Trafford Decides to Go

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

Trafford Decides to Go

§ 1

A Haunting desire to go away into solitude grew-388- upon Trafford very steadily. He wanted intensely to think, and London and Marjorie would not let him think. He wanted therefore to go away out of London and Marjorie's world. He wanted, he felt, to go away alone and face God, and clear things up in his mind. By imperceptible degrees this desire anticipated its realization. His activities were affected more and more by intimations of a determined crisis. One eventful day it seemed to him that his mind passed quite suddenly from desire to resolve. He found himself with a project, already broadly definite. Hitherto he hadn't been at all clear where he could go. From the first almost he had felt that this change he needed, the change by which he was to get out of the thickets of work and perplexity and distraction that held him captive, must be a physical as well as a mental removal; he must go somewhere, still and isolated, where sustained detached thinking was possible.... His preference, if he had one, inclined him to some solitude among the Himalaya Mountains. That came perhaps from Kim and the precedent of the Hindoo's religious retreat from the world. But this retreat he contemplated was a retreat that aimed at a return, a clarified and strengthened resumption of the world. And then suddenly, as if he had always intended it, Labrador flashed through his thoughts, like a familiar name that had been for a time quite unaccountably forgotten.

The word "Labrador" drifted to him one day-389- from an adjacent table as he sat alone at lunch in the Liberal Union Club. Some bore was reciting the substance of a lecture to a fellow-member. "Seems to be a remarkable country," said the speaker. "Mineral wealth hardly glanced at, you know. Furs and a few score Indians. And at our doors. Practically—at our doors."

Trafford ceased to listen. His mind was taking up this idea of Labrador. He wondered why he had not thought of Labrador before.

He had two or three streams of thought flowing in his mind, as a man who muses alone is apt to do. Marjorie's desire to move had reappeared; a particular group of houses between Berkeley Square and Park Lane had taken hold of her fancy, she had urged the acquisition of one upon him that morning, and this kept coming up into consciousness like a wrong thread in a tapestry. Moreover, he was watching his fellow-members with a critical rather than a friendly eye. A half-speculative, half-hostile contemplation of his habitual associates was one of the queer aspects of this period of unsettlement. They exasperated him by their massive contentment with the surface of things. They came in one after another patting their ties, or pulling at the lapels of their coats, and looked about them for vacant places with a conscious ease of manner that irritated his nerves. No doubt they were all more or less successful and distinguished men, matter for conversation and food for anecdotes, but why did they trouble to give themselves the air of it? They halted or sat down by friends, enunciated vapid remarks in sonorous voices, and opened conversations in trite phrases, about London architecture, about the political situation or the morning's newspaper, conversations that ought, he felt, to have been-390- thrown away unopened, so stale and needless they seemed to him. They were judges, lawyers of all sorts, bankers, company promoters, railway managers, stockbrokers, pressmen, politicians, men of leisure. He wondered if indeed they were as opaque as they seemed, wondered with the helpless wonder of a man of exceptional mental gifts whether any of them at any stage had had such thoughts as his, had wanted as acutely as he did now to get right out of the world. Did old Booch over there, for example, guzzling oysters, cry at times upon the unknown God in the vast silences of the night? But Booch, of course, was a member or something of the House of Laymen, and very sound on the thirty-nine articles—a man who ate oysters like that could swallow anything—and in the vast silences of the night he was probably heavily and noisily asleep....

Blenkins, the gentlemanly colleague of Denton in the control of the Old Country Gazette, appeared on his way to the pay-desk, gesticulating amiably en-route to any possible friend. Trafford returned his salutation, and pulled himself together immediately after in fear that he had scowled, for he hated to be churlish to any human being. Blenkins, too, it might be, had sorrow and remorse and periods of passionate self-distrust and self-examination; maybe Blenkins could weep salt tears, as Blenkins no doubt under suitable sword-play would reveal heart and viscera as quivering and oozy as any man's.

But to Trafford's jaundiced eyes just then, it seemed that if you slashed Blenkins across he would probably cut like a cheese....

Now, in Labrador——....

So soon as Blenkins had cleared, Trafford followed him to the pay-desk, and went on upstairs to the smoking-room, thinking of Labrador. Long ago he-391- had read the story of Wallace and Hubbard in that wilderness.

There was much to be said for a winter in Labrador. It was cold, it was clear, infinitely lonely, with a keen edge of danger and hardship and never a letter or a paper.

One could provision a hut and sit wrapped in fur, watching the Northern Lights....

"I'm off to Labrador," said Trafford, and entered the smoking-room.

It was, after all, perfectly easy to go to Labrador. One had just to go....

As he pinched the end of his cigar, he became aware of Blenkins, with a gleam of golden glasses and a flapping white cuff, beckoning across the room to him. With that probable scowl on his conscience Trafford was moved to respond with an unreal warmth, and strolled across to Blenkins and a group of three or four other people, including that vigorous young politician, Weston Massinghay, and Hart, K.C., about the further fireplace. "We were talking of you," said Blenkins. "Come and sit down with us. Why don't you come into Parliament?"

"I've just arranged to go for some months to Labrador."

"Industrial development?" asked Blenkins, all alive.

"No. Holiday."

No Blenkins believes that sort of thing, but of course, if Trafford chose to keep his own counsel——

"Well, come into Parliament as soon as you get back."

Trafford had had that old conversation before. He pretended insensibility when Blenkins gestured to a vacant chair. "No," he said, still standing, "we settled all that. And now I'm up to my neck in—detail-392- about Labrador. I shall be starting—before the month is out."

Blenkins and Hart simulated interest. "It's immoral," said Blenkins, "for a man of your standing to keep out of politics."

"It's more than immoral," said Hart; "it's American."

"Solomonson comes in to represent the firm," smiled Trafford, signalled the waiter for coffee, and presently disentangled himself from their company.

For Blenkins Trafford concealed an exquisite dislike and contempt; and Blenkins had a considerable admiration for Trafford, based on extensive misunderstandings. Blenkins admired Trafford because he was good-looking and well-dressed, with a beautiful and successful wife, because he had become reasonably rich very quickly and easily, was young and a Fellow of the Royal Society with a reputation that echoed in Berlin, and very perceptibly did not return Blenkins' admiration. All these things filled Blenkins with a desire for Trafford's intimacy, and to become the associate of the very promising political career that it seemed to him, in spite of Trafford's repudiations, was the natural next step in a deliberately and honourably planned life. He mistook Trafford's silences and detachment for the marks of a strong, silent man, who was scheming the immense, vulgar, distinguished-looking achievements that appeal to the Blenkins mind. Blenkins was a sentimentally loyal party Liberal, and as he said at times to Hart and Weston Massinghay: "If those other fellows get hold of him——!"

