The Passionate Friends
purpose became as it were the form in which we discussed all the
purposes of life. I became Man in her imagination, the protagonist of
the world. At first I displayed the modest worthy desire for respectable
service that Harbury had taught me, but her clear, sceptical little
voice pierced and tore all those pretences to shreds. "Do some decent
public work," I said, or some such phrase.
"But is that All you want?" I hear her asking. "Is that All you want?"
I lay prone upon the turf and dug up a root of grass with my penknife.
"Before I met you it was," I said.
"And now?"
"I want you."
"I'm nothing to want. I want you to want all the world.... _Why
shouldn't you?_"
I think I must have talked of the greatness of serving the empire. "Yes,
but splendidly," she insisted. "Not doing little things for other
people--who aren't doing anything at all. I want you to conquer people
and lead people.... When I see you, Stephen, sometimes--I almost wish I
were a man. In order to be able to do all the things that you are going
to do."
"For you," I said, "for you."
I stretched out my hand for hers, and my gesture went disregarded.
She sat rather crouched together with her eyes gazing far away across
the great spaces of the park.
"That is what women are for," she said. "To make men see how splendid
life can be. To lift them up--out of a sort of timid grubbiness----" She
turned upon me suddenly. "Stephen," she said, "promise me. Whatever you
become, you promise and swear here and now never to be grey and grubby,
never to be humpy and snuffy, never to be respectable and modest and
dull and a little fat, like--like everybody. Ever."
"I swear," I said.
"By me."
"By you. No book to kiss! Please, give me your hand."
§ 8
All through that summer we saw much of each other. I was up at the House
perhaps every other day; we young people were supposed to be all in a
company together down by the tennis lawns, but indeed we dispersed and
came and went by a kind of tacit understanding, Guy and Philip each with
one of the Fawney girls and I with Mary. I put all sorts of
constructions upon the freedom I was given with her, but I perceive now
that we still seemed scarcely more than children to Lady Ladislaw, and
that the idea of our marriage was as inconceivable to her as if we had
been brother and sister. Matrimonially I was as impossible as one of the
stable boys. All the money I could hope to earn for years to come would
not have sufficed even to buy Mary clothes. But as yet we thought little
of matters so remote, glad in our wonderful new discovery of love, and
when at last I went off to Oxford, albeit the parting moved us to much
tenderness and vows and embraces, I had no suspicion that never more in
all our lives would Mary and I meet freely and gladly without
restriction. Yet so it was. From that day came restraints and
difficulties; the shadow of furtiveness fell between us; our
correspondence had to be concealed.
I went to Oxford as one goes into exile; she to London. I would post to
her so that the letters reached Landor House before lunch time when the
sun of Lady Ladislaw came over the horizon, but indeed as yet no one was
watching her letters. Afterwards as she moved about she gave me other
instructions, and for the most part I wrote to her in envelopes
addressed for her by one of the Fawney girls, who was under her spell
and made no enquiry for what purpose these envelopes were needed.
To me of course Mary wrote without restraint. All her letters to me were
destroyed after our crisis, but some of mine to her she kept for many
years; at last they came back to me so that I have them now. And for all
their occasional cheapness and crudity, I do not find anything in them
to be ashamed of. They reflect, they are chiefly concerned with that
search for a career of fine service which was then the chief
preoccupation of my mind, the bias is all to a large imperialism, but it
is manifest that already the first ripples of a rising tide of criticism
against the imperialist movement had reached and were exercising me. In
one letter I am explaining that imperialism is not a mere
aggressiveness, but the establishment of peace and order throughout half
the world. "We may never withdraw," I wrote with all the confidence of a
Foreign Secretary, "from all these great territories of ours, but we
shall stay only to raise their peoples ultimately to an equal
citizenship with ourselves." And then in the same letter: "and if I do
not devote myself to the Empire what else is there that gives anything
like the same opportunity of a purpose in life." I find myself in
another tolerantly disposed to "accept socialism," but manifestly
hostile to "the narrow mental habits of the socialists." The large note
of youth! And in another I am clearly very proud and excited and a
little mock-modest over the success of my first two speeches in the
Union.
On the whole I like the rather boyish, tremendously serious young man of
those letters. An egotist, of course, but what youth was ever anything
else? I may write that much freely now, for by this time he is almost as
much outside my personality as you or my father. He is the young
Stratton, one of a line. I like his gravity; if youth is not grave with
all the great spectacle of life opening at its feet, then surely no age
need be grave. I love and envy his simplicity and honesty. His sham
modesty and so forth are so translucent as scarcely to matter. It is
clear I was opening my heart to myself as I opened it to Mary. I wasn't
acting to her. I meant what I said. And as I remember her answers she
took much the same high tone with me, though her style of writing was
far lighter than mine, more easy and witty and less continuous. She
flashed and flickered. As for confessed love-making there is very
little,--I find at the end of one of my notes after the signature, "I
love you, I love you." And she was even more restrained. Such little
phrases as "Dear Stevenage"--that was one of her odd names for me--"I
wish you were here," or "Dear, _dear_ Stevenage," were epistolary
events, and I would re-read the blessed wonderful outbreak a hundred
times....
