"Naturally," I said with an air of disposing of an argument, and then paused.
"Why should one have to tie oneself always to one other human being?"
she asked. "Why must it be like that?"
I do not remember how I tried to meet this extraordinary idea. "One loves," I may have said. The subtle scepticisms of her mind went altogether beyond my habits of thinking; it had never occurred to me that there was any other way of living except in these voluntary and involuntary mutual servitudes in which men and women live and die. "If you love me," I urged, "if you love me---- I want nothing better in all my life but to love and serve and keep you and make you happy."
She surveyed me and weighed my words against her own.
"I love meeting you," she said. "I love your going because it means that afterwards you will come again. I love this--this slipping out to you. But up there, there is a room in the house that is _my_ place--me--my own. n.o.body follows me there. I want to go on living, Stevenage, just as I am living now. I don"t want to become someone"s certain possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. No, not even to you."
"But if you love," I cried.
"To you least of all. Don"t you see?--I want to be wonderful to you, Stevenage, more than to anyone. I want--I want always to make your heart beat faster. I want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating faster. Always and always I want it to be like that. Just as it has been on these mornings. It has been beautiful--altogether beautiful."
"Yes," I said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues I had never faced before.
"It isn"t," I said, "how people live."
"It is how I want to live," said Mary.
"It isn"t the way life goes."
"I want it to be. Why shouldn"t it be? Why at any rate shouldn"t it be for me?"
-- 4
I made some desperate schemes to grow suddenly rich and powerful, and I learnt for the first time my true economic value. Already my father and I had been discussing my prospects in life and he had been finding me vague and difficult. I was full of large political intentions, but so far I had made no definite plans for a living that would render my political ambitions possible. It was becoming apparent to me that for a poor man in England, the only possible route to political distinction is the bar, and I was doing my best to reconcile myself to the years of waiting and practice that would have to precede my political debut.
My father disliked the law. And I do not think it reconciled him to the idea of my being a barrister that afterwards I hoped to become a politician. "It isn"t in our temperament, Stephen," he said. "It"s a pushing, bullying, cramming, base life. I don"t see you succeeding there, and I don"t see myself rejoicing even if you do succeed. You have to shout, and Strattons don"t shout; you have to be smart and tricky and there"s never been a smart and tricky Stratton yet; you have to s.n.a.t.c.h opportunities and get the better of the people and misrepresent the realities of every case you touch. You"re a paid misrepresenter. They say you"ll get a fellowship, Stephen. Why not stay up, and do some thinking for a year or so. There"ll be enough to keep you. Write a little."
"The bar," I said, "is only a means to an end."
"If you succeed."
"If I succeed. One has to take the chances of life everywhere."
"And what is the end?"
"Constructive statesmanship."
"Not in that way," said my father, pouring himself a second gla.s.s of port, and turned over my high-sounding phrase with a faint hint of distaste; "Constructive Statesmanship. No. Once a barrister always a barrister. You"ll only be a party politician.... Vulgar men....
Vulgar.... If you succeed that is...."
He criticized me but he did not oppose me, and already in the beginning of the summer we had settled that I should be called to the bar.
Now suddenly I wanted to go back upon all these determinations. I began to demand in the intellectual slang of the time "more actuality," and to amaze my father with talk about empire makers and the greatness of Lord Strathcona and Cecil Rhodes. Why, I asked, shouldn"t I travel for a year in search of opportunity? At Oxford I had made acquaintance with a son of Pramley"s, the big Mexican and Borneo man, and to him I wrote, apropos of a half-forgotten midnight talk in the rooms of some common friend. He wrote back with the suggestion that I should go and talk to his father, and I tore myself away from Mary and went up to see that great exploiter of undeveloped possibilities and have one of the most illuminating and humiliating conversations in the world. He was, I remember, a little pale-complexioned, slow-speaking man with a humorous blue eye, a faint, just perceptible northern accent and a trick of keeping silent for a moment after you had finished speaking, and he talked to me as one might talk to a child of eight who wanted to know how one could become a commander-in-chief. His son had evidently emphasized my Union reputation, and he would have been quite willing, I perceived, to give me employment if I had displayed the slightest intelligence or ability in any utilizable direction. But quite dreadfully he sounded my equipment with me and showed me the emptiness of my stores.
"You want some way that gives you a chance of growing rich rapidly," he said. "Aye. It"s not a bad idea. But there"s others, you know, have tried that game before ye.
"You don"t want riches just for riches but for an end. Aye! Aye! It"s the spending attracts ye. You"d not have me think you"d the sin of avarice. I"m clear on that about ye.
"Well," he explained, "it"s all one of three things we do, you know--prospecting and forestalling and--just stealing, and the only respectable way is prospecting. You"d prefer the respectable way, I suppose?... I knew ye would. Well, let"s see what chances ye have."
And he began to probe my practical knowledge. It was like an unfit man stripping for a medical inspection. Did I know anything of oil, of rubber, of sugar, of substances generally, had I studied mineralogy or geology, had I any ideas of industrial processes, of technical chemistry, of rare minerals, of labor problems and the handling of alien labor, of the economics of railway management or of camping out in dry, thinly populated countries, or again could I maybe speak Spanish or Italian or Russian? The little dons who career about Oxford afoot and awheel, wearing old gowns and mortarboards, giggling over Spooner"s latest, and being tremendous "characters" in the intervals of concocting the ruling-cla.s.s mind, had turned my mind away from such matters altogether. I had left that sort of thing to Germans and east-end Jews and young men from the upper-grade board schools of Sheffield and Birmingham. I was made to realize appalling wildernesses of ignorance....
"You see," said old Pramley, "you don"t seem to know anything whatever.
