Part 21

"Chatter of that sort isn't the beginning of discussion, it's the end. It's the death-rattle. Nobody was meeting the thoughts of any one. I admit Buzard, who's a man, talked the worst rubbish of all. That Primitive Matriarchate of his! So it isn't sex. I've noticed before that the men in this movement of yours are worse than the women. It isn't sex. It's something else. It's a foolishness. It's a sort of irresponsible looseness." He turned on her gravely. "You ought not to get all these people here. It's contagious. Before you know it you'll find your own mind liquefy and become enthusiastic and slop about. You'll begin to talk monomania about Mr. Asquith."

"But it's a great movement, Rag, even if incidentally they say and do silly things!"

"My dear! aren't I feminist? Don't I want women fine and sane and responsible? Don't I want them to have education, to handle things, to vote like men and bear themselves with the gravity of men? And these meetings--all hat and flutter! These displays of weak, untrained, hysterical vehemence! These gatherings of open-mouthed impressionable young girls to be trained in incoherence! You can't go on with it!"

Marjorie regarded him quietly for a moment. "I must go on with something," she said.

"Well, not this."

"Then _what?_"

"Something sane."

"Tell me what."

"It must come out of yourself."

Marjorie thought sullenly for a moment. "Nothing comes out of myself," she said.

"I don't think you realize a bit what my life has become," she went on; "how much I'm like some one who's been put in a pleasant, high-class prison."

"This house! It's your own!"

"It doesn't give me an hour's mental occupation in the day. It's all very well to say I might do more in it. I can't--without absurdity. Or expenditure. I can't send the girl away and start scrubbing. I can't make jam or do ornamental needlework. The shops do it better and cheaper, and I haven't been trained to it. I've been trained _not_ to do it. I've been brought up on games and school-books, and fed on mixed ideas. I can't sit down and pacify myself with a needle as women used to do. Besides, I not only detest doing needlework but I hate it--the sort of thing a woman of my kind does anyhow--when it's done. I'm no artist. I'm not sufficiently interested in outside things to spend my time in serious systematic reading, and after four or five novels--oh, these meetings are better than that! You see, you've got a life--too much of it--_I_ haven't got enough. I wish almost I could sleep away half the day. Oh! I want something _real_, Rag; something more than I've got." A sudden inspiration came to her. "Will you let me come to your laboratory and work with you?"

She stopped abruptly. She caught up her own chance question and pointed it at him, a vitally important challenge. "Will you let me come to your laboratory and work?" she repeated.

Trafford thought. "No," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I'm in love with you. I can't think of my work when you're about.... And you're too much behind. Oh my dear! don't you see how you're behind?" He paused. "I've been soaking in this stuff of mine for ten long years."

"Yes," assented Marjorie flatly.

He watched her downcast face, and then it lifted to him with a helpless appeal in her eyes, and lift in her voice. "But look here, Rag!" she cried--"what on earth am I to _DO?_"

Sec. 5

At least there came out of these discussions one thing, a phrase, a purpose, which was to rule the lives of the Traffords for some years. It expressed their realization that instinct and impulse had so far played them false, that life for all its rich gifts of mutual happiness wasn't adjusted between them. "We've got," they said, "to talk all this out between us. We've got to work this out." They didn't mean to leave things at a misfit, and that was certainly their present relation. They were already at the problem of their joint lives, like a tailor with his pins and chalk. Marjorie hadn't rejected a humorist and all his works in order to decline at last to the humorous view of life, that rather stupid, rather pathetic, grin-and-bear-it attitude compounded in incalculable proportions of goodwill, evasion, indolence, slovenliness, and (nevertheless) spite (masquerading indeed as jesting comment), which supplies the fabric of everyday life for untold thousands of educated middle-class people. She hated the misfit. She didn't for a moment propose to pretend that the ungainly twisted sleeve, the puckered back, was extremely jolly and funny. She had married with a passionate anticipation of things fitting and fine, and it was her nature, in great matters as in small, to get what she wanted strenuously before she counted the cost. About both their minds there was something sharp and unrelenting, and if Marjorie had been disposed to take refuge from facts in swathings of aesthetic romanticism, whatever covering she contrived would have been torn to rags very speedily by that fierce and steely veracity which swung down out of the laboratory into her home.

