A Telephone Call

Marriage by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. A Telephone Call

A Telephone Call

§ 1

Trafford went back to Solomonson for a day or so,-183- and then to London, to resume the experimental work of the research he had in hand. But he was so much in love with Marjorie that for some days it was a very dazed mind that fumbled with the apparatus—arranged it and rearranged it, and fell into daydreams that gave the utmost concern to Durgan the bottle-washer.

"He's not going straight at things," said Durgan the bottle-washer to his wife. "He usually goes so straight at things it's a pleasure to watch it. He told me he was going down into Kent to think everything out." Mr. Durgan paused impressively, and spoke with a sigh of perplexity. "He hasn't...."

But later Durgan was able to report that Trafford had pulled himself together. The work was moving.

"I was worried for a bit," said Mr. Durgan. "But I think it's all right again. I believe it's all right again."

§ 2

Trafford was one of those rare scientific men who really ought to be engaged in scientific research.

He could never leave an accepted formula alone. His mind was like some insatiable corrosive, that ate into all the hidden inequalities and plastered weaknesses of accepted theories, and bit its way through every plausibility of appearance. He was extraordinarily-184- fertile in exasperating alternative hypotheses. His invention of destructive test experiments was as happy as the respectful irony with which he brought them into contact with the generalizations they doomed. He was already, at six-and-twenty, hated, abused, obstructed, and respected. He was still outside the Royal Society, of course, and the editors of the scientific periodicals admired his papers greatly, and delayed publication; but it was fairly certain that that pressure of foreign criticism and competition which prevents English scientific men of good family and social position from maintaining any such national standards as we are able to do in art, literature, and politics, would finally carry him in. And since he had a small professorship worth three hundred a year, which gave him the command of a sufficient research laboratory and the services of Mr. Durgan, a private income of nearly three hundred more, a devoted mother to keep house for him, and an invincible faith in Truth, he had every prospect of winning in his particular struggle to inflict more Truth, new lucidities, and fresh powers upon this fractious and unreasonable universe.

In the world of science now, even more than in the world of literature and political thought, the thing that is alive struggles, half-suffocated, amidst a copious production of things born dead. The endowment of research, the organization of scientific progress, the creation of salaried posts, and the assignment of honours, has attracted to this field just that type of man which is least gifted to penetrate and discover, and least able to admit its own defect or the quality of a superior. Such men are producing great, bulky masses of imitative research, futile inquiries, and monstrous entanglements of technicality about their subjects; and it is to their-185- instinctive antagonism to the idea of a "gift" in such things that we owe the preposterous conception of a training for research, the manufacture of mental blinkers that is to say, to avoid what is the very soul of brilliant inquiry—applicable discursiveness. The trained investigator is quite the absurdest figure in the farce of contemporary intellectual life; he is like a bath-chair perpetually starting to cross the Himalayas by virtue of a licence to do so. For such enterprises one must have wings. Organization and genius are antipathetic. The vivid and creative mind, by virtue of its qualities, is a spasmodic and adventurous mind; it resents blinkers, and the mere implication that it can be driven in harness to the unexpected. It demands freedom. It resents regular attendance from ten to four and punctualities in general and all those paralyzing minor tests of conduct that are vitally important to the imagination of the authoritative dull. Consequently, it is being eliminated from its legitimate field, and it is only here and there among the younger men that such a figure as Trafford gives any promise of a renewal of that enthusiasm, that intellectual enterprise, which were distinctive of the great age of scientific advance.

Trafford was the only son of his parents. His father had been a young surgeon, more attracted by knowledge than practice, who had been killed by a scratch of the scalpel in an investigation upon ulcerative processes, at the age of twenty-nine. Trafford at that time was three years old, so that he had not the least memory of his father; but his mother, by a thousand almost unpremeditated touches, had built up a figure for him and a tradition that was shaping his life. She had loved her husband passionately, and when he died her love burnt up like a flame released, and made a god of the good she had known with him.-186- She was then a very beautiful and active-minded woman of thirty, and she did her best to reconstruct her life; but she could find nothing so living in the world as the clear courage, the essential simplicity, and tender memories of the man she had lost. And she was the more devoted to him that he had had little weaknesses of temper and bearing, and that an outrageous campaign had been waged against him that did not cease with his death. He had, in some medical periodical, published drawings of a dead dog clamped to display a deformity, and these had been seized upon by a group of anti-vivisection fanatics as the representation of a vivisection. A libel action had been pending when he died; but there is no protection of the dead from libel. That monstrous lie met her on pamphlet cover, on hoardings, in sensational appeals; it seemed immortal, and she would have suffered the pains of a dozen suttees if she could have done so, to show the world how the power and tenderness of this alleged tormentor of helpless beasts had gripped one woman's heart. It counted enormously in her decision to remain a widow and concentrate her life upon her son.

She watched his growth with a care and passionate subtlety that even at six-and-twenty he was still far from suspecting. She dreaded his becoming a mother's pet, she sent him away to school and fretted through long terms alone, that he might be made into a man. She interested herself in literary work and social affairs lest she should press upon him unduly. She listened for the crude expression of growing thought in him with an intensity that was almost anguish. She was too intelligent to dream of forming his mind, he browsed on every doctrine to find his own, but she did desire most passionately, she prayed, she prayed in the darkness of sleepless nights, that-187- the views, the breadths, the spacious emotions which had ennobled her husband in her eyes should rise again in him.

There were years of doubt and waiting. He was a good boy and a bad boy, now brilliant, now touching, now disappointing, now gloriously reassuring, and now heart-rending as only the children of our blood can be. He had errors and bad moments, lapses into sheer naughtiness, phases of indolence, attacks of contagious vulgarity. But more and more surely she saw him for his father's son; she traced the same great curiosities, the same keen dauntless questioning; whatever incidents might disturb and perplex her, his intellectual growth went on strong and clear and increasing like some sacred flame that is carried in procession, halting perhaps and swaying a little but keeping on, over the heads of a tumultuous crowd.

He went from his school to the Royal College of Science, thence to successes at Cambridge, and thence to Berlin. He travelled a little in Asia Minor and Persia, had a journey to America, and then came back to her and London, sunburnt, moustached, manly, and a little strange. When he had been a boy she had thought his very soul pellucid; it had clouded opaquely against her scrutiny as he passed into adolescence. Then through the period of visits and departures, travel together, separations, he grew into something detached and admirable, a man curiously reminiscent of his father, unexpectedly different. She ceased to feel what he was feeling in his mind, had to watch him, infer, guess, speculate about him. She desired for him and dreaded for him with an undying tenderness, but she no longer had any assurance that she could interfere to help him. He had his father's trick of falling into thought. Her brown eyes would-188- watch him across the flowers and delicate glass and silver of her dinner table when he dined at home with her. Sometimes he seemed to forget she existed, sometimes he delighted in her, talked to amuse her, petted her; sometimes, and then it was she was happiest, he talked of plays and books with her, discussed general questions, spoke even of that broadly conceived scheme of work which engaged so much of his imagination. She knew that it was distinguished and powerful work. Old friends of her husband spoke of it to her, praised its inspired directness, its beautiful simplicity. Since the days of Wollaston, they said, no one had been so witty an experimenter, no one had got more out of mere scraps of apparatus or contrived more ingenious simplifications.

When he had accepted the minor Professorship which gave him a footing in the world of responsible scientific men, she had taken a house in a quiet street in Chelsea which necessitated a daily walk to his laboratory. It was a little old Georgian house with worn and graceful rooms, a dignified front door and a fine gateway of Sussex ironwork much painted and eaten away. She arranged it with great care; she had kept most of her furniture, and his study had his father's bureau, and the selfsame agate paper-weight that had pressed the unfinished paper he left when he died. She was a woman of persistent friendships, and there came to her, old connections of those early times trailing fresher and younger people in their wake, sons, daughters, nephews, disciples; her son brought home all sorts of interesting men, and it was remarkable to her that amidst the talk and discussion at her table, she discovered aspects of her son and often quite intimate aspects she would never have seen with him alone.

She would not let herself believe that this Indian-189- summer of her life could last for ever. He was no passionless devotee of research, for all his silence and restraints. She had seen him kindle with anger at obstacles and absurdities, and quicken in the presence of beauty. She knew how readily and richly he responded to beauty. Things happened to have run smoothly with him so far, that was all. "Of course," she said, "he must fall in love. It cannot be long before he falls in love."

Once or twice that had seemed to happen, and then it had come to nothing....

She knew that sooner or later this completion of his possibilities must come, that the present steadfastness of purpose was a phase in which forces gathered, that love must sweep into his life as a deep and passionate disturbance. She wondered where it would take him, whether it would leave him enriched or devastated. She saw at times how young he was; she had, as I suppose most older people have about their juniors, the profoundest doubt whether he was wise enough yet to be trusted with a thing so good as himself. He had flashes of high-spirited indiscretion, and at times a wildfire of humour flared in his talk. So far that had done no worse for him than make an enemy or so in scientific circles. But she had no idea of the limits of his excitability. She would watch him and fear for him—she knew the wreckage love can make—and also she desired that he should lose nothing that life and his nature could give him.

§ 3

In the two months of separation that ensued before Marjorie was one-and-twenty, Trafford's mind went through some remarkable phases. At first the excitement of his passion for Marjorie obscured everything else, then with his return to London and-190- his laboratory the immense inertia of habit and slowly developed purposes, the complex yet convergent system of ideas and problems to which so much of his life had been given, began to reassert itself. His love was vivid and intense, a light in his imagination, a fever in his blood; but it was a new thing; it had not crept into the flesh and bones of his being, it was away there in Surrey; the streets of London, his home, the white-walled chamber with its skylight and high windows and charts of constants, in which his apparatus was arranged, had no suggestion of her. She was outside—an adventure—a perplexing incommensurable with all these things.

He had left Buryhamstreet with Marjorie riotously in possession of his mind. He could think of nothing but Marjorie in the train, and how she had shone at him in the study, and how her voice had sounded when she spoke, and how she stood and moved, and the shape and sensation of her hands, and how it had felt to hold her for those brief moments in the wood and press lips and body to his, and how her face had gleamed in the laced shadows of the moonlight, soft and wonderful.

In fact, he thought of Marjorie.

He thought she was splendid, courageous, wise by instinct. He had no doubt of her or that she was to be his—when the weeks of waiting had passed by. She was his, and he was Marjorie's; that had been settled from the beginning of the world. It didn't occur to him that anything had happened to alter his life or any of his arrangements in any way, except that they were altogether altered—as the world is altered without displacement when the sun pours up in the east. He was glorified—and everything was glorified.

He wondered how they would meet again, and-191- dreamt a thousand impossible and stirring dreams, but he dreamt them as dreams.

At first, to Durgan's infinite distress, he thought of her all day, and then, as the old familiar interests grappled him again, he thought of her in the morning and the evening and as he walked between his home and the laboratory and at all sorts of incidental times—and even when the close-locked riddles of his research held the foreground and focus of his thoughts, he still seemed to be thinking of her as a radiant background to ions and molecules and atoms and interwoven systems of eddies and quivering oscillations deep down in the very heart of matter.

And always he thought of her as something of the summer. The rich decays of autumn came, the Chelsea roads were littered with variegated leaves that were presently wet and dirty and slippery, the twilight crept down into the day towards five o'clock and four, but in his memory of her the leaves were green, the evenings were long, the warm quiet of rural Surrey in high August filled the air. So that it was with a kind of amazement he found her in London and in November close at hand. He was called to the college telephone one day from a conversation with a proposed research student. It was a middle-aged woman bachelor anxious for the D.Sc., who wished to occupy the further bench in the laboratory; but she had no mental fire, and his mind was busy with excuses and discouragements.

He had no thought of Marjorie when she answered, and for an instant he did not recognize her voice.

"Yes, I'm Mr. Trafford."...

"Who is it?" he reiterated with a note of irascibility. "Who?"

The little voice laughed. "Why! I'm Marjorie!" it said.

Then she was back in his life like a lantern suddenly-192- become visible in a wood at midnight.

It was like meeting her as a china figure, neat and perfect and two inches high. It was her voice, very clear and very bright, and quite characteristic, as though he was hearing it through the wrong end of a telescope. It was her voice, clear as a bell; confident without a shadow.

"It's me! Marjorie! I'm twenty-one to-day!"

It was like a little arrow of exquisite light shot into the very heart of his life.

He laughed back. "Are you for meeting me then, Marjorie?"

§ 4

They met in Kensington Gardens with an air of being clandestine and defiant. It was one of those days of amber sunlight, soft air, and tender beauty with which London relieves the tragic glooms of the year's decline. There were still a residue of warm-tinted leaves in puffs and clusters upon the tree branches, a boat or two ruffled the blue Serpentine, and the waterfowl gave colour and animation to the selvage of the water. The sedges were still a greenish yellow.

The two met shyly. They were both a little unfamiliar to each other. Trafford was black-coated, silk-hatted, umbrella-d, a decorous young professor in the place of the cheerful aeronaut who had fallen so gaily out of the sky. Marjorie had a new tailor-made dress of russet-green, and a little cloth toque ruled and disciplined the hair he had known as a ruddy confusion.... They had dreamt, I think, of extended arms and a wild rush to embrace one another. Instead, they shook hands.

"And so," said Trafford, "we meet again!"-193-

"I don't see why we shouldn't meet!" said Marjorie.

There was a slight pause.

"Let's have two of those jolly little green chairs," said Trafford....

They walked across the grass towards the chairs he had indicated, and both were full of the momentous things they were finding it impossible to say.

"There ought to be squirrels here, as there are in New York," he said at last.

They sat down. There was a moment's silence, and then Trafford's spirit rose in rebellion and he plunged at this—this stranger beside him.

"Look here," he said, "do you still love me, Marjorie?"

She looked up into his face with eyes in which surprise and scrutiny passed into something altogether beautiful. "I love you—altogether," she said in a steady, low voice.

And suddenly she was no longer a stranger, but the girl who had flitted to his arms breathless, unhesitating, through the dusk. His blood quickened. He made an awkward gesture as though he arrested an impulse to touch her. "My sweetheart," he said. "My dear one!"

Marjorie's face flashed responses. "It's you," he said.

"Me," she answered.

"Do you remember?"

"Everything!"

"My dear!"

"I want to tell you things," said Marjorie. "What are we to do?"....

He tried afterwards to retrace that conversation. He was chiefly ashamed of his scientific preoccupations-194- during that London interval. He had thought of a thousand things; Marjorie had thought of nothing else but love and him. Her happy assurance, her absolute confidence that his desires would march with hers, reproached and confuted every adverse thought in him as though it was a treachery to love. He had that sense which I suppose comes at times to every man, of entire unworthiness for the straight, unhesitating decision, the clear simplicity of a woman's passion. He had dreamt vaguely, unsubstantially, the while he had arranged his pressures and temperatures and infinitesimal ingredients, and worked with goniometer and trial models and the new calculating machine he had contrived for his research. But she had thought clearly, definitely, fully—of nothing but coming to him. She had thought out everything that bore upon that; reasons for preciptance, reasons for delay, she had weighed the rewards of conformity against the glamour of romance. It became more and more clear to him as they talked, that she was determined to elope with him, to go to Italy, and there have an extraordinarily picturesque and beautiful time. Her definiteness shamed his poverty of anticipation. Her enthusiasm carried him with her. Of course it was so that things must be done....

When at last they parted under the multiplying lamps of the November twilight, he turned his face eastward. He was afraid of his mother's eyes—he scarcely knew why. He walked along Kensington Gore, and the clustering confused lights of street and house, white and golden and orange and pale lilac, the moving lamps and shining glitter of the traffic, the luminous interiors of omnibuses, the reflection of carriage and hoarding, the fading daylight overhead, the phantom trees to the left, the deepening shadows and blacknesses among the houses on his right, the-195- bobbing heads of wayfarers, were just for him the stir and hue and texture of fairyland. All the world was fairyland. He went to his club and dined there, and divided the evening between geography, as it is condensed in Baedeker and Murray on North Italy, Italian Switzerland and the Italian Riviera, and a study of the marriage laws as they are expounded in "Whitaker's Almanac," the "Encyclopædia Britannica," and other convenient works of reference. He replaced the books as he used them, and went at last from the library into the smoking-room, but seeing a man who might talk to him there, he went out at once into the streets, and fetched a wide compass by Baker Street, Oxford Street, and Hyde Park, home.

He was a little astonished at himself and everything.

But it was going to be—splendid.

(What poor things words can be!)

§ 5

He found his mother still up. She had been re-reading "The Old Wives' Tale," and she sat before a ruddy fire in the shadow beyond the lit circle of a green-shaded electric light thinking, with the book put aside. In the dimness above was his father's portrait. "Time you were in bed, mother," he said reprovingly, and kissed her eyebrow and stood above her. "What's the book?" he asked, and picked it up and put it down, forgotten. Their eyes met. She perceived he had something to say; she did not know what. "Where have you been?" she asked.

He told her, and they lapsed into silence. She asked another question and he answered her, and the indifferent conversation ended again. The silence lengthened. Then he plunged: "I wonder, mother,-196- if it would put you out very much if I brought home a wife to you?"

So it had come to this—and she had not seen it coming. She looked into the glowing recesses of the fire before her and controlled her voice by an effort. "I'd be glad for you to do it, dear—if you loved her," she said very quietly. He stared down at her for a moment; then he knelt down beside her and took her hand and kissed it. "My dear," she whispered softly, stroking his head, and her tears came streaming. For a time they said no more.

Presently he put coal on the fire, and then sitting on the hearthrug at her feet and looking away from her into the flames—in an attitude that took her back to his boyhood—he began to tell her brokenly and awkwardly of Marjorie.

"It's so hard, mother, to explain these things," he began. "One doesn't half understand the things that are happening to one. I want to make you in love with her, dear, just as I am. And I don't see how I can."

"Perhaps I shall understand, my dear. Perhaps I shall understand better than you think."

"She's such a beautiful thing—with something about her——. You know those steel blades you can bend back to the hilt—and they're steel! And she's tender. It's as if someone had taken tears, mother, and made a spirit out of them——"

She caressed and stroked his hand. "My dear," she said, "I know."

"And a sort of dancing daring in her eyes."

"Yes," she said. "But tell me where she comes from, and how you met her—and all the circumstantial things that a sensible old woman can understand."

He kissed her hand and sat down beside her, with-197- his shoulder against the arm of her chair, his fingers interlaced about his knee. She could not keep her touch from his hair, and she tried to force back the thought in her mind that all these talks must end, that very soon indeed they would end. And she was glad, full of pride and joy too that her son was a lover after her heart, a clean and simple lover as his father had been before him. He loved this unknown Marjorie, finely, sweetly, bravely, even as she herself could have desired to have been loved. She told herself she did not care very greatly even if this Marjorie should prove unworthy. So long as her son was not unworthy.

He pieced his story together. He gave her a picture of the Popes, Marjorie in her family like a jewel in an ugly setting, so it seemed to him, and the queer dull rage of her father and all that they meant to do. She tried to grasp his perplexities and advise, but chiefly she was filled with the thought that he was in love. If he wanted a girl he should have her, and if he had to take her by force, well, wasn't it his right? She set small store upon the Popes that night—or any circumstances. And since she herself had married on the slightest of security, she was concerned very little that this great adventure was to be attempted on an income of a few hundreds a year. It was outside her philosophy that a wife should be anything but glad to tramp the roads if need be with the man who loved her. He sketched out valiant plans, was for taking Marjorie away in the teeth of all opposition and bringing her back to London. It would have to be done decently, of course, but it would have, he thought, to be done. Mrs. Trafford found the prospect perfect; never before had he sounded and looked so like that dim figure which hung still and sympathetic above them. Ever and again-198- she glanced up at her husband's quiet face....

On one point she was very clear with him.

"You'll live with us, mother?" he said abruptly.

"Not with you. As near as you like. But one house, one woman.... I'll have a little flat of my own—for you both to come to me."

"Oh, nonsense, mother! You'll have to be with us. Living alone, indeed!"

"My dear, I'd prefer a flat of my own. You don't understand—everything. It will be better for all of us like that."

There came a little pause between them, and then her hand was on his head again. "Oh, my dear," she said, "I want you to be happy. And life can be difficult. I won't give a chance—for things to go wrong. You're hers, dear, and you've got to be hers—be each other's altogether. I've watched so many people. And that's the best, the very best you can have. There's just the lovers—the real enduring lovers; and the uncompleted people who've failed to find it."...

§ 6

Trafford's second meeting with Marjorie, which, by the by, happened on the afternoon of the following day, brought them near to conclusive decisions. The stiffness of their first encounter in London had altogether vanished. She was at her prettiest and in the highest spirits—and she didn't care for anything else in the world. A gauzy silk scarf which she had bought and not paid for that day floated atmospherically about her straight trim body; her hair had caught the infection of insurrection and was waving rebelliously about her ears. As he drew near her his grave discretion passed from him as clouds pass from a hillside. She smiled radiantly. He held out both-199- his hands for both of hers, and never did a maiden come so near and yet not get a public and shameless kissing.

One could as soon describe music as tell their conversation. It was a matter of tones and feelings. But the idea of flight together, of the bright awakening in unfamiliar sunshine with none to come between them, had gripped them both. A certain sober gravity of discussion only masked that deeper inebriety. It would be easy for them to get away; he had no lectures until February; he could, he said, make arrangements, leave his research. She dreaded disputation. She was for a simple disappearance, notes on pincushions and defiantly apologetic letters from Boulogne, but his mother's atmosphere had been a gentler one than her home's, with a more powerful disposition to dignity. He still couldn't understand that the cantankerous egotism of Pope was indeed the essential man; it seemed to him a crust of bad manners that reason ought to pierce.

The difference in their atmospheres came out in their talk—in his desire for a handsome and dignified wedding—though the very heavens protested—and her resolve to cut clear of every one, to achieve a sort of gaol delivery of her life, make a new beginning altogether, with the minimum of friction and the maximum of surprise. Unused to fighting, he was magnificently prepared to fight; she, with her intimate knowledge of chronic domestic conflict, was for the evasion of all the bickerings, scoldings, and misrepresentations his challenge would occasion. He thought in his innocence a case could be stated and discussed; but no family discussion she had ever heard had even touched the realities of the issue that occasioned it.

"I don't like this underhand preparation," he-200- said.

"Nor I," she echoed. "But what can one do?"

"Well, oughtn't I to go to your father and give him a chance? Why shouldn't I? It's—the dignified way."

"It won't be dignified for father," said Marjorie, "anyhow."

"But what right has he to object?"

"He isn't going to discuss his rights with you. He will object."

"But why?"

"Oh! because he's started that way. He hit you. I haven't forgotten it. Well, if he goes back on that now——He'd rather die than go back on it. You see, he's ashamed in his heart. It would be like confessing himself wrong not to keep it up that you're the sort of man one hits. He just hates you because he hit you. I haven't been his daughter for twenty-one years for nothing."

"I'm thinking of us," said Trafford. "I don't see we oughtn't to go to him just because he's likely to be—unreasonable."

"My dear, do as you please. He'll forbid and shout, and hit tables until things break. Suppose he locks me up!"

"Oh, Habeas Corpus, and my strong right arm! He's much more likely to turn you out-of-doors."

"Not if he thinks the other will annoy you more. I'll have to bear a storm."

"Not for long."

"He'll bully mother till she cries over me. But do as you please. She'll come and she'll beg me——Do as you please. Perhaps I'm a coward. I'd far rather I could slip away."

Trafford thought for a moment. "I'd far rather you could," he answered, in a voice that spoke of-201- inflexible determinations.

They turned to the things they meant to do. "Italy!" she whispered, "Italy!" Her face was alight with her burning expectation of beauty, of love, of the new heaven and the new earth that lay before them. The intensity of that desire blazing through her seemed to shame his dull discretions. He had to cling to his resolution, lest it should vanish in that contagious intoxication.

"You understand I shall come to your father," he said, as they drew near the gate where it seemed discreet for them to part.

"It will make it harder to get away," she said, with no apparent despondency. "It won't stop us. Oh! do as you please."

She seemed to dismiss the question, and stood hand-in-hand with him in a state of glowing gravity. She wouldn't see him again for four-and-twenty hours. Then a thought came into her head—a point of great practical moment.

"Oh!" she said, "of course, you won't tell father you've seen me."

She met his eye. "Really you mustn't," she said. "You see—he'll make a row with mother for not having watched me better. I don't know what he isn't likely to do. It isn't myself——This is a confidential communication—all this. No one in this world knows I am meeting you. If you must go to him, go to him."

"For myself?"

She nodded, with her open eyes on his—eyes that looked now very blue and very grave, and her lips a little apart.

She surprised him a little, but even this sudden weakness seemed adorable.

"All right," he said.-202-

"You don't think that I'm shirking——?" she asked, a little too eagerly.

"You know your father best," he answered. "I'll tell you all he says and all the terror of him here to-morrow afternoon."

§ 7

In the stillness of the night Trafford found himself thinking over Marjorie; it was a new form of mental exercise, which was destined to play a large part in his existence for many subsequent years. There had come a shadow on his confidence in her. She was a glorious person; she had a kind of fire behind her and in her—shining through her, like the lights in a fire-opal, but——He wished she had not made him promise to conceal their meeting and their close co-operation from her father. Why did she do that? It would spoil his case with her father, and it could forward things for them in no conceivable way. And from that, in some manner too subtle to trace, he found his mind wandering to another problem, which was destined to reappear with a slowly dwindling importance very often in this procedure of thinking over Marjorie in the small hours. It was the riddle—it never came to him in the daytime, but only in those intercalary and detachedly critical periods of thought—why exactly had she engaged herself to Magnet? Why had she? He couldn't imagine himself, in Marjorie's position, doing anything of the sort. Marjorie had ways of her own; she was different.... Well, anyhow, she was splendid and loving and full of courage.... He had got no further than this when at last he fell asleep.

§ 8

Trafford's little attempt to regularise his position-203- was as creditable to him as it was inevitably futile. He sought out 29, Hartstone Square in the morning on his way to his laboratory, and he found it one of a great row of stucco houses each with a portico and a dining-room window on the ground floor, and each with a railed area from which troglodytic servants peeped. Collectively the terrace might claim a certain ugly dignity of restraint, there was none of your Queen Anne nonsense of art or beauty about it, and the narrow height, the subterranean kitchens of each constituent house, told of a steep relentless staircase and the days before the pampering of the lower classes began. The houses formed a square, as if the British square so famous at Waterloo for its dogged resistance to all the forces of the universe had immortalized itself in buildings, and they stared upon a severely railed garden of hardy shrubs and gravel to which the tenants had the inestimable privilege of access. They did not use it much, that was their affair, but at any rate they had keys and a nice sense of rights assured, and at least it kept other people out.

Trafford turned out of a busy high road full of the mixed exhilarating traffic of our time, and came along a quiet street into this place, and it seemed to him he had come into a corner of defence and retreat, into an atmosphere of obstinate and unteachable resistances. But this illusion of conservativism in its last ditch was dispelled altogether in Mr. Pope's portico. Youth flashed out of these solemnities like a dart shot from a cave. Trafford was raising his hand to the solid brass knocker when abruptly it was snatched from his fingers, the door was flung open and a small boy with a number of dirty books in a-204- strap flew out and hit him with projectile violence.

"Blow!" said the young gentleman recoiling, and Trafford recovering said: "Hullo, Theodore!"

"Lord!" said Theodore breathless, "It's you! What a lark! Your name's never mentioned—no how. What did you do?... Wish I could stop and see it! I'm ten minutes late. Ave atque vale. So long!"

He vanished with incredible velocity. And Mr. Trafford was alone in possession of the open doorway except for Toupee, who after a violent outbreak of hostility altered his mind and cringed to his feet in abject and affectionate propitiation. A pseudo-twin appeared, said "Hello!" and vanished, and then he had an instant's vision of Mr. Pope, newspaper in hand, appearing from the dining-room. His expression of surprise changed to malevolence, and he darted back into the room from which he had emerged. Trafford decided to take the advice of a small brass plate on his left hand, and "ring also."

A housemaid came out of the bowels of the earth very promptly and ushered him up two flights of stairs into what was manifestly Mr. Pope's study.

It was a narrow, rather dark room lit by two crimson-curtained windows, and with a gas fire before which Mr. Pope's walking boots were warming for the day. The apartment revealed to Trafford's cursory inspection many of the stigmata of an Englishman of active intelligence and literary tastes. There in the bookcase were the collected works of Scott, a good large illustrated Shakespeare in numerous volumes, and a complete set of bound Punches from the beginning. A pile of back numbers of the Times stood on a cane stool in a corner, and in a little bookcase handy for the occupier of the desk were Whitaker, Wisden and an old peerage. The desk bore-205- traces of recent epistolary activity, and was littered with the printed matter of Aunt Plessington's movements. Two or three recent issues of The Financial Review of Reviews were also visible. About the room hung steel engravings apparently of defunct judges or at any rate of exceedingly grim individuals, and over the mantel were trophies of athletic prowess, a bat witnessing that Mr. Pope had once captained the second eleven at Harrogby.

Mr. Pope entered with a stern expression and a sentence prepared. "Well, sir," he said with a note of ironical affability, "to what may I ascribe this—intrusion?"

Mr. Trafford was about to reply when Mr. Pope interrupted. "Will you be seated," he said, and turned his desk chair about for himself, and occupying it, crossed his legs and pressed the finger tips of his two hands together. "Well, sir?" he said.

Trafford remained standing astraddle over the boots before the gas fire.

"Look here, sir," he said; "I am in love with your daughter. She's one and twenty, and I want to see her—and in fact——" He found it hard to express himself. He could think only of a phrase that sounded ridiculous. "I want—in fact—to pay my addresses to her."

"Well, sir, I don't want you to do so. That is too mild. I object strongly—very strongly. My daughter has been engaged to a very distinguished and able man, and I hope very shortly to hear that that engagement—— Practically it is still going on. I don't want you to intrude upon my daughter further."

"But look here, sir. There's a certain justice—I mean a certain reasonableness——"

Mr. Pope held out an arresting hand. "I don't-206- wish it. Let that be enough."

"Of course it isn't enough. I'm in love with her—and she with me. I'm an entirely reputable and decent person——"

"May I be allowed to judge what is or is not suitable companionship for my daughter—and what may or may not be the present state of her affections?"

"Well, that's rather the point we are discussing. After all, Marjorie isn't a baby. I want to do all this—this affair, openly and properly if I can, but, you know, I mean to marry Marjorie—anyhow."

"There are two people to consult in that matter."

"I'll take the risk of that."

"Permit me to differ."

A feeling of helplessness came over Trafford. The curious irritation Mr. Pope always roused in him began to get the better of him. His face flushed hotly. "Oh really! really! this is—this is nonsense!" he cried. "I never heard anything so childish and pointless as your objection——"

"Be careful, sir!" cried Mr. Pope, "be careful!"

"I'm going to marry Marjorie."

"If she marries you, sir, she shall never darken my doors again!"

"If you had a thing against me!"

"Haven't I!"

"What have you?"

There was a quite perceptible pause before Pope fired his shot.

"Does any decent man want the name of Trafford associated with his daughter. Trafford! Look at the hoardings, sir!"

A sudden blaze of anger lit Trafford. "My God!" he cried and clenched his fists and seemed for a moment ready to fall upon the man before him.-207- Then he controlled himself by a violent effort. "You believe in that libel on my dead father?" he said, with white lips.

"Has it ever been answered?"

"A hundred times. And anyhow!—Confound it! I don't believe—you believe it. You've raked it up—as an excuse! You want an excuse for your infernal domestic tyranny! That's the truth of it. You can't bear a creature in your household to have a will or preference of her own. I tell you, sir, you are intolerable—intolerable!"

He was shouting, and Pope was standing now and shouting too. "Leave my house, sir. Get out of my house, sir. You come here to insult me, sir!"

A sudden horror of himself and Pope seized the younger man. He stiffened and became silent. Never in his life before had he been in a bawling quarrel. He was amazed and ashamed.

"Leave my house!" cried Pope with an imperious gesture towards the door.

Trafford made an absurd effort to save the situation. "I am sorry, sir, I lost my temper. I had no business to abuse you——"

"You've said enough."

"I apologise for that. I've done what I could to manage things decently."

"Will you go, sir?" threatened Mr. Pope.

"I'm sorry I came," said Trafford.

Mr. Pope took his stand with folded arms and an expression of weary patience.

"I did what I could," said Trafford at the door.

The staircase and passage were deserted. The whole house seemed to have caught from Mr. Pope that same quality of seeing him out....

"Confound it!" said Trafford in the street.-208- "How on earth did all this happen?"...

He turned eastward, and then realized that work would be impossible that day. He changed his direction for Kensington Gardens, and in the flower-bordered walk near the Albert Memorial he sat down on a chair, and lugged at his moustache and wondered. He was extraordinarily perplexed, as well as ashamed and enraged by this uproar. How had it begun? Of course, he had been stupidly abusive, but the insult to his father had been unendurable. Did a man of Pope's sort quite honestly believe that stuff? If he didn't, he deserved kicking. If he did, of course he was entitled to have it cleared up. But then he wouldn't listen! Was there any case for the man at all? Had he, Trafford, really put the thing so that Pope would listen? He couldn't remember. What was it he had said in reply to Pope? What was it exactly that Pope had said?

It was already vague; it was a confused memory of headlong words and answers; what wasn't vague, what rang in his ears still, was the hoarse discord of two shouting voices.

Could Marjorie have heard?

§ 9

So Marjorie carried her point. She wasn't to be married tamely after the common fashion which trails home and all one's beginnings into the new life. She was to be eloped with, romantically and splendidly, into a glorious new world. She walked on shining clouds, and if she felt some remorse, it was a very tender and satisfactory remorse, and with a clear conviction below it that in the end she would be forgiven.

They made all their arrangements elaborately and-209- carefully. Trafford got a license to marry her; she was to have a new outfit from top to toe to go away with on that eventful day. It accumulated in the shop, and they marked the clothes M.T. She was watched, she imagined, but as her father did not know she had seen Trafford, nothing had been said to her, and no attempt was made to prohibit her going out and coming in. Trafford entered into the conspiracy with a keen interest, a certain amusement, and a queer little feeling of distaste. He hated to hide any act of his from any human being. The very soul of scientific work, you see, is publication. But Marjorie seemed to justify all things, and when his soul turned against furtiveness, he reminded it that the alternative was bawling.

One eventful afternoon he went to the college, and Marjorie slipped round by his arrangement to have tea with Mrs. Trafford....

He returned about seven in a state of nervous apprehension; came upstairs two steps at a time, and stopped breathless on the landing. He gulped as he came in, and his eyes were painfully eager. "She's been?" he asked.

But Marjorie had won Mrs. Trafford.

"She's been," she answered. "Yes, she's all right, my dear."

"Oh, mother!" he said.

"She's a beautiful creature, dear—and such a child! Oh! such a child! And God bless you, dear, God bless you....

"I think all young people are children. I want to take you both in my arms and save you.... I'm talking nonsense, dear."

He kissed her, and she clung to him as if he were something too precious to release.

§ 10

The elopement was a little complicated by a surprise-210- manœuvre of Mrs. Pope's. She was more alive to the quality of the situation, poor lady! than her daughter suspected; she was watching, dreading, perhaps even furtively sympathizing and trying to arrange—oh! trying dreadfully to arrange. She had an instinctive understanding of the deep blue quiet in Marjorie's eyes, and the girl's unusual tenderness with Daffy and the children. She peeped under the blind as Marjorie went out, noted the care in her dress, watched her face as she returned, never plumbed her with a question for fear of the answer. She did not dare to breathe a hint of her suspicions to her husband, but she felt things were adrift in swift, smooth water, and all her soul cried out for delay. So presently there came a letter from Cousin Susan Pendexter at Plymouth. The weather was beautiful, Marjorie must come at once, pack up and come and snatch the last best glow of the dying autumn away there in the west. Marjorie's jerry-built excuses, her manifest chagrin and reluctance, confirmed her mother's worst suspicions.

She submitted and went, and Mrs. Pope and Syd saw her off.