Blenkins was the fine flower of Oxford Liberalism and the Tennysonian days. He wanted to be like King Arthur and Sir Galahad, with the merest touch of Launcelot, and to be perfectly upright and splendid-393- and very, very successful. He was a fair, tenoring sort of person with an Arthurian moustache and a disposition to long frock coats. It had been said of him that he didn't dress like a gentleman, but that he dressed more like a gentleman than a gentleman ought to dress. It might have been added that he didn't behave like a gentleman, but that he behaved more like a gentleman than a gentleman ought to behave. He didn't think, but he talked and he wrote more thoughtfully in his leaders, and in the little dialogues he wrote in imitation of Sir Arthur Helps, than any other person who didn't think could possibly do. He was an orthodox Churchman, but very, very broad; he held all the doctrines, a distinguished sort of thing to do in an age of doubt, but there was a quality about them as he held them—as though they had been run over by something rather heavy. It was a flattened and slightly obliterated breadth—nothing was assertive, but nothing, under examination, proved to be altogether gone. His profuse thoughtfulness was not confined to his journalistic and literary work, it overflowed into Talks. He was a man for Great Talks, interminable rambling floods of boyish observation, emotional appreciation, and silly, sapient comment. He loved to discuss "Who are the Best Talkers now Alive?" He had written an essay, Talk in the Past. He boasted of week-ends when the Talk had gone on from the moment of meeting in the train to the moment of parting at Euston, or Paddington, or Waterloo; and one or two hostesses with embittered memories could verify his boasting. He did his best to make the club a Talking Club, and loved to summon men to a growing circle of chairs....

Trafford had been involved in Talks on one or two occasions, and now, as he sat alone in the corridor and smoked and drank his coffee, he could imagine-394- the Talk he had escaped, the Talk that was going on in the smoking room—the platitudes, the sagacities, the digressions, the sudden revelation of deep, irrational convictions. He reflected upon the various Talks at which he had assisted. His chief impression of them all was of an intolerable fluidity. Never once had he known a Talk thicken to adequate discussion; never had a new idea or a new view come to him in a Talk. He wondered why Blenkins and his like talked at all. Essentially they lived for pose, not for expression; they did not greatly desire to discover, make, or be; they wanted to seem and succeed. Talking perhaps was part of their pose of great intellectual activity, and Blenkins was fortunate to have an easy, unforced running of mind....

Over his cigar Trafford became profoundly philosophical about Talk. And after the manner of those who become profoundly philosophical he spread out the word beyond its original and proper intentions to all sorts of kindred and parallel things. Blenkins and his miscellany of friends in their circle of chairs were, after all, only a crude rendering of very much of intellectual activity of mankind. Men talked so often as dogs bark. Those Talkers never came to grips, fell away from topic to topic, pretended depth and evaded the devastating horrors of sincerity. Listening was a politeness amongst them that was presently rewarded with utterance. Tremendously like dogs they were, in a dog-fancying neighborhood on a summer week-day afternoon. Fluidity, excessive abundance, inconsecutiveness; these were the things that made Talk hateful to Trafford.

Wasn't most literature in the same class? Wasn't nearly all present philosophical and sociological discussion in the world merely a Blenkins circle on a colossal scale, with every one looming forward to get-395- in a deeply thoughtful word edgeways at the first opportunity? Imagine any one in distress about his soul or about mankind, going to a professor of economics or sociology or philosophy! He thought of the endless, big, expensive, fruitless books, the windy expansions of industrious pedantry that mocked the spirit of inquiry. The fields of physical and biological science alone had been partially rescued from the floods of human inconsecutiveness. There at least a man must, on the whole, join on to the work of other men, stand a searching criticism, justify himself. Philosophically this was an age of relaxed schoolmen. He thought of Doctor Codger at Cambridge, bubbling away with his iridescent Hegelianism like a salted snail; of Doctor Quiller at Oxford, ignoring Bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular Pragmatism. Each contradicted the other fundamentally upon matters of universal concern; neither ever joined issue with the other. Why in the name of humanity didn't some one take hold of those two excellent gentlemen, and bang their busy heads together hard and frequently until they either compromised or cracked?

§ 2

He forgot these rambling speculations as he came out into the spring sunshine of Pall Mall, and halting for a moment on the topmost step, regarded the tidy pavements, the rare dignified shops, the waiting taxicabs, the pleasant, prosperous passers-by. His mind lapsed back to the thought that he meant to leave all this and go to Labrador. His mind went a step further, and reflected that he would not only go to Labrador, but—it was highly probable—come back again.

And then?-396-

Why, after all, should he go to Labrador at all? Why shouldn't he make a supreme effort here?

Something entirely irrational within him told him with conclusive emphasis that he had to go to Labrador....

He remembered there was this confounded business of the proposed house in Mayfair to consider....

§ 3

It occurred to him that he would go a little out of his way, and look at the new great laboratories at the Romeike College, of which his old bottle-washer Durgan was, he knew, extravagantly proud. Romeike's widow was dead now and her will executed, and her substance half turned already to bricks and stone and glazed tiles and all those excesses of space and appliance which the rich and authoritative imagine must needs give us Science, however ill-selected and underpaid and slighted the users of those opportunities may be. The architects had had great fun with the bequest; a quarter of the site was devoted to a huge square surrounded by dignified, if functionless, colonnades, and adorned with those stone seats of honour which are always so chill and unsatisfactory as resting places in our island climate. The Laboratories, except that they were a little shaded by the colonnades, were everything a laboratory should be; the benches were miracles of convenience, there wasn't anything the industrious investigator might want, steam, high pressures, electric power, that he couldn't get by pressing a button or turning a switch, unless perhaps it was inspiring ideas. And the new library at the end, with its greys and greens, its logarithmic computators at every table, was a miracle of mental-397- convenience.

Durgan showed his old professor the marvels.

"If he chooses to do something here," said Durgan not too hopefully, "a man can...."

"What's become of the little old room where we two used to work?" asked Trafford.

"They'll turn 'em all out presently," said Durgan, "when this part is ready, but just at present it's very much as you left it. There's been precious little research done there since you went away—not what I call research. Females chiefly—and boys. Playing at it. Making themselves into D.Sc.'s by a baby research instead of a man's examination. It's like broaching a thirty-two gallon cask full of Pap to think of it. Lord, sir, the swill! Research! Counting and weighing things! Professor Lake's all right, I suppose, but his work was mostly mathematical; he didn't do much of it here. No, the old days ended, sir, when you...."

He arrested himself, and obviously changed his words. "Got busy with other things."

Trafford surveyed the place; it seemed to him to have shrunken a little in the course of the three years that had intervened since he resigned his position. On the wall at the back there still hung, fly-blown and a little crumpled, an old table of constants he had made for his elasticity researches. Lake had kept it there, for Lake was a man of generous appreciations, and rather proud to follow in the footsteps of an investigator of Trafford's subtlety and vigor. The old sink in the corner where Trafford had once swilled his watch glasses and filled his beakers had been replaced by one of a more modern construction, and the combustion cupboard was unfamiliar, until Durgan pointed out that it had been enlarged. The ground-glass window at the east end showed still the marks of-398- an explosion that had banished a clumsy student from this sanctuary at the very beginning of Trafford's career.