One may want to talk things out long before one hits upon the phrases that will open up the matter.

There were two chief facts in the case between them and so far they had looked only one in the face, the fact that Marjorie was unemployed to a troublesome and distressing extent, and that there was nothing in her nature or training to supply, and something in their circumstances and relations to prevent any adequate use of her energies. With the second fact neither of them cared to come to close quarters as yet, and neither as yet saw very distinctly how it was linked to the first, and that was the steady excess of her expenditure over their restricted means. She was secretly surprised at her own weakness. Week by week and month by month, they were spending all his income and eating into that little accumulation of capital that had once seemed so sufficient against the world....

And here it has to be told that although Trafford knew that Marjorie had been spending too much money, he still had no idea of just how much money she had spent. She was doing her utmost to come to an understanding with him, and at the same time--I don't explain it, I don't excuse it--she was keeping back her bills from him, keeping back urgent second and third and fourth demands, that she had no cheque-book now to stave off even by the most partial satisfaction. It kept her awake at nights, that catastrophic explanation, that all unsuspected by Trafford hung over their attempts at mutual elucidation; it kept her awake but she could not bring it to the speaking point, and she clung, in spite of her own intelligence, to a persuasion that _after_ they had got something really settled and defined then it would be time enough to broach the particulars of this second divergence....

Talking one's relations over isn't particularly easy between husband and wife at any time; we are none of us so sure of one another as to risk loose phrases or make experiments in expression in matters so vital; there is inevitably an excessive caution on the one hand and an abnormal sensitiveness to hints and implications on the other. Marjorie's bills were only an extreme instance of these unavoidable suppressions that always occur. Moreover, when two people are continuously together, it is amazingly hard to know when and where to begin; where intercourse is unbroken it is as a matter of routine being constantly interrupted. You cannot broach these broad personalities while you are getting up in the morning, or over the breakfast-table while you make the coffee, or when you meet again after a multitude of small events at tea, or in the evening when one is rather tired and trivial after the work of the day. Then Miss Margharita Trafford permitted no sustained analysis of life in her presence. She synthesized things fallaciously, but for the time convincingly; she insisted that life wasn't a thing you discussed, but pink and soft and jolly, which you crowed at and laughed at and addressed as "Goo." Even without Margharita there were occasions when the Traffords were a forgetfulness to one another. After an ear has been pinched or a hand has been run through a man's hair, or a pretty bare shoulder kissed, all sorts of broader interests lapse into a temporary oblivion. They found discussion much more possible when they walked together. A walk seemed to take them out of the everyday sequence, isolate them from their household, abstract them a little from one another. They set out one extravagant spring Sunday to Great Missenden, and once in spring also they discovered the Waterlow Park. On each occasion they seemed to get through an enormous amount of talking. But the Great Missenden walk was all mixed up with a sweet keen wind, and beechwoods just shot with spring green and bursting hedges and the extreme earliness of honeysuckle, which Trafford noted for the first time, and a clamorous rejoicing of birds. And in the Waterlow Park there was a great discussion of why the yellow crocus comes before white and purple, and the closest examination of the manner in which daffodils and narcissi thrust their green noses out of the garden beds. Also they found the ugly, ill-served, aggressively propagandist non-alcoholic refreshment-room in that gracious old house a scandal and disappointment, and Trafford scolded at the stupidity of officialdom that can control so fine a thing so ill.

Though they talked on these walks they were still curiously evasive. Indeed, they were afraid of each other. They kept falling away from their private thoughts and intentions. They generalized, they discussed Marriage and George Gissing and Bernard Shaw and the suffrage movement and the agitation for the reform of the divorce laws. They pursued imaginary cases into distant thickets of contingency remotely far from the personal issues between them....

