The Passionate Friends
your little sister had begun your careers as inhabitants of this earth.
Your little sister had indeed but just begun.
And then one morning at the breakfast-table I picked a square envelope
out of a heap of letters, and saw the half-forgotten and infinitely
familiar handwriting of Lady Mary Justin.... The sight of it gave me an
odd mixture of sensations. I was startled, I was disturbed, I was a
little afraid. I hadn't forgiven her yet; it needed but this touch to
tell me how little I had forgotten....
§ 2
I sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before I opened it,
hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic
situation. Then I pushed my chair a little back from the table and
ripped the envelope.
It was a far longer letter than Mary had ever written me in the old
days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. I
have it still, and here I open its worn folds and, except for a few
trifling omissions, copy it out for you.... A few trifling omissions, I
say,--just one there is that is not trifling, but that I must needs
make....
You will never see any of these letters because I shall destroy them so
soon as this copy is made. It has been difficult--or I should have
destroyed them before. But some things can be too hard for us....
This first letter is on the Martens note-paper; its very heading was
familiar to me. The handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little
stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two scribbled obliterations;
it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her
usual and characteristic ease....
And as I read, slowly my long-cherished anger evaporated, and the real
Mary, outspoken and simple, whom I had obscured by a cloud of fancied
infidelities, returned to me....
"My dear Stephen," she begins, "About six weeks ago I saw in the _Times_
that you have a little daughter. It set me thinking, picturing you with
a mite of a baby in your arms--what _little_ things they are,
Stephen!--and your old face bent over it, so that presently I went to my
room and cried. It set me thinking about you so that I have at last
written you this letter.... I love to think of you with wife and
children about you Stephen,--I heard of your son for the first time
about a year ago, but--don't mistake me,--something wrings me too....
"Well, I too have children. Have you ever thought of me as a mother? I
am. I wonder how much you know about me now. I have two children and the
youngest is just two years old. And somehow it seems to me that now that
you and I have both given such earnests of our good behavior, such
evidence that _that_ side of life anyhow is effectually settled for us,
there is no reason remaining why we shouldn't correspond. You are my
brother, Stephen, and my friend and my twin and the core of my
imagination, fifty babies cannot alter that, we can live but once and
then die, and, promise or no promise, I will not be dead any longer in
your world when I'm not dead, nor will I have you, if I can help it, a
cold unanswering corpse in mine....
"Too much of my life and being, Stephen, has been buried, and I am in
rebellion. This is a breach of the tomb if you like, an irregular
private premature resurrection from an interment in error. Out of my
alleged grave I poke my head and say Hello! to you. Stephen, old friend!
dear friend! how are you getting on? What is it like to you? How do you
feel? I want to know about you.... I'm not doing this at all furtively,
and you can write back to me, Stephen, as openly as your heart desires.
I have told Justin I should do this. I rise, you see, blowing my own
Trump. Let the other graves do as they please....
"Your letters will be respected, Stephen.... If you choose to rise also
and write me a letter.
"Stephen, I've been wanting to do this for--for all the time. If there
was thought-reading you would have had a thousand letters. But formerly
I was content to submit, and latterly I've chafed more. I think that as
what they call passion has faded, the immense friendliness has become
more evident, and made the bar less and less justifiable. You and I have
had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day--it was in a
report in the _Times_, I think--was calling _Materia Matrimoniala_. And
of course I hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts
of ways--whatever you have done about me I've had a woman's sense of
honor about you and I've managed to learn a great deal without asking
forbidden questions. I've pricked up my ears at the faintest echo of
your name.
"They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort
of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all
rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I
should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I
never see any advertisement of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what
it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd
and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest
appearance of being animated by you. And equally perplexing is your
being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace
Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so forth. It's
so--Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports
of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the _Fortnightly_. I
can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching
into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean,
Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English
politics--speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning,
taking up that work you dropped--it's six years now ago. I've been
accumulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our
side,"--this you will remember was in 1909--"still steers our devious
party courses, and the Tariff Reformers have still to capture us. Weston
Massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the
Clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good
seaman in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the poop,
white and shrieking with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists
armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons
were fixed.... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only
for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?
"We are in it so far as I can contrive. But I contrive very little. We
are pillars of the Conservative party--on that Justin's mind is firmly
settled--and every now and then I clamor urgently that we must do more
for it. But Justin's ideas go no further than writing cheques--doing
more for the party means writing a bigger cheque--and there are moments
when I feel we shall simply bring down a peerage upon our heads and bury
my ancient courtesy title under the ignominy of a new creation. He would
certainly accept it. He writes his cheque and turns back at the earliest
opportunity to his miniature gardens and the odd little freaks of
collecting that attract him. Have you ever heard of chintz oil jars?
'No,' you will say. Nor has anyone else yet except our immediate circle
of friends and a few dealers who are no doubt industriously increasing
the present scanty supply. We possess three. They are matronly shaped
jars about two feet or a yard high, of a kind of terra-cotta with wooden
tops surmounted by gilt acorns, and they have been covered with white
paint and on this flowers and birds and figures from some very rich old
chintz have been stuck very cunningly, and then everything has been
varnished--and there you are. Our first and best was bought for
seven-and-sixpence, brought home in the car, put upon a console table
on the second landing and worshipped. It's really a very pleasant mellow
thing to see. Nobody had ever seen the like. Guests, sycophantic people
of all sorts were taken to consider it. It was looked at with heads at
every angle, one man even kept his head erect and one went a little
upstairs and looked at it under his arm. Also the most powerful lenses
have been used for a minute examination, and one expert licked the
varnish and looked extremely thoughtful and wise at me as he turned the
booty over his gifted tongue. And now, God being with us, we mean to
possess every specimen in existence--before the Americans get hold of
the idea. Yesterday Justin got up and motored sixty miles to look at an
alleged fourth....
"Oh my dear! I am writing chatter. You perceive I've reached the
chattering stage. It is the fated end of the clever woman in a good
social position nowadays, her mind beats against her conditions for the
last time and breaks up into this carping talk, this spume of
observation and comment, this anecdotal natural history of the
restraining husband, as waves burst out their hearts in a foam upon a
reef. But it isn't chatter I want to write to you.
"Stephen, I'm intolerably wretched. No creature has ever been gladder to
have been born than I was for the first five and twenty years of my
life. I was full of hope and I was full, I suppose, of vanity and rash
confidence. I thought I was walking on solid earth with my head reaching
up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the
smiling. And I am nothing and worse than nothing, I am the ineffectual
mother of two children, a daughter whom I adore--but of her I may not
tell you--and a son,--a son who is too like his father for any fury of
worship, a stolid little creature.... That is all I have done in the
world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue Persian who is scarcely
two years old, has already had nine kittens. My husband and I have never
forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other;
that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our rôle;
I have done my duty to the great new line of Justin by giving it the
heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen
between us. We hardly speak except in company. I have not been so much
married, Stephen, I find, as collected, and since our tragic
misadventure--but there were beautiful moments, Stephen, unforgettable
glimpses of beauty in that--thank God, I say impenitently for that--the
door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is
not locked, is very discreetly--watched. I have no men friends, no
social force, no freedom to take my line. My husband is my official
obstacle. We barb the limitations of life for one another. A little
while ago he sought to chasten me--to rouse me rather--through jealousy,
and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of
artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous
interest. I was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired.
'This,' I said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for _me_, Justin,'--and
the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible
celerity. I hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with
by a minion, but I become more and more aware of my ignorance of a
great financier's methods as I become more and more aware of them....
"Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know
what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like
a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release
me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not;
and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any
secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me,
write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.
"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore,