The Passionate Friends
little statuette of the God of Love. We are talking almost easily. She
looks sideways at my face, already with the quiet controlled
watchfulness of a woman interested in a man, she smiles and she talks of
flowers and sunshine, the Canadian winter--and with an abrupt
transition, of old times we've had together in the shrubbery and the
wilderness of bracken out beyond. She seems tremendously grown-up and
womanly to me. I am talking my best, and glad, and in a manner scared at
the thrill her newly discovered beauty gives me, and keeping up my
dignity and coherence with an effort. My attention is constantly being
distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never
noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her
voice before.
We agree about the flowers and the sunshine and the Canadian
winter--about everything. "I think so often of those games we used to
invent," she declares. "So do I," I say, "so do I." And then with a
sudden boldness: "Once I broke a stick of yours, a rotten stick you
thought a sound one. Do you remember?"
Then we laugh together and seem to approach across a painful,
unnecessary distance that has separated us. It vanishes for ever. "I
couldn't now," she says, "smack your face like that, Stephen."
That seems to me a brilliantly daring and delightful thing for her to
say, and jolly of her to use my Christian name too! "I believe I
scratched," she adds.
"You never scratched," I assert with warm conviction. "Never."
"I did," she insists and I deny. "You couldn't."
"We're growing up," she cries. "That's what has happened to us. We shall
never fight again with our hands and feet, never--until death do us
part."
"For better, or worse," I say, with a sense of wit and enterprise beyond
all human precedent.
"For richer, or poorer," she cries, taking up my challenge with a
lifting laugh in her voice.
And then to make it all nothing again, she exclaims at the white lilies
that rise against masses of sweet bay along the further wall....
How plainly I can recall it all! How plainly and how brightly! As we
came up the broad steps at the further end towards the tennis lawn, she
turned suddenly upon me and with a novel assurance of command told me to
stand still. "_There_," she said with a hand out and seemed to survey me
with her chin up and her white neck at the level of my eyes. "Yes. A
whole step," she estimated, "and more, taller than I. You will look down
on me, Stephen, now, for all the rest of our days."
"I shall always stand," I answered, "a step or so below you."
"No," she said, "come up to the level. A girl should be smaller than a
man. You are a man, Stephen--almost.... You must be near six feet....
Here's Guy with the box of balls."
She flitted about the tennis court before me, playing with Philip
against Guy and myself. She punished some opening condescensions with a
wicked vigor--and presently Guy and I were straining every nerve to save
the set. She had a low close serve I remember that seemed perfectly
straightforward and simple, and was very difficult to return.
§ 6
All that golden summer on the threshold of my manhood was filled by
Mary. I loved her with the love of a boy and a man. Either I was with
Mary or I was hoping and planning to be with Mary or I was full of some
vivid new impression of her or some enigmatical speech, some pregnant
nothing, some glance or gesture engaged and perplexed my mind. In those
days I slept the profound sweet sleep of youth, but whenever that deep
flow broke towards the shallows, as I sank into it at night and came out
of it at morning, I passed through dreams of Mary to and from a world of
waking thought of her.
There must have been days of friendly intercourse when it seemed we
talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we
had our eyes on one another. And afterwards I would spend long hours in
recalling and analyzing those nothings, questioning their nothingness,
making out of things too submerged and impalpable for the rough drags of
recollection, promises and indications. I would invent ingenious things
to say, things pushing out suddenly from nothingness to extreme
significance. I rehearsed a hundred declarations.
It was easy for us to be very much together. We were very free that
summer and life was all leisure. Lady Ladislaw was busied with her own
concerns; she sometimes went away for two or three days leaving no one
but an attenuated governess with even the shadow of a claim to interfere
with Mary. Moreover she was used to seeing me with her children at
Burnmore; we were still in her eyes no more than children.... And also
perhaps she did not greatly mind if indeed we did a little fall in love
together. To her that may have seemed a very natural and slight and
transitory possibility....
One afternoon of warm shadows in the wood near the red-lacquered Chinese
bridge, we two were alone together and we fell silent. I was trembling
and full of a wild courage. I can feel now the exquisite surmise, the
doubt of that moment. Our eyes met. She looked up at me with an
unwonted touch of fear in her expression and I laid my hands on her. She
did not recoil, she stood mute with her lips pressed together, looking
at me steadfastly. I can feel that moment now as a tremendous
hesitation, blank and yet full of light and life, like a clear sky in
the moment before dawn....
She made a little move towards me. Impulsively, with no word said, we
kissed.
§ 7
I would like very much to give you a portrait of Mary as she was in
those days. Every portrait I ever had of her I burnt in the sincerity of
what was to have been our final separation, and now I have nothing of
her in my possession. I suppose that in the files of old illustrated
weeklies somewhere, a score of portraits must be findable. Yet
photographs have a queer quality of falsehood. They have no movement and
always there was a little movement about Mary just as there is always a
little scent about flowers. She was slender and graceful, so that she
seemed taller than she was, she had beautifully shaped arms and a
brightness in her face; it seemed to me always that there was light in
her face, more than the light that shone upon it. Her fair, very
slightly reddish hair--it was warm like Australian gold--flowed with a
sort of joyous bravery back from her low broad forehead; the color under
her delicate skin was bright and quick, and her mouth always smiled
faintly. There was a peculiar charm for me about her mouth, a
whimsicality, a sort of humorous resolve in the way in which the upper
lip fell upon the lower and in a faint obliquity that increased with
her quickening smile. She spoke with a very clear delicate intonation
that made one want to hear her speak again; she often said faintly
daring things, and when she did, she had that little catch in the
breath--of one who dares. She did not talk hastily; often before she
spoke came a brief grave pause. Her eyes were brightly blue except when
the spirit of mischief took her and then they became black, and there
was something about the upper and lower lids that made them not only the
prettiest but the sweetest and kindliest eyes in the world. And she
moved with a quiet rapidity, without any needless movements, to do
whatever she had a mind to do....
But how impossible it is to convey the personal charm of a human being.
I catalogue these things and it is as if she moved about silently behind
my stumbling enumeration and smiled at me still, with her eyes a little
darkened, mocking me. That phantom will never be gone from my mind. It
was all of these things and none of these things that made me hers, as I
have never been any other person's....
We grew up together. The girl of nineteen mingles in my memory with the
woman of twenty-five.
Always we were equals, or if anything she was the better of us two. I
never made love to her in the commoner sense of the word, a sense in
which the woman is conceived of as shy, unawakened, younger, more
plastic, and the man as tempting, creating responses, persuading and
compelling. We made love to each other as youth should, we were friends
lit by a passion.... I think that is the best love. If I could wish your
future I would have you love someone neither older and stronger nor
younger and weaker than yourself. I would have you have neither a toy
nor a devotion, for the one makes the woman contemptible and the other
the man. There should be something almost sisterly between you. Love
neither a goddess nor a captive woman. But I would wish you a better
fate in your love than chanced to me.
Mary was not only naturally far more quick-minded, more swiftly
understanding than I, but more widely educated. Mine was the stiff
limited education of the English public school and university; I could
not speak and read and think French and German as she could for all that
I had a pedantic knowledge of the older forms of those tongues; and the
classics and mathematics upon which I had spent the substance of my
years were indeed of little use to me, have never been of any real use
to me, they were ladders too clumsy to carry about and too short to
reach anything. My general ideas came from the newspapers and the
reviews. She on the other hand had read much, had heard no end of good
conversation, the conversation of people who mattered, had thought for
herself and had picked the brains of her brothers. Her mother had let
her read whatever books she liked, partly because she believed that was
the proper thing to do, and partly because it was so much less trouble
to be liberal in such things.
We had the gravest conversations.
I do not remember that we talked much of love, though we were very much
in love. We kissed; sometimes greatly daring we walked hand in hand;
once I took her in my arms and carried her over a swampy place beyond
the Killing Wood, and held her closely to me; that was a great event
between us; but we were shy of one another, shy even of very intimate
words; and a thousand daring and beautiful things I dreamt of saying to
her went unsaid. I do not remember any endearing names from that time.
But we jested and shared our humors, shaped our developing ideas in
quaint forms to amuse one another and talked--as young men talk
together.
We talked of religion; I think she was the first person to thaw the
private silences that had kept me bound in these matters even from
myself for years. I can still recall her face, a little flushed and
coming nearer to mine after avowals and comparisons. "But Stephen," she
says; "if none of these things are really true, why do they keep on
telling them to us? What is true? What are we for? What is Everything
for?"
I remember the awkwardness I felt at these indelicate thrusts into
topics I had come to regard as forbidden.
"I suppose there's a sort of truth in them," I said, and then more
Siddonsesquely: "endless people wiser than we are----"
"Yes," she said. "But that doesn't matter to us. Endless people wiser
than we are have said one thing, and endless people wiser than we are
have said exactly the opposite. It's _we_ who have to understand--for
ourselves.... We don't understand, Stephen."
I was forced to a choice between faith and denial. But I parried with
questions. "Don't you," I asked, "feel there is a God?"
She hesitated. "There is something--something very beautiful," she said
and stopped as if her breath had gone. "That is all I know, Stephen...."
And I remember too that we talked endlessly about the things I was to do
in the world. I do not remember that we talked about the things she was
to do, by some sort of instinct and some sort of dexterity she evaded
that, from the very first she had reserves from me, but my career and