Sec. 6

One day came an incident that Marjorie found wonderfully illuminating. Trafford had a fit of rage. Stung by an unexpected irritation, he forgot himself, as people say, and swore, and was almost physically violent, and the curious thing was that so he lit up things for her as no premeditated attempt of his had ever done.

A copy of the _Scientific Bulletin_ fired the explosion. He sat down at the breakfast-table with the heaviness of a rather overworked and worried man, tasted his coffee, tore open a letter and crumpled it with his hand, turned to the _Bulletin_, regarded its list of contents with a start, opened it, read for a minute, and expressed himself with an extraordinary heat of manner in these amazing and unprecedented words:

"Oh! Damnation and damnation!"

Then he shied the paper into the corner of the room and pushed his plate from him.

"Damn the whole scheme of things!" he said, and met the blank amazement of Marjorie's eye.

"Behrens!" he said with an air of explanation.

"Behrens?" she echoed with a note of inquiry.

"He's doing my stuff!"

He sat darkling for a time and then hit the table with his fist so hard that the breakfast things seemed to jump together--to Marjorie's infinite amazement. "I can't _stand_ it!" he said.

She waited some moments. "I don't understand," she began. "What has he done?"

"Oh!" was Trafford's answer. He got up, recovered the crumpled paper and stood reading. "Fool and thief," he said.

Marjorie was amazed beyond measure. She felt as though she had been effaced from Trafford's life. "Ugh!" he cried and slapped back the _Bulletin_ into the corner with quite needless violence. He became aware of Marjorie again.

"He's doing my work," he said.

And then as if he completed the explanation: "And I've got to be in Croydon by half-past ten to lecture to a pack of spinsters and duffers, because they're too stupid to get the stuff from books. It's all in books,--every bit of it."

He paused and went on in tones of unendurable wrong. "It isn't as though he was doing it right. He isn't. He can't. He's a fool. He's a clever, greedy, dishonest fool with a twist. Oh! the pile, the big Pile of silly muddled technicalities he's invented already! The solemn mess he's making of it! And there he is, I can't get ahead of him, I can't get at him. I've got no time. I've got no room or leisure to swing my mind in! Oh, curse these engagements, curse all these silly fretting entanglements of lecture and article! I never get the time, I can't get the time, I can't get my mind clear! I'm worried! I'm badgered! And meanwhile Behrens----!"

"Is he discovering what you want to discover?"

"Behrens! _No!_ He's going through the breaches I made. He's guessing out what I meant to do. And he's getting it set out all wrong,--misleading terminology,--distinctions made in the wrong place. Oh, the fool he is!"

"But afterwards----"

"Afterwards I may spend my life--removing the obstacles he's made. He'll be established and I shan't. You don't know anything of these things. You don't understand."

She didn't. Her next question showed as much. "Will it affect your F.R.S.?" she asked.

"Oh! _that's_ safe enough, and it doesn't matter anyhow. The F.R.S.! Confound the silly little F.R.S.! As if that mattered. It's seeing all my great openings--misused. It's seeing all I might be doing. This brings it all home to me. Don't you understand, Marjorie? Will you never understand? I'm getting away from all _that!_ I'm being hustled away by all this work, this silly everyday work to get money. Don't you see that unless I can have time for thought and research, life is just darkness to me? I've made myself master of that stuff. I had at any rate. No one can do what I can do there. And when I find myself--oh, shut out, shut out! I come near raving. As I think of it I want to rave again." He paused. Then with a swift transition: "I suppose I'd better eat some breakfast. Is that egg boiled?"

She gave him an egg, brought his coffee, put things before him, seated herself at the table. For a little while he ate in silence. Then he cursed Behrens.

"Look here!" she said. "Bad as I am, you've got to reason with me, Rag. I didn't know all this. I didn't understand ... I don't know what to do."

"What _is_ there to do?"

"I've got to do something. I'm beginning to see things. It's just as though everything had become clear suddenly." She was weeping. "Oh, my dear! I want to help you. I have so wanted to help you. Always. And it's come to this!"

