towards
the shore. I wandered down through the rain and spindrift to the very
edge of the sea, and there found a corner among the rocks a little
sheltered from the wind, and sat, inert and wretched; my lips salt, my
hair stiff with salt, and my body wet and cold; a miserable defeated
man. For I had now an irrational and entirely overwhelming conviction of
defeat. I saw as if I ought always to have seen that I had been pursuing
a phantom of hopeless happiness, that my dream of ever possessing Mary
again was fantastic and foolish, and that I had expended all my strength
in vain. Over me triumphed a law and tradition more towering than those
cliffs and stronger than those waves. I was overwhelmed by a sense of
human weakness, of the infinite feebleness of the individual man against
wind and wave and the stress of tradition and the ancient usages of
mankind. "We must submit," I whispered, crouching close, "we must
submit." ...
Far as the eye could reach the waves followed one another in long
unhurrying lines, an inexhaustible succession, rolling, hissing,
breaking, and tossing white manes of foam, to gather at last for a
crowning effort and break thunderously, squirting foam two hundred feet
up the streaming faces of the cliffs. The wind tore and tugged at me,
and wind and water made together a clamor as though all the evil voices
in the world, all the violent passions and all the hasty judgments were
seeking a hearing above the more elemental uproar....
§ 14
And while I was in this phase of fatigue and despair in Mayo, the scene
was laid and all the other actors were waiting for the last act of my
defeat in London. I came back to find two letters from Mary and a little
accumulation of telegrams and notes, one written in my flat, from
Tarvrille.
Mary's letters were neither of them very long, and full of a new-born
despair. She had not realized how great were the forces against her and
against us both. She let fall a phrase that suggested she was ill. She
had given in, she said, to save herself and myself and others from the
shame and ruin of a divorce, and I must give in too. We had to agree not
to meet or communicate for three years, and I was to go out of England.
She prayed me to accept this. She knew, she said, she seemed to desert
me, but I did not know everything,--I did not know everything,--I must
agree; she could not come with me; it was impossible. _Now_ certainly it
was impossible. She had been weak, but I did not know all. If I knew all
I should be the readier to understand and forgive her, but it was part
of the conditions that I could not know all. Justin had been generous,
in his way.... Justin had everything in his hands, the whole world was
behind him against us, and I must give in. Those letters had a quality I
had never before met in her, they were broken-spirited. I could not
understand them fully, and they left me perplexed, with a strong desire
to see her, to question her, to learn more fully what this change in her
might mean.
Tarvrille's notes recorded his repeated attempts to see me, I felt that
he alone was capable of clearing up things for me, and I went out again
at once and telegraphed to him for an appointment.
He wired to me from that same house in Mayfair in which I had first met
Mary after my return. He asked me to come to him in the afternoon, and
thither I went through a November fog, and found him in the drawing-room
that had the plate glass above the fireplace. But now he was vacating
the house, and everything was already covered up, the pictures and their
frames were under holland, the fine furniture all in covers of faded
stuff, the chandeliers and statues wrapped up, the carpets rolled out of
the way. Even the window-curtains were tucked into wrappers, and the
blinds, except one he had raised, drawn down. He greeted me and
apologized for the cold inhospitality of the house. "It was convenient
here," he said. "I came here to clear out my papers and boxes. And
there's no chance of interruptions."
He went and stood before the empty fireplace, and plunged into the
middle of the matter.
"You know, my dear Stratton, in this confounded business my heart's with
you. It has been all along. If I could have seen a clear chance before
you--for you and Mary to get away--and make any kind of life of
it--though she's my cousin--I'd have helped you. Indeed I would. But
there's no sort of chance--not the ghost of a chance...."
He began to explain very fully, quite incontrovertibly, that entire
absence of any chance for Mary and myself together. He argued to the
converted. "You know as well as I do what that romantic flight abroad,
that Ouidaesque casa in some secluded valley, comes to in reality. All
round Florence there's no end of such scandalous people, I've been among
them, the nine circles of the repenting scandalous, all cutting one
another."
"I agree," I said. "And yet----"
"What?"
"We could have come back."
Tarvrille paused, and then leant forward. "No."
"But people have done so. It would have been a clean sort of divorce."
"You don't understand Justin. Justin would ruin you. If you were to take
Mary away.... He's a queer little man. Everything is in his hands.
Everything always is in the husband's hands in these affairs. If he
chooses. And keeps himself in the right. For an injured husband the law
sanctifies revenge....
"And you see, you've got to take Justin's terms. He's changed. He didn't
at first fully realize. He feels--cheated. We've had to persuade him.
There's a case for Justin, you know. He's had to stand--a lot. I don't
wonder at his going stiff at last. No doubt it's hard for you to see
that. But you have to see it. You've got to go away as he
requires--three years out of England, you've got to promise not to
correspond, not to meet afterwards----"
"It's so extravagant a separation."
"The alternative is--not for you to have Mary, but for you two to be
flung into the ditch together--that's what it comes to, Stratton.
Justin's got his case. He's set like--steel. You're up against the law,
up against social tradition, up against money--any one of those a man
may fight, but not all three. And she's ill, Stratton. You owe her
consideration. You of all people. That's no got-up story; she's truly
ill and broken. She can no longer fly with you and fight with you,
travel in uncomfortable trains, stay in horrible little inns. You don't
understand. The edge is off her pluck, Stratton."
"What do you mean?" I asked, and questioned his face.
"Just exactly what I say."
A gleam of understanding came to me....
"Why can't I see her?" I broke in, with my voice full of misery and
anger. "Why can't I see her? As if seeing her once more could matter so
very greatly now!"
He appeared to weigh something in his mind. "You can't," he said.
"How do I know that she's not being told some story of my abandonment of
her? How do I know she isn't being led to believe I no longer want her
to come to me?"
"She isn't," said Tarvrille, still with that arrested judicial note in