Our separation lengthened. There was a queer detached unexpected
meeting in London in December, for some afternoon gathering. I was shy
and the more disconcerted because she was in winter town clothes that
made her seem strange and changed. Then came the devastating intimation
that all through the next summer the Ladislaws were to be in Scotland.
I did my boyish utmost to get to Scotland. They were at Lankart near
Invermoriston, and the nearest thing I could contrive was to join a
reading party in Skye, a reading party of older men who manifestly had
no great desire for me. For more than a year we never met at all, and
all sorts of new things happened to us both. I perceived they happened
to me, but I did not think they happened to her. Of course we changed.
Of course in a measure and relatively we forgot. Of course there were
weeks when we never thought of each other at all. Then would come phases
of hunger. I remember a little note of hers. "Oh Stevenage," it was
scrawled, "perhaps next Easter!" Next Easter was an aching desolation.
The blinds of Burnmore House remained drawn; the place was empty except
for three old servants on board-wages. The Christians went instead to
the Canary Isles, following some occult impulse of Lady Ladislaw's. Lord
Ladislaw spent the winter in Italy.
What an empty useless beauty the great Park possessed during those
seasons of intermission! There were a score of places in it we had made
our own....
Her letters to Oxford would cease for weeks, and suddenly revive and
become frequent. Now and then would come a love-letter that seemed to
shine like stars as I read it; for the most part they were low-pitched,
friendly or humorous letters in a roundish girlish writing that was
maturing into a squarely characteristic hand. My letters to her too I
suppose varied as greatly. We began to be used to living so apart. There
were weeks of silence....
Yet always when I thought of my life as a whole, Mary ruled it. With her
alone I had talked of my possible work and purpose; to her alone had I
confessed to ambitions beyond such modest worthiness as a public school
drills us to affect....
Then the whole sky of my life lit up again with a strange light of
excitement and hope. I had a note, glad and serenely friendly, to say
they were to spend all the summer at Burnmore.
I remember how I handled and scrutinized that letter, seeking for some
intimation that our former intimacy was still alive. We were to meet.
How should we meet? How would she look at me? What would she think of
me?
§ 9
Of course it was all different. Our first encounter in this new phase
had a quality of extreme disillusionment. The warm living creature, who
would whisper, who would kiss with wonderful lips, who would say strange
daring things, who had soft hair one might touch with a thrilling and
worshipful hand, who changed one at a word or a look into a God of
pride, became as if she had been no more than a dream. A self-possessed
young aristocrat in white and brown glanced at me from amidst a group of
brilliant people on the terrace, nodded as it seemed quite carelessly
in acknowledgment of my salutation, and resumed her confident
conversation with a tall stooping man, no less a person than Evesham,
the Prime Minister. He was lunching at Burnmore on his way across
country to the Rileys. I heard that dear laugh of hers, as ready and
easy as when she laughed with me. I had not heard it for nearly three
years--nor any sound that had its sweetness. "But Mr. Evesham," she was
saying, "nowadays we don't believe that sort of thing----"
"There are a lot of things still for you to believe," says Mr. Evesham
beaming. "A lot of things! One's capacity increases. It grows with
exercise. Justin will bear me out."
Beyond her stood an undersized, brown-clad middle-aged man with a big
head, a dark face and expressive brown eyes fixed now in unrestrained
admiration on Mary's laughing face. This then was Justin, the incredibly
rich and powerful, whose comprehensive operations could make and break a
thousand fortunes in a day. He answered Evesham carelessly, with his
gaze still on Mary, and in a voice too low for my straining ears. There
was some woman in the group also, but she has left nothing upon my mind
whatever except an effect of black and a very decorative green sunshade.
She greeted Justin's remark, I remember, with the little yelp of
laughter that characterized that set. I think too there was someone else
in the group; but I cannot clearly recall who....
Presently as I and Philip made unreal conversation together I saw Mary
disengage herself and come towards us. It was as if a princess came
towards a beggar. Absurd are the changes of phase between women and
men. A year or so ago and all of us had been but "the children"
together; now here were I and Philip mere youths still, nobodies, echoes
and aspirations, crude promises at the best, and here was Mary in full
flower, as glorious and central as the Hampton Court azaleas in spring.
"And this is Stephen," she said, aglow with happy confidence.
I made no memorable reply, and there was a little pause thick with mute
questionings.
"After lunch," she said with her eye on mine, "I am going to measure
against you on the steps. I'd hoped--when you weren't looking--I might
creep up----"
"I've taken no advantage," I said.
"You've kept your lead."
Justin had followed her towards us, and now held out a hand to Philip.
"Well, Philip my boy," he said, and defined our places. Philip made some
introductory gesture with a word or so towards me. Justin glanced at me