"But it's not _your_ fault. I didn't mean that. It's--it's in the nature of things."

"It's my fault."

"It's not your fault."

"It is."

"Confound it, Marjorie. When I swear at Behrens I'm not swearing at you."

"It's my fault. All this is my fault. I'm eating you up. What's the good of your pretending, Rag. You know it is. Oh! When I married you I meant to make you happy, I had no thought but to make you happy, to give myself to you, my body, my brains, everything, to make life beautiful for you----"

"Well, _haven't_ you?" He thrust out a hand she did not take.

"I've broken your back," she said.

An unwonted resolution came into her face. Her lips whitened. "Don't you know, Rag," she said, forcing herself to speak----"Don't you guess? You don't know half! In that bureau there----In there! It's stuffed with bills. Unpaid bills."

She was weeping, with no attempt to wipe the streaming tears away; terror made the expression of her wet face almost fierce. "Bills," she repeated. "More than a hundred pounds still. Yes! Now. _Now!_"

He drew back, stared at her and with no trace of personal animus, like one who hears of a common disaster, remarked with a quiet emphasis: "Oh, _damn!_"

"I know," she said, "Damn!" and met his eyes. There was a long silence between them. She produced a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. "That's what I amount to," she said.

"It's your silly upbringing," he said after a long pause.

"And my silly self."

She stood up, unlocked and opened her littered desk, turned and held out the key to him.

"Why?" he asked.

"Take it. You gave me a cheque-book of my own and a corner of my own, and they--they are just ambushes--against you."

He shook his head.

"Take it," said Marjorie with quiet insistence.

He obeyed. She stood with her eyes on the crumpled heap of bills. They were not even tidily arranged. That seemed to her now an extreme aggravation of her offence.

"I ought to be sent to the chemist's," she remarked, "as one sends a worthless cat."

Trafford weighed this proposition soberly for some moments. "You're a bother, Marjorie," he said with his eyes on the desk; "no end of a bother. I'd better have those bills."

He looked at her, stood up, put his hands on her shoulders, drew her to him and kissed her forehead. He did it without passion, without tenderness, with something like resignation in his manner. She clung to him tightly, as though by clinging she could warm and soften him.

"Rag," she whispered; "all my heart is yours.... I want to help you.... And this is what I have done."

"I know," he said--almost grimly.

He repeated his kiss.

Then he seemed to explode again. "Gods!" he cried, "look at the clock. I shall miss that Croydon lecture!" He pushed her from him. "Where are my boots?..."

Sec. 7

Marjorie spent the forenoon and the earlier part of the afternoon repeating and reviewing this conversation. Her mind was full of the long disregarded problem of her husband's state of mind. She thought with a sympathetic astonishment of his swearing, of his startling blow upon the table. She hadn't so far known he could swear. But this was the real thing, the relief of vehement and destructive words. His voice, saying "damnation and damnation," echoed and re-echoed in her ears. Somehow she understood that as she had never understood any sober statement of his case. Such women as Marjorie, I think, have an altogether keener understanding of people who have lost control of themselves than they have of reasoned cases. Perhaps that is because they themselves always reserve something when they state a reasoned case.

She went on to the apprehension of a change in him that hitherto she had not permitted herself to see--a change in his attitude to her. There had been a time when she had seemed able without an effort to nestle inside his heart. Now she felt distinctly for the first time that that hadn't happened. She had instead a sense of her embrace sliding over a rather deliberately contracted exterior.... Of course he had been in a hurry....

She tried to follow him on his journey to Croydon. Now he'd have just passed out of London Bridge. What was he thinking and feeling about her in the train? Now he would be going into the place, wherever it was, where he gave his lecture. Did he think of Behrens and curse her under his breath as he entered that tiresome room?...

It seemed part of the prevailing inconvenience of life that Daffy should see fit to pay an afternoon call.

Marjorie heard the sobs and uproar of an arrested motor, and glanced discreetly from the window to discover the dark green car with its green-clad chauffeur which now adorned her sister's life, and which might under different circumstances, have adorned her own. Wilkins--his name was Wilkins, his hair was sandy and his expression discreet, and he afforded material for much quiet humorous observation--descended smartly and opened the door. Daffy appeared in black velvet, with a huge black fur muff, and an air of being unaware that there were such things as windows in the world.

It was just four, and the cook-general, who ought to have been now in her housemaid's phase, was still upstairs divesting herself of her more culinary characteristics. Marjorie opened the door.

"Hullo, old Daffy!" she said.

"Hullo, old Madge!" and there was an exchange of sisterly kisses and a mutual inspection.

"Nothing wrong?" asked Daffy, surveying her.

"_Wrong?_"

"You look pale and--tired about the eyes," said Daffy, leading the way into the drawing-room. "Thought you might be a bit off it, that's all. No offence, Madge."

"I'm all right," said Marjorie, getting her back to the light. "Want a holiday, perhaps. How's every one?"

"All right. _We're_ off to Lake Garda next week. This new play has taken it out of Will tremendously. He wants a rest and fresh surroundings. It's to be the biggest piece of work he's done--so far, and it's straining him. And people worry him here; receptions, first nights, dinners, speeches. He's so neat, you know, in his speeches.... But it wastes him. He wants to get away. How's Rag?"

"Busy."

"Lecturing?"

"And his Research of course."

"Oh! of course. How's the Babe?"

"Just in. Come up and see the little beast, Daffy! It is getting so pretty, and it talks----"

Margharita dominated intercourse for a time. She was one of those tactful infants who exactly resemble their fathers and exactly resemble their mothers, and have a charm and individuality quite distinctly their own, and she was now beginning to converse with startling enterprise and intelligence.

"Big, big, bog," she said at the sight of Daffy.

"Remembers you," said Marjorie.

"Bog! Go ta-ta!" said Margharita.

"There!" said Marjorie, and May, the nurse in the background, smiled unlimited appreciation.

"Bably," said Margharita.

"That's herself!" said Marjorie, falling on her knees. "She talks like this all day. Oh de sweetums, den!" _Was_ it?

Daffy made amiable gestures and canary-like noises with her lips, and Margharita responded jovially.

"You darling!" cried Marjorie, "you delight of life," kneeling by the cot and giving the crowing, healthy little mite a passionate hug.

"It's really the nicest of babies," Daffy conceded, and reflected....

"I don't know what I should do with a kiddy," said Daffy, as the infant worship came to an end; "I'm really glad we haven't one--yet. He'd love it, I know. But it would be a burthen in some ways. They _are_ a tie. As he says, the next few years means so much for him. Of course, here his reputation is immense, and he's known in Germany, and there are translations into Russian; but he's still got to conquer America, and he isn't really well known yet in France. They read him, of course, and buy him in America, but they're--_restive_. Oh! I do so wish they'd give him the Nobel prize, Madge, and have done with it! It would settle everything. Still, as he says, we mustn't think of that--yet, anyhow. He isn't venerable enough. It's doubtful, he thinks, that they would give the Nobel prize to any humorist now that Mark Twain is dead. Mark Twain was different, you see, because of the German Emperor and all that white hair and everything."

At this point Margharita discovered that the conversation had drifted away from herself, and it was only when they got downstairs again that Daffy could resume the thread of Magnet's career, which had evidently become the predominant interest in her life. She brought out all the worst elements of Marjorie's nature and their sisterly relationship. There were moments when it became nakedly apparent that she was magnifying Magnet to belittle Trafford. Marjorie did her best to counter-brag. She played her chief card in the F. R. S.

"They always ask Will to the Royal Society Dinner," threw out Daffy; "but of course he can't always go. He's asked to so many things."

Five years earlier Marjorie would have kicked her shins for that.

Instead she asked pointedly, offensively, if Magnet was any balder.

"He's not really bald," said Daffy unruffled, and went on to discuss the advisability of a second motor car--purely for town use. "I tell him I don't want it," said Daffy, "but he's frightfully keen upon getting one."

Sec. 8