It"s a deeficulty. It"ll stand in your way a little now, though no doubt you"d be quick at the uptake--after all the education they"ve given ye.... But it stands in your way, if ye think of setting out to do something large and effective, just immediately...."
Moreover it came out, I forget now how, that I hadn"t clearly grasped the difference between c.u.mulative and non-c.u.mulative preference shares....
I remember too how I dined alone that evening in a mood between frantic exasperation and utter abas.e.m.e.nt in the window of the Mediated Universities Club, of which I was a junior member under the undergraduate rule. And I lay awake all night in one of the austere club bedrooms, saying to old Pramley a number of extremely able and penetrating things that had unhappily not occurred to me during the progress of our interview. I didn"t go back to Burnmore for several days. I had set my heart on achieving something, on returning with some earnest of the great attack I was to make upon the separating great world between myself and Mary. I am far enough off now from that angry and pa.s.sionate youngster to smile at the thought that my subjugation of things in general and high finance in particular took at last the form of proposing to go into the office of Bean, Medhurst, Stockton, and Schnadhorst upon half commission terms. I was awaiting my father"s reply to this startling new suggestion when I got a telegram from Mary. "We are going to Scotland unexpectedly. Come down and see me." I went home instantly, and told my father I had come to talk things over with him. A note from Mary lay upon the hall-table as I came in and encountered my father. "I thought it better to come down to you," I said with my glance roving to find that, and then I met his eye. It wasn"t altogether an unkindly eye, but I winced dishonestly.
"Talking is better for all sorts of things," said my father, and wanted to know if the weather had been as hot in London as it had been in Burnmore.
Mary"s note was in pencil, scribbled hastily. I was to wait after eleven that night near the great rose bushes behind the pavilion. Long before eleven I was there, on a seat in a thick shadow looking across great lakes of moonlight towards the phantom statuary of the Italianate garden and the dark laurels that partly masked the house. I waited nearly an hour, an hour of stillness and small creepings and cheepings and goings to and fro among the branches.
In the bushes near by me a little green glow-worm shared my vigil.
And then, wrapped about in a dark velvet cloak, still in her white dinner dress, with shining, gleaming, glancing stones about her dear throat, warm and wonderful and glowing and daring, Mary came flitting out of the shadows to me.
"My dear," she whispered, panting and withdrawing a little from our first pa.s.sionate embrace, "Oh my dear!... How did I come? Twice before, when I was a girl, I got out this way. By the corner of the conservatory and down the laundry wall. You can"t see from here, but it"s easy--easy.
There"s a tree that helps. And now I have come that way to you.
_You!..._
"Oh! love me, my Stephen, love me, dear. Love me as if we were never to love again. Am I beautiful, my dear? Am I beautiful in the moonlight?
Tell me!...
"Perhaps this is the night of our lives, dear! Perhaps never again will you and I be happy!...
"But the wonder, dear, the beauty! Isn"t it still? It"s as if nothing really stood solid and dry. As if everything floated....
"Everyone in all the world has gone to sleep to-night and left the world to us. Come! Come this way and peep at the house, there. Stoop--under the branches. See, not a light is left! And all its blinds are drawn and its eyes shut. One window is open, _my_ little window, Stephen! but that is in the shadow where that creeper makes everything black.
"Along here a little further is night-stock. Now--Now! Sniff, Stephen!
Sniff! The scent of it! It lies--like a bank of scented air.... And Stephen, there! Look!... A star--a star without a sound, falling out of the blue! It"s gone!"
There was her dear face close to mine, soft under the soft moonlight, and the breath of her sweet speech mingled with the scent of the night-stock....
That was indeed the most beautiful night of my life, a night of moonlight and cool fragrance and adventurous excitement. We were transported out of this old world of dusty limitations; it was as if for those hours the curse of man was lifted from our lives. No one discovered us, no evil thing came near us. For a long time we lay close in one another"s arms upon a bank of thyme. Our heads were close together; her eyelashes swept my cheek, we spoke rarely and in soft whispers, and our hearts were beating, beating. We were as solemn as great mountains and as innocent as sleeping children. Our kisses were kisses of moonlight. And it seemed to me that nothing that had ever happened or could happen afterwards, mattered against that happiness....
It was nearly three when at last I came back into my father"s garden. No one had missed me from my room and the house was all asleep, but I could not get in because I had closed a latch behind me, and so I stayed in the little arbor until day, watching the day break upon long beaches of pale cloud over the hills towards Alfridsham. I slept at last with my head upon my arms upon the stone table, until the noise of shooting bolts and doors being unlocked roused me to watch my chance and slip back again into the house, and up the shuttered darkened staircase to my tranquil, undisturbed bedroom.
-- 5
It was in the vein of something evasive in Mary"s character that she let me hear first of her engagement to Justin through the _Times_. Away there in Scotland she got I suppose new perspectives, new ideas; the glow of our immediate pa.s.sion faded. The thing must have been drawing in upon her for some time. Perhaps she had meant to tell me of it all that night when she had summoned me to Burnmore. Looking back now I am the more persuaded that she did. But the thing came to me in London with the effect of an immense treachery. Within a day or so of the newspaper"s announcement she had written me a long letter answering some argument of mine, and saying nothing whatever of the people about her. Even then Justin must have been asking her to marry him. Her mind must have been full of that question. Then came a storm of disappointment, humiliation and anger with this realization. I can still feel myself writing and destroying letters to her, letters of satire, of protest. Oddly enough I cannot recall the letter that at last I sent her, but it is eloquent of the weak boyishness of my position that I sent it in our usual furtive manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of our relationship. "No," she scribbled back, "you do not understand. I cannot write. I must talk to you."
We had a secret meeting.