Part 25

"Dear me!" murmured Francis. "Dear me!" His face wore an expression of immense surprise. He went on muttering to himself in a puzzled way, and finally, with a sort of triumph, as though he had found the solution of his riddle:

"But if they are married?"

"My dear father, you must admit that love and marriage are two very different things. Love is divine, marriage is human."

"But----"

"Marriage is not a divine ordinance. It is a respectable human institution contrived for the comfortable existence of society."

"I am thinking of Minna's children."

"So am I."

"She will lose them."

"That is her affair. Anything is better for them than being brought up in a house with a man and a woman who hate each other."

"I can't admit that."

"As a matter of principle, perhaps not; as a matter of practice, you will, just as you took over Frederic's mess. . . ."

"How did that turn out?"

"Splendidly."

Very slowly Francis turned that over in his mind and went back in memory to the day in Mrs. Entwistle's cottage. It did not bring him any great elucidation, but it gave him a feeling of confidence in Serge, and, clinging to him, he said:

"What are we to do?"

"If you'll agree to say nothing to my mother, to write nothing to Basil, and not to bother your head about the rights and wrongs of it, I'll go to London and see Minna. If there's a glimmer of hope I'll do everything I can. If there isn't, I'll see Minna through. . . . I don't think I shall come back. I can't stay in this place much longer. It gobbles men up and doesn't even have the decency to digest them