I do not like to tell how a week later Marjorie explained herself and her dressing-bag and a few small articles back to London from Plymouth. Suffice it that she lied desperately and elaborately. Her mother had never achieved such miracles of mis-statement, and she added a vigour that was all her own. It is easier to sympathize with her than exonerate her. She was in a state of intense impatience, and—what is strange—extraordinarily afraid that something would separate her from her lover if she did not secure him. She was in a fever of determination.-211- She could not eat or sleep or attend to anything whatever; she was occupied altogether with the thought of assuring herself to Trafford. He towered in her waking vision over town and land and sea.

He didn't hear the lies she told; he only knew she was magnificently coming back to him. He met her at Paddington, a white-faced, tired, splendidly resolute girl, and they went to the waiting registrar's forthwith.

She bore herself with the intentness and dignity of one who is taking the cardinal step in life. They kissed as though it was a symbol, and were keenly business-like about cabs and luggage and trains. At last they were alone in the train together. They stared at one another.

"We've done it, Mrs. Trafford!" said Trafford.

She snapped like an over-taut string, crumpled, clung to him, and without a word was weeping passionately in his arms.

It surprised him that she could weep as she did, and still more to see her as she walked by his side along the Folkestone pier, altogether recovered, erect, a little flushed and excited like a child. She seemed to miss nothing. "Oh, smell the sea!" she said, "Look at the lights! Listen to the swish of the water below." She watched the luggage spinning on the wire rope of the giant crane, and he watched her face and thought how beautiful she was. He wondered why her eyes could sometimes be so blue and sometimes dark as night.

The boat cleared the pier and turned about and headed for France. They walked the upper deck together and stood side by side, she very close to him.

"I've never crossed the sea before," she said.

"Old England," she whispered. "It's like leaving a nest. A little row of lights and that's all the-212- world I've ever known, shrunken to that already."

Presently they went forward and peered into the night.

"Look!" she said. "Italy! There's sunshine and all sorts of beautiful things ahead. Warm sunshine, wonderful old ruins, green lizards...." She paused and whispered almost noiselessly: "love——"

They pressed against each other.

"And yet isn't it strange? All you can see is darkness, and clouds—and big waves that hiss as they come near...."

§ 11

Italy gave all her best to welcome them. It was a late year, a golden autumn, with skies of such blue as Marjorie had never seen before. They stayed at first in a pretty little Italian hotel with a garden on the lake, and later they walked over Salvator to Morcote and by boat to Ponte Tresa, and thence they had the most wonderful and beautiful tramp in the world to Luino, over the hills by Castelrotto. To the left of them all day was a broad valley with low-lying villages swimming in a luminous mist, to the right were purple mountains. They passed through paved streets with houses the colour of flesh and ivory, with balconies hung with corn and gourds, with tall church campaniles rising high, and great archways giving upon the blue lowlands; they tramped along avenues of sweet chestnut and between stretches of exuberant vineyard, in which men and women were gathering grapes—purple grapes, a hatful for a soldo, that rasped the tongue. Everything was strange and wonderful to Marjorie's eyes; now it would be a wayside shrine and now a yoke of soft-going, dewlapped-213- oxen, now a chapel hung about with ex votos, and now some unfamiliar cultivation—or a gipsy-eyed child—or a scorpion that scuttled in the dust. The very names of the villages were like jewels to her, Varasca, Croglio, Ronca, Sesia, Monteggio. They walked, or sat by the wayside and talked, or rested at the friendly table of some kindly albergo. A woman as beautiful as Ceres, with a white neck all open, made them an omelette, and then fetched her baby from its cradle to nurse it while she talked to them as they made their meal. And afterwards she filled their pockets with roasted chestnuts, and sent them with melodious good wishes upon their way. And always high over all against the translucent blue hung the white shape of Monte Rosa, that warmed in colour as the evening came.

Marjorie's head was swimming with happiness and beauty, and with every fresh delight she recurred again to the crowning marvel of this clean-limbed man beside her, who smiled and carried all her luggage in a huge rucksack that did not seem to exist for him, and watched her and caressed her—and was hers, hers!

At Baveno there were letters. They sat at a little table outside a café and read them, suddenly mindful of England again. Incipient forgiveness showed through Mrs. Pope's reproaches, and there was also a simple, tender love-letter (there is no other word for it) from old Mrs. Trafford to her son.

From Baveno they set off up Monte Mottarone—whence one may see the Alps from Visto to Ortler Spitz—trusting to find the inn still open, and if it was closed to get down to Orta somehow before night. Or at the worst sleep upon the mountain side.

(Monte Mottarone! Just for a moment taste the-214- sweet Italian name upon your lips.) These were the days before the funicular from Stresa, when one trudged up a rude path through the chestnuts and walnuts.

As they ascended the long windings through the woods, they met an old poet and his wife, coming down from sunset and sunrise. There was a word or two about the inn, and they went upon their way. The old man turned ever and again to look at them.

"Adorable young people," he said. "Adorable happy young people....

"Did you notice, dear, how she held that dainty little chin of hers?...

"Pride is such a good thing, my dear, clear, straight pride like theirs—and they were both so proud!...

"Isn't it good, dear, to think that once you and I may have looked like that to some passer-by. I wish I could bless them—sweet, swift young things! I wish, dear, it was possible for old men to bless young people without seeming to set up for saints...."

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