"By Jove!" he said after a silence, "but I did some good work here."

"You did, sir," said Durgan.

"I wonder—I may take it up again presently."

"I doubt it, sir," said Durgan.

"Oh! But suppose I come back?"

"I don't think you would find yourself coming back, sir," said Durgan after judicious consideration.

He adduced no shadow of a reason for his doubt, but some mysterious quality in his words carried conviction to Trafford's mind. He knew that he would never do anything worth doing in molecular physics again. He knew it now conclusively for the first time.

§ 4

He found himself presently in Bond Street. The bright May day had brought out great quantities of people, so that he had to come down from altitudes of abstraction to pick his way among them.

He was struck by the prevailing interest and contentment in the faces he passed. There was no sense of insecurity betrayed, no sense of the deeps and mysteries upon which our being floats like a film. They looked solid, they looked satisfied; surely never before in the history of the world has there been so great a multitude of secure-feeling, satisfied-looking, uninquiring people as there is to-day. All the tragic great things of life seem stupendously remote from them; pain is rare, death is out of sight, religion has shrunken to an inconsiderable, comfortable, reassuring appendage of the daily life. And with the bright small things of immediacy they are so active and-399- alert. Never before has the world seen such multitudes, and a day must come when it will cease to see them for evermore.

As he shouldered his way through the throng before the Oxford Street shop windows he appreciated a queer effect, almost as it were of insanity, about all this rich and abundant and ultimately aimless life, this tremendous spawning and proliferation of uneventful humanity. These individual lives signified no doubt enormously to the individuals, but did all the shining, reflecting, changing existence that went by like bubbles in a stream, signify collectively anything more than the leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon? The pretty girl looking into the window schemed picturesque achievements with lace and ribbon, the beggar at the curb was alert for any sympathetic eye, the chauffeur on the waiting taxi-cab watched the twopences ticking on with a quiet satisfaction; each followed a keenly sought immediate end, but altogether? Where were they going altogether? Until he knew that, where was the sanity of statecraft, the excuse of any impersonal effort, the significance of anything beyond a life of appetites and self-seeking instincts?

He found that perplexing suspicion of priggishness affecting him again. Why couldn't he take the gift of life as it seemed these people took it? Why was he continually lapsing into these sombre, dimly religious questionings and doubts? Why after all should he concern himself with these riddles of some collective and ultimate meaning in things? Was he for all his ability and security so afraid of the accidents of life that on that account he clung to this conception of a larger impersonal issue which the world in general seemed to have abandoned so cheerfully? At any rate he did cling to it—and his sense-400- of it made the abounding active life of this stirring, bristling thoroughfare an almost unendurable perplexity....

By the Marble Arch a little crowd had gathered at the pavement edge. He remarked other little knots towards Paddington, and then still others, and inquiring, found the King was presently to pass. They promised themselves the gratification of seeing the King go by. They would see a carriage, they would see horses and coachmen, perhaps even they might catch sight of a raised hat and a bowing figure. And this would be a gratification to them, it would irradiate the day with a sense of experiences, exceptional and precious. For that some of them had already been standing about for two or three hours.

He thought of these waiting people for a time, and then he fell into a speculation about the King. He wondered if the King ever lay awake at three o'clock in the morning and faced the riddle of the eternities or whether he did really take himself seriously and contentedly as being in himself the vital function of the State, performed his ceremonies, went hither and thither through a wilderness of gaping watchers, slept well on it. Was the man satisfied? Was he satisfied with his empire as it was and himself as he was, or did some vision, some high, ironical intimation of the latent and lost possibilities of his empire and of the world of Things Conceivable that lies beyond the poor tawdry splendours of our present loyalties, ever dawn upon him?

Trafford's imagination conjured up a sleepless King Emperor agonizing for humanity....

He turned to his right out of Lancaster Gate into Sussex Square, and came to a stop at the pavement edge.

From across the road he surveyed the wide white-401- front and portals of the house that wasn't big enough for Marjorie.

§ 5

He let himself in with his latchkey.

Malcolm, his man, hovered at the foot of the staircase, and came forward for his hat and gloves and stick.

"Mrs. Trafford in?" asked Trafford.

"She said she would be in by four, sir."

Trafford glanced at his watch and went slowly upstairs.

On the landing there had been a rearrangement of the furniture, and he paused to survey it. The alterations had been made to accommodate a big cloisonné jar, that now glowed a wonder of white and tinted whites and luminous blues upon a dark, deep-shining stand. He noted now the curtain of the window had been changed from something—surely it had been a reddish curtain!—to a sharp clear blue with a black border, that reflected upon and sustained and encouraged the jar tremendously. And the wall behind—? Yes. Its deep brown was darkened to an absolute black behind the jar, and shaded up between the lacquer cabinets on either hand by insensible degrees to the general hue. It was wonderful, perfectly harmonious, and so subtly planned that it seemed it all might have grown, as flowers grow....

He entered the drawing-room and surveyed its long and handsome spaces. Post-impressionism was over and gone; three long pictures by young Rogerson and one of Redwood's gallant bronzes faced the tall windows between the white marble fireplaces at either end. There were two lean jars from India, a young boy's head from Florence, and in a great bowl-402- in the remotest corner a radiant mass of azaleas....

His mood of wondering at familiar things was still upon him. It came to him as a thing absurd and incongruous that this should be his home. It was all wonderfully arranged into one dignified harmony, but he felt now that at a touch of social earthquake, with a mere momentary lapse towards disorder, it would degenerate altogether into litter, lie heaped together confessed the loot it was. He came to a stop opposite one of the Rogersons, a stiffly self-conscious shop girl in her Sunday clothes, a not unsuccessful emulation of Nicholson's wonderful Mrs. Stafford of Paradise Row. Regarded as so much brown and grey and amber-gold, it was coherent in Marjorie's design, but regarded as a work of art, as a piece of expression, how madly irrelevant was its humour and implications to that room and the purposes of that room! Rogerson wasn't perhaps trying to say much, but at any rate he was trying to say something, and Redwood too was asserting freedom and adventure, and the thought of that Florentine of the bust, and the patient, careful Indian potter, and every maker of all the little casual articles about him, produced an effect of muffled, stifled assertions. Against this subdued and disciplined background of muted, inarticulate cries,—cries for beauty, for delight, for freedom, Marjorie and her world moved and rustled and chattered and competed—wearing the skins of beasts, the love-plumage of birds, the woven cocoon cases of little silkworms....

"Preposterous," he whispered.

He went to the window and stared out; turned about and regarded the gracious variety of that long, well-lit room again, then strolled thoughtfully upstairs. He reached the door of his study, and a sound of voices from the schoolroom—it had recently-403- been promoted from the rank of day nursery to this level—caught his mood. He changed his mind, crossed the landing, and was welcomed with shouts.

The rogues had been dressing up. Margharita, that child of the dreadful dawn, was now a sturdy and domineering girl of eight, and she was attired in a gilt paper mitre and her governess's white muslin blouse so tied at the wrists as to suggest long sleeves, a broad crimson band doing duty as a stole. She was Becket prepared for martyrdom at the foot of the altar. Godwin, his eldest son, was a hot-tempered, pretty-featured pleasantly self-conscious boy of nearly seven and very happy now in a white dragoon's helmet and rude but effective brown paper breastplate and greaves, as the party of assassin knights. A small acolyte in what was in all human probably one of the governess's more intimate linen garments assisted Becket, while the general congregation of Canterbury was represented by Edward, aged two, and the governess, disguised with a Union Jack tied over her head after the well-known fashion of the middle ages. After the children had welcomed their father and explained the bloody work in hand, they returned to it with solemn earnestness, while Trafford surveyed the tragedy. Godwin slew with admirable gusto, and I doubt if the actual Thomas of Canterbury showed half the stately dignity of Margharita.

The scene finished, they went on to the penance of Henry the Second; and there was a tremendous readjustment of costumes, with much consultation and secrecy. Trafford's eyes went from his offspring to the long, white-painted room, with its gay frieze of ships and gulls and its rug-variegated cork carpet of plain brick red. Everywhere it showed his wife's quick cleverness, the clean serviceable decorativeness of it all, the pretty patterned window curtains, the-404- writing desks, the little library of books, the flowers and bulbs in glasses, the counting blocks and bricks and jolly toys, the blackboard on which the children learnt to draw in bold wide strokes, the big, well-chosen German colour prints upon the walls. And the children did credit to their casket; they were not only full of vitality but full of ideas, even Edward was already a person of conversation. They were good stuff anyhow....

It was fine in a sense, Trafford thought, to have given up his own motives and curiosities to afford this airy pleasantness of upbringing for them, and then came a qualifying thought. Would they in their turn for the sake of another generation have to give up fine occupations for mean occupations, deep thoughts for shallow? Would the world get them in turn? Would the girls be hustled and flattered into advantageous marriages, that dinners and drawing-rooms might still prevail? Would the boys, after this gracious beginning, presently have to swim submerged in another generation of Blenkinses and their Talk, toil in arduous self-seeking, observe, respect and manipulate shams, succeed or fail, and succeeding, beget amidst hope and beautiful emotions yet another generation doomed to insincerities and accommodations, and so die at last—as he must die?...

He heard his wife's clear voice in the hall below, and went down to meet her. She had gone into the drawing-room, and he followed her in and through the folding doors to the hinder part of the room, where she stood ready to open a small bureau. She turned at his approach, and smiled a pleasant, habitual smile....

She was no longer the slim, quick-moving girl who had come out of the world to him when he crawled from beneath the wreckage of Solomonson's plane,-405- no longer the half-barbaric young beauty who had been revealed to him on the staircase of the Vevey villa. She was now a dignified, self-possessed woman, controlling her house and her life with a skilful, subtle appreciation of her every point and possibility. She was wearing now a simple walking dress of brownish fawn colour, and her hat was touched with a steely blue that made her blue eyes seem handsome and hard, and toned her hair to a merely warm brown. She had, as it were, subdued her fine colours into a sheath in order that she might presently draw them again with more effect.

"Hullo, old man!" she said, "you home?"

He nodded. "The club bored me—and I couldn't work."

Her voice had something of a challenge and defiance in it. "I've been looking at a house," she said. "Alice Carmel told me of it. It isn't in Berkeley Square, but it's near it. It's rather good."

He met her eye. "That's—premature," he said.

"We can't go on living in this one."

"I won't go to another."

"But why?"

"I just won't."

"It isn't the money?"

"No," said Trafford, with sudden fierce resentment. "I've overtaken you and beaten you there, Marjorie."

She stared at the harsh bitterness of his voice. She was about to speak when the door opened, and Malcom ushered in Aunt Plessington and Uncle Hubert. Husband and wife hung for a moment, and then realized their talk was at an end....

Marjorie went forward to greet her aunt, careless now of all that once stupendous Influence might think of her. She had long ceased to feel even the-406- triumph of victory in her big house, her costly, dignified clothes, her assured and growing social importance. For five years Aunt Plessington had not even ventured to advise; had once or twice admired. All that business of Magnet was—even elaborately—forgotten....

Seven years of feverish self-assertion had left their mark upon both the Plessingtons. She was leaner, more gauntly untidy, more aggressively ill-dressed. She no longer dressed carelessly, she defied the world with her clothes, waved her tattered and dingy banners in its face. Uncle Hubert was no fatter, but in some queer way he had ceased to be thin. Like so many people whose peripheries defy the manifest quaint purpose of Providence, he was in a state of thwarted adiposity, and with all the disconnectedness and weak irritability characteristic of his condition. He had developed a number of nervous movements, chin-strokings, cheek-scratchings, and incredulous pawings at his more salient features.

"Isn't it a lark?" began Aunt Plessington, with something like a note of apprehension in her highpitched voice, and speaking almost from the doorway, "we're making a call together. I and Hubert! It's an attack in force."

Uncle Hubert goggled in the rear and stroked his chin, and tried to get together a sort of facial expression.

The Traffords made welcoming noises, and Marjorie advanced to meet her aunt.

"We want you to do something for us," said Aunt Plessington, taking two hands with two hands....

In the intervening years the Movement had had ups and downs; it had had a boom, which had ended abruptly in a complete loss of voice for Aunt Plessington—she had tried to run it on a patent non-stimulating-407- food, and then it had entangled itself with a new cult of philanthropic theosophy from which it had been extracted with difficulty and in a damaged condition. It had never completely recovered from that unhappy association. Latterly Aunt Plessington had lost her nerve, and she had taken to making calls upon people with considerable and sometimes embarrassing demand for support, urging them to join committees, take chairs, stake reputations, speak and act as foils for her. If they refused she lost her temper very openly and frankly, and became industriously vindictive. She circulated scandals or created them. Her old assurance had deserted her; the strangulated contralto was losing its magic power, she felt, in this degenerating England it had ruled so long. In the last year or so she had become extremely snappy with Uncle Hubert. She ascribed much of the Movement's futility to the decline of his administrative powers and the increasing awkwardness of his gestures, and she did her utmost to keep him up to the mark. Her only method of keeping him up to the mark was to jerk the bit. She had now come to compel Marjorie to address a meeting that was to inaugurate a new phase in the Movement's history, and she wanted Marjorie because she particularly wanted a daring, liberal, and spiritually amorous bishop, who had once told her with a note of profound conviction that Marjorie was a very beautiful woman. She was so intent upon her purpose that she scarcely noticed Trafford. He slipped from the room unobserved under cover of her playful preliminaries, and went to the untidy little apartment overhead which served in that house as his study. He sat down at the big desk, pushed his methodically arranged papers back, and drummed on the edge with his fingers.

"I'm damned if we have that bigger house," said-408- Trafford.

§ 6

He felt he wanted to confirm and establish this new resolution, to go right away to Labrador for a year. He wanted to tell someone the thing definitely. He would have gone downstairs again to Marjorie, but she was submerged and swimming desperately against the voluble rapids of Aunt Plessington's purpose. It might be an hour before that attack withdrew. Presently there would be other callers. He decided to have tea with his mother and talk to her about this new break in the course of his life.

Except that her hair was now grey and her brown eyes by so much contrast brighter, Mrs. Trafford's appearance had altered very little in the ten years of her only son's marriage. Whatever fresh realizations of the inevitably widening separation between parent and child these years had brought her, she had kept to herself. She had watched her daughter-in-law sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with perplexity, always with a jealous resolve to let no shadow of jealousy fall between them. Marjorie had been sweet and friendly to her, but after the first outburst of enthusiastic affection, she had neither offered nor invited confidences. Old Mrs. Trafford had talked of Marjorie to her son guardedly, and had marked and respected a growing indisposition on his part to discuss his wife. For a year or so after his marriage she had ached at times with a sense of nearly intolerable loneliness, and then the new interests she had found for herself had won their way against this depression. The new insurrectionary movement of women that had distinguished those years had attacked her by its emotion and repelled her by its crudity, and she had resolved, quite in the spirit of the man who-409- had shaped her life, to make a systematic study of all the contributory strands that met in this difficult tangle. She tried to write, but she found that the poetic gift, the gift of the creative and illuminating phrase which alone justifies writing, was denied to her, and so she sought to make herself wise, to read and hear, and discuss and think over these things, and perhaps at last inspire and encourage writing in others.

Her circle of intimates grew, and she presently remarked with a curious interest that while she had lost the confidences of her own son and his wife, she was becoming the confidant of an increasing number of other people. They came to her, she perceived, because she was receptive and sympathetic and without a claim upon them or any interest to complicate the freedoms of their speech with her. They came to her, because she did not belong to them nor they to her. It is, indeed, the defect of all formal and established relationship, that it embarrasses speech, and taints each phase in intercourse with the flavour of diplomacy. One can be far more easily outspoken to a casual stranger one may never see again than to that inseparable other, who may misinterpret, who may disapprove or misunderstand, and who will certainly in the measure of that discord remember....

It became at last a matter of rejoicing to Mrs. Trafford that the ties of the old instinctive tenderness between herself and her son, the memories of pain and tears and the passionate conflict of childhood, were growing so thin and lax and inconsiderable, that she could even hope some day to talk to him again—almost as she talked to the young men and young women who drifted out of the unknown to her and sat in her little room and sought to express their perplexities-410- and listened to her advice....

It seemed to her that afternoon the wished-for day had come.

Trafford found her just returned from a walk in Kensington Gardens and writing a note at her desk under the narrow sunlit window that looked upon the High Street. "Finish your letter, little mother," he said, and took possession of the hearthrug.

When she had sealed and addressed her letter, she turned her head and found him looking at his father's portrait.

"Done?" he asked, becoming aware of her eyes.

She took her letter into the hall and returned to him, closing the door behind her.

"I'm going away, little mother," he said with an unconvincing off-handedness. "I'm going to take a holiday."

"Alone?"

"Yes. I want a change. I'm going off somewhere—untrodden ground as near as one can get it nowadays—Labrador."

Their eyes met for a moment.

"Is it for long?"

"The best part of a year."

"I thought you were going on with your research work again."

"No." He paused. "I'm going to Labrador."

"Why?" she asked.

"I'm going to think."

She found nothing to say for a moment. "It's good," she remarked, "to think." Then, lest she herself should seem to be thinking too enormously, she rang the bell to order the tea that was already on its way.

"It surprises a mother," she said, when the maid-411- had come and gone, "when her son surprises her."

"You see," he repeated, as though it explained everything, "I want to think."

Then after a pause she asked some questions about Labrador; wasn't it very cold, very desert, very dangerous and bitter, and he answered informingly. How was he going to stay there? He would go up the country with an expedition, build a hut and remain behind. Alone? Yes—thinking. Her eyes rested on his face for a time. "It will be—lonely," she said after a pause.

She saw him as a little still speck against immense backgrounds of snowy wilderness.

The tea-things came before mother and son were back at essentials again. Then she asked abruptly: "Why are you going away like this?"

"I'm tired of all this business and finance," he said after a pause.

"I thought you would be," she answered as deliberately.

"Yes. I've had enough of things. I want to get clear. And begin again somehow."

She felt they both hung away from the essential aspect. Either he or she must approach it. She decided that she would, that it was a less difficult thing for her than for him.

"And Marjorie?" she asked.

He looked into his mother's eyes very quietly. "You see," he went on deliberately disregarding her question, "I'm beached. I'm aground. I'm spoilt now for the old researches—spoilt altogether. And I don't like this life I'm leading. I detest it. While I was struggling it had a kind of interest. There was an excitement in piling up the first twenty thousand. But now—! It's empty, it's aimless, it's incessant...."

He paused. She turned to the tea-things, and lit-412- the spirit lamp under the kettle. It seemed a little difficult to do, and her hand trembled. When she turned on him again it was with an effort.

"Does Marjorie like the life you are leading?" she asked, and pressed her lips together tightly.

He spoke with a bitterness in his voice that astonished her. "Oh, she likes it."

"Are you sure?"

He nodded.

"She won't like it without you."

"Oh, that's too much! It's her world. It's what she's done—what she's made. She can have it; she can keep it. I've played my part and got it for her. But now—now I'm free to go. I will go. She's got everything else. I've done my half of the bargain. But my soul's my own. If I want to go away and think, I will. Not even Marjorie shall stand in the way of that."

She made no answer to this outburst for a couple of seconds. Then she threw out, "Why shouldn't Marjorie think, too?"

He considered that for some moments. "She doesn't," he said, as though the words came from the roots of his being.

"But you two——"

"We don't talk. It's astonishing—how we don't. We don't. We can't. We try to, and we can't. And she goes her way, and now—I will go mine."

"And leave her?"

He nodded.

"In London?"

"With all the things she cares for."

"Except yourself."

"I'm only a means——"

She turned her quiet face to him. "You know,"-413- she said, "that isn't true."...

"No," she repeated, to his silent contradiction.

"I've watched her," she went on. "You're not a means. I'd have spoken long ago if I had thought that. Haven't I watched? Haven't I lain awake through long nights thinking about her and you, thinking over every casual mood, every little sign—longing to help—helpless." ... She struggled with herself, for she was weeping. "It has come to this," she said in a whisper, and choked back a flood of tears.

Trafford stood motionless, watching her. She became active. She moved round the table. She looked at the kettle, moved the cups needlessly, made tea, and stood waiting for a moment before she poured it out. "It's so hard to talk to you," she said, "and about all this.... I care so much. For her. And for you.... Words don't come, dear.... One says stupid things."

She poured out the tea, and left the cups steaming, and came and stood before him.

"You see," she said, "you're ill. You aren't just. You've come to an end. You don't know where you are and what you want to do. Neither does she, my dear. She's as aimless as you—and less able to help it. Ever so much less able."

"But she doesn't show it. She goes on. She wants things and wants things——"

"And you want to go away. It's the same thing. It's exactly the same thing. It's dissatisfaction. Life leaves you empty and craving—leaves you with nothing to do but little immediate things that turn to dust as you do them. It's her trouble, just as it's your trouble."

"But she doesn't show it."

"Women don't. Not so much. Perhaps even-414- she doesn't know it. Half the women in our world don't know—and for a woman it's so much easier to go on—so many little things."...

Trafford tried to grasp the intention of this. "Mother," he said, "I mean to go away."

"But think of her!"

"I've thought. Now I've got to think of myself."

"You can't—without her."

"I will. It's what I'm resolved to do."

"Go right away?"

"Right away."

"And think?"

He nodded.

"Find out—what it all means, my boy?"

"Yes. So far as I'm concerned."

"And then——?"

"Come back, I suppose. I haven't thought."

"To her?"

He didn't answer. She went and stood beside him, leaning upon the mantel. "Godwin," she said, "she'd only be further behind.... You've got to take her with you."

He stood still and silent.

"You've got to think things out with her. If you don't——"

"I can't."

"Then you ought to go away with her——" She stopped.

"For good?" he asked.

"Yes."

They were both silent for a space. Then Mrs. Trafford gave her mind to the tea that was cooling in the cups, and added milk and sugar. She spoke again with the table between them.

"I've thought so much of these things," she said with the milk-jug in her hand. "It's not only you-415- two, but others. And all the movement about us.... Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings. Only——You know, Godwin, all these things are so difficult to express. Woman's come out of being a slave, and yet she isn't an equal.... We've had a sort of sham emancipation, and we haven't yet come to the real one."

She put down the milk-jug on the tray with an air of grave deliberation. "If you go away from her and make the most wonderful discoveries about life and yourself, it's no good—unless she makes them too. It's no good at all.... You can't live without her in the end, any more than she can live without you. You may think you can, but I've watched you. You don't want to go away from her, you want to go away from the world that's got hold of her, from the dresses and parties and the competition and all this complicated flatness we have to live in.... It wouldn't worry you a bit, if it hadn't got hold of her. You don't want to get out of it for your own sake. You are out of it. You are as much out of it as any one can be. Only she holds you in it, because she isn't out of it. Your going away will do nothing. She'll still be in it—and still have her hold on you.... You've got to take her away. Or else—if you go away—in the end it will be just like a ship, Godwin, coming back to its moorings."

She watched his thoughtful face for some moments, then arrested herself just in time in the act of putting a second portion of sugar into each of the cups. She handed her son his tea, and he took it mechanically. "You're a wise little mother," he said. "I didn't see things in that light.... I wonder if you're right."

"I know I am," she said.-416-

"I've thought more and more,—it was Marjorie."

"It's the world."

"Women made the world. All the dress and display and competition."

Mrs. Trafford thought. "Sex made the world. Neither men nor women. But the world has got hold of the women tighter than it has the men. They're deeper in." She looked up into his face. "Take her with you," she said, simply.

"She won't come," said Trafford, after considering it.

Mrs. Trafford reflected. "She'll come—if you make her," she said.

"She'll want to bring two housemaids."

"I don't think you know Marjorie as well as I do."

"But she can't——"

"She can. It's you—you'll want to take two housemaids for her. Even you.... Men are not fair to women."

Trafford put his untasted tea upon the mantelshelf, and confronted his mother with a question point blank. "Does Marjorie care for me?" he asked.

"You're the sun of her world."

"But she goes her way."

"She's clever, she's full of life, full of activities, eager to make and arrange and order; but there's nothing she is, nothing she makes, that doesn't centre on you."

"But if she cared, she'd understand!"

"My dear, do you understand?"

He stood musing. "I had everything clear," he said. "I saw my way to Labrador...."

Her little clock pinged the hour. "Good God!" he said, "I'm to be at dinner somewhere at seven. We're going to a first night. With the Bernards, I-417- think. Then I suppose we'll have a supper. Always life is being slashed to tatters by these things. Always. One thinks in snatches of fifty minutes. It's dementia...."

§ 7

They dined at the Loretto Restaurant with the Bernards and Richard Hampden and Mrs. Godwin Capes, the dark-eyed, quiet-mannered wife of the dramatist, a woman of impulsive speech and long silences, who had subsided from an early romance (Capes had been divorced for her while she was still a mere girl) into a markedly correct and exclusive mother of daughters. Through the dinner Marjorie was watching Trafford and noting the deep preoccupation of his manner. He talked a little to Mrs. Bernard until it was time for Hampden to entertain her, then finding Mrs. Capes was interested in Bernard, he lapsed into thought. Presently Marjorie discovered his eyes scrutinizing herself.

She hoped the play would catch his mind, but the play seemed devised to intensify his sense of the tawdry unreality of contemporary life. Bernard filled the intervals with a conventional enthusiasm. Capes didn't appear.

"He doesn't seem to care to see his things," his wife explained.

"It's so brilliant," said Bernard.

"He has to do it," said Mrs. Capes slowly, her sombre eyes estimating the crowded stalls below. "It isn't what he cares to do."

The play was in fact an admirable piece of English stagecraft, and it dealt exclusively with that unreal other world of beings the English theatre has for its own purposes developed. Just as Greece-418- through the ages evolved and polished and perfected the idealized life of its Homeric poems, so the British mind has evolved their Stage Land to embody its more honourable dreams, full of heroic virtues, incredible honour, genial worldliness, childish villainies, profound but amiable waiters and domestics, pathetic shepherds and preposterous crimes. Capes, needing an income, had mastered the habits and customs of this imagined world as one learns a language; success endorsed his mastery; he knew exactly how deeply to underline an irony and just when it is fit and proper for a good man to call upon "God!" or cry out "Damn!" In this play he had invented a situation in which a charming and sympathetic lady had killed a gross and drunken husband in self-defence, almost but not quite accidentally, and had then appealed to the prodigious hero for assistance in the resulting complications. At a great cost of mental suffering to himself he had told his First and Only Lie to shield her. Then years after he had returned to England—the first act happened, of course in India—to find her on the eve of marrying, without any of the preliminary confidences common among human beings, an old school friend of his. (In plays all Gentlemen have been at school together, and one has been the other's fag.) The audience had to be interested in the problem of what the prodigious hero was to do in this prodigious situation. Should he maintain a colossal silence, continue his shielding, and let his friend marry the murderess saved by his perjury, or——?... The dreadful quandary! Indeed, the absolute—inconvenience!

Marjorie watched Trafford in the corner of the box, as he listened rather contemptuously to the statement of the evening's Problem and then lapsed again into a brooding quiet. She wished she understood-419- his moods better. She felt there was more in this than a mere resentment at her persistence about the new house....

Why didn't he go on with things?...

This darkling mood of his had only become manifest to her during the last three or four years of their life. Previously, of course, he had been irritable at times.

Were they less happy now than they had been in the little house in Chelsea? It had really been a horrible little house. And yet there had been a brightness then—a nearness....

She found her mind wandering away upon a sort of stock-taking expedition. How much of real happiness had she and Trafford had together? They ought by every standard to be so happy....

She declined the Bernard's invitation to a chafing-dish supper, and began to talk so soon as she and Trafford had settled into the car.

"Rag," she said, "something's the matter?"

"Well—yes."

"The house?"

"Yes—the house."

Marjorie considered through a little interval.

"Old man, why are you so prejudiced against a bigger house?"

"Oh, because the one we have bores me, and the next one will bore me more."

"But try it."

"I don't want to."

"Well," she said and lapsed into silence.

"And then," he asked, "what are we going to do?"

"Going to do—when?"

"After the new house——"

"I'm going to open out," she said.-420-

He made no answer.

"I want to open out. I want you to take your place in the world, the place you deserve."

"A four-footman place?"

"Oh! the house is only a means."

He thought upon that. "A means," he asked, "to what? Look here, Marjorie, what do you think you are up to with me and yourself? What do you see me doing—in the years ahead?"

She gave him a silent and thoughtful profile for a second or so.

"At first I suppose you are going on with your researches."

"Well?"

"Then——I must tell you what I think of you, Rag. Politics——"

"Good Lord!"

"You've a sort of power. You could make things noble."

"And then? Office?"

"Why not? Look at the little men they are."

"And then perhaps a still bigger house?"

"You're not fair to me."

He pulled up the bearskin over his knees.

"Marjorie!" he said. "You see——We aren't going to do any of those things at all.... No!..."

"I can't go on with my researches," he explained. "That's what you don't understand. I'm not able to get back to work. I shall never do any good research again. That's the real trouble, Marjorie, and it makes all the difference. As for politics——I can't touch politics. I despise politics. I think this empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it, silly, silly beyond words; temporary, accidental, foolish, a mere stop-gap—like a gipsey's roundabout-421- in a place where one will presently build a house.... You don't help make the house by riding on the roundabout.... There's no clear knowledge—no clear purpose.... Only research matters—and expression perhaps—I suppose expression is a sort of research—until we get that—that sufficient knowledge. And you see, I can't take up my work again. I've lost something...."

She waited.

"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "and I feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I've been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Business and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's attention or imagination wander—and it's so degrading. Hopelessly degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. I don't want to buy things. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It's exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened—on nothing! Nothing!"

"This is a mood," she whispered to his pause.

"It isn't a mood, it's a fact.... I've got nothing ahead, and I don't know how to get back. My life's no good to me any more. I've spent myself."

She looked at him with dismayed eyes. "But," she said, "this is a mood."

"No," he said, "no mood, but conviction. I know...."

He started. The car had stopped at their house,-422- and Malcolm was opening the door of the car. They descended silently, and went upstairs in silence.

He came into her room presently and sat down by her fireside. She had gone to her dressing-table and unfastened a necklace; now with this winking and glittering in her hand she came and stood beside him.

"Rag," she said, "I don't know what to say. This isn't so much of a surprise.... I felt that somehow life was disappointing you, that I was disappointing you. I've felt it endless times, but more so lately. I haven't perhaps dared to let myself know just how much.... But isn't it what life is? Doesn't every wife disappoint her husband? We're none of us inexhaustible. After all, we've had a good time; isn't it a little ungrateful to forget?..."

"Look here, Rag," she said. "I don't know what to do. If I did know, I would do it.... What are we to do?"

"Think," he suggested.

"We've got to live as well as think."

"It's the immense troublesome futility of—everything," he said.

"Well—let us cease to be futile. Let us do. You say there is no grip for you in research, that you despise politics.... There's no end of trouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, change the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves...."

"Who are we that we should tamper with the lives of others?"

"But one must do something."

He thought that over.

"No," he said "that's the universal blunder nowadays. One must do the right thing. And we don't know the right thing, Marjorie. That's the very-423- heart of the trouble.... Does this life satisfy you? If it did would you always be so restless?..."

"But," she said, "think of the good things in life?"

"It's just the good, the exquisite things in life, that make me rebel against this life we are leading. It's because I've seen the streaks of gold that I know the rest for dirt. When I go cheating and scheming to my office, and come back to find you squandering yourself upon a horde of chattering, overdressed women, when I think that that is our substance and everyday and what we are, then it is I remember most the deep and beautiful things.... It is impossible, dear, it is intolerable that life was made beautiful for us—just for these vulgarities."

"Isn't there——" She hesitated. "Love—still?"

"But——Has it been love? Love is a thing that grows. But we took it—as people take flowers out of a garden, cut them off, put them in water.... How much of our daily life has been love? How much of it mere consequences of the love we've left behind us?... We've just cohabited and 'made love'—you and I—and thought of a thousand other things...."

He looked up at her. "Oh, I love a thousand things about you," he said. "But do I love you, Marjorie? Have I got you? Haven't I lost you—haven't we both lost something, the very heart of it all? Do you think that we were just cheated by instinct, that there wasn't something in it we felt and thought was there? And where is it now? Where is that brightness and wonder, Marjorie, and the pride and the immense unlimited hope?"

She was still for a moment, then knelt very swiftly before him and held out her arms.

"Oh Rag!" she said, with a face of tender beauty.-424- He took her finger tips in his, dropped them and stood up above her.

"My dear," he cried, "my dear! why do you always want to turn love into—touches?... Stand up again. Stand up there, my dear; don't think I've ceased to love you, but stand up there and let me talk to you as one man to another. If we let this occasion slide to embraces...."

He stopped short.

She crouched before the fire at his feet. "Go on," she said, "go on."

"I feel now that all our lives now, Marjorie——We have come to a crisis. I feel that now——now is the time. Either we shall save ourselves now or we shall never save ourselves. It is as if something had gathered and accumulated and could wait no longer. If we do not seize this opportunity——Then our lives will go on as they have gone on, will become more and more a matter of small excitements and elaborate comforts and distraction...."

He stopped this halting speech and then broke out again.

"Oh! why should the life of every day conquer us? Why should generation after generation of men have these fine beginnings, these splendid dreams of youth, attempt so much, achieve so much and then, then become—this! Look at this room, this litter of little satisfactions! Look at your pretty books there, a hundred minds you have pecked at, bright things of the spirit that attracted you as jewels attract a jackdaw. Look at the glass and silver, and that silk from China! And we are in the full tide of our years, Marjorie. Now is the very crown and best of our lives. And this is what we do, we sample, we accumulate. For this we loved, for this we hoped. Do you-425- remember when we were young—that life seemed so splendid—it was intolerable we should ever die?... The splendid dream! The intimations of greatness!... The miserable failure!"

He raised clenched fists. "I won't stand it, Marjorie. I won't endure it. Somehow, in some way, I will get out of this life—and you with me. I have been brooding upon this and brooding, but now I know...."

"But how?" asked Marjorie, with her bare arms about her knees, staring into the fire. "How?"

"We must get out of its constant interruptions, its incessant vivid, petty appeals...."

"We might go away—to Switzerland."

"We went to Switzerland. Didn't we agree—it was our second honeymoon. It isn't a honeymoon we need. No, we'll have to go further than that."

A sudden light broke upon Marjorie's mind. She realized he had a plan. She lifted a fire-lit face to him and looked at him with steady eyes and asked——

"Where?"

"Ever so much further."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

"You do. You've planned something."

"I don't know, Marjorie. At least—I haven't made up my mind. Where it is very lonely. Cold and remote. Away from all this——" His mind stopped short, and he ended with a cry: "Oh! God! how I want to get out of all this!"

He sat down in her arm-chair, and bowed his face on his hands.

Then abruptly he stood up and went out of the room.

§ 8

When in five minutes' time he came back into her-426- room she was still upon her hearthrug before the fire, with her necklace in her hand, the red reflections of the flames glowing and winking in her jewels and in her eyes. He came and sat again in her chair.

"I have been ranting," he said. "I feel I've been—eloquent. You make me feel like an actor-manager, in a play by Capes.... You are the most difficult person for me to talk to in all the world—because you mean so much to me."

She moved impulsively and checked herself and crouched away from him. "I mustn't touch your hand," she whispered.

"I want to explain."

"You've got to explain."

"I've got quite a definite plan.... But a sort of terror seized me. It was like—shyness."

"I know. I knew you had a plan."

"You see.... I mean to go to Labrador."

He leant forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands extended, explanatory. He wanted intensely that she should understand and agree and his desire made him clumsy, now slow and awkward, now glibly and unsatisfyingly eloquent. But she comprehended his quality better than he knew. They were to go away to Labrador, this snowy desert of which she had scarcely heard, to camp in the very heart of the wilderness, two hundred miles or more from any human habitation——

"But how long?" she asked abruptly.

"The better part of a year."

"And we are to talk?"

"Yes," he said, "talk and think ourselves together—oh!—the old phrases carry it all—find God...."

"It is what I dreamt of, Rag, years ago."-427-

"Will you come," he cried, "out of all this?"

She leant across the hearthrug, and seized and kissed his hand....

Then, with one of those swift changes of hers, she was in revolt. "But, Rag," she exclaimed, "this is dreaming. We are not free. There are the children! Rag! We cannot leave the children!"

"We can," he said. "We must."

"But, my dear!—our duty!"

"Is it a mother's duty always to keep with her children? They will be looked after, their lives are organized, there is my mother close at hand.... What is the good of having children at all—unless their world is to be better than our world?... What are we doing to save them from the same bathos as this—to which we have come? We give them food and health and pictures and lessons, that's all very well while they are just little children; but we've got no religion to give them, no aim, no sense of a general purpose. What is the good of bread and health—and no worship?... What can we say to them when they ask us why we brought them into the world?—We happened—you happened. What are we to tell them when they demand the purpose of all this training, all these lessons? When they ask what we are preparing them for? Just that you, too, may have children! Is that any answer? Marjorie, it's common-sense to try this over—to make this last supreme effort—just as it will be common-sense to separate if we can't get the puzzle solved together."

"Separate!"

"Separate. Why not? We can afford it. Of course, we shall separate."

"But Rag!—separate!"

He faced her protest squarely. "Life is not worth living," he said, "unless it has more to hold-428- it together than ours has now. If we cannot escape together, then—I will go alone."...

§ 9

They parted that night resolved to go to Labrador together, with the broad outline of their subsequent journey already drawn. Each lay awake far into the small hours thinking of this purpose and of one another, with a strange sense of renewed association. Each woke to a morning of sunshine heavy-eyed. Each found that overnight decision remote and incredible. It was like something in a book or a play that had moved them very deeply. They came down to breakfast, and helped themselves after the wonted fashion of several years, Marjorie with a skilful eye to the large order of her household; the Times had one or two characteristic letters which interested them both; there was the usual picturesque irruption of the children and a distribution of early strawberries among them. Trafford had two notes in his correspondence which threw a new light upon the reconstruction of the Norton-Batsford company in which he was interested; he formed a definite conclusion upon the situation, and went quite normally to his study and the telephone to act upon that.

It was only as the morning wore on that it became real to him that he and Marjorie had decided to leave the world. Then, with the Norton-Batsford business settled, he sat at his desk and mused. His apathy passed. His imagination began to present first one picture and then another of his retreat. He walked along Oxford Street to his Club thinking—"soon we shall be out of all this." By the time he was at lunch in his Club, Labrador had become again the magic refuge it had seemed the day before. After-429- lunch he went to work in the library, finding out books about Labrador, and looking up the details of the journey.

But his sense of futility and hopeless oppression had vanished. He walked along the corridor and down the great staircase, and without a trace of the despairful hostility of the previous day, passed Blenkins, talking grey bosh with infinite thoughtfulness. He nodded easily to Blenkins. He was going out of it all, as a man might do who discovers after years of weary incarceration that the walls of his cell are made of thin paper. The time when Blenkins seemed part of a prison-house of routine and invincible stupidity seemed ten ages ago.

In Pall Mall Trafford remarked Lady Grampians and the Countess of Claridge, two women of great influence, in a big green car, on the way no doubt to create or sustain or destroy; and it seemed to him that it was limitless ages since these poor old dears with their ridiculous hats and their ridiculous airs, their luncheons and dinners and dirty aggressive old minds, had sent tidal waves of competitive anxiety into his home....

He found himself jostling through the shopping crowd on the sunny side of Regent Street. He felt now that he looked over the swarming, preoccupied heads at distant things. He and Marjorie were going out of it all, going clean out of it all. They were going to escape from society and shopping, and petty engagements and incessant triviality—as a bird flies up out of weeds.

§ 10

But Marjorie fluctuated more than he did.

There were times when the expedition for which he was now preparing rapidly and methodically seemed-430- to her the most adventurously-beautiful thing that had ever come to her, and times when it seemed the maddest and most hopeless of eccentricities. There were times when she had devastating premonitions of filth, hunger, strain and fatigue, damp and cold, when her whole being recoiled from the project, when she could even think of staying secure in London and letting him go alone. She developed complicated anxieties for the children; she found reasons for further inquiries, for delay. "Why not," she suggested, "wait a year?"

"No," he said, "I won't. I mean we are to do this, and do it now, and nothing but sheer physical inability to do it will prevent my carrying it out.... And you? Of course you are to come. I can't drag you shrieking all the way to Labrador; short of that I'm going to make you come with me."

She sat and looked up at him with dark lights in her upturned eyes, and a little added warmth in her cheek. "You've never forced my will like this before," she said, in a low voice. "Never."

He was too intent upon his own resolve to heed her tones.

"It hasn't seemed necessary somehow," he said, considering her statement. "Now it does."

"This is something final," she said.

"It is final."

She found an old familiar phrasing running through her head, as she sat crouched together, looking up at his rather gaunt, very intent face, the speech of another woman echoing to her across a vast space of years: "Whither thou goest I will go——"

"In Labrador," he began....

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). Marriage. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35338/35338-h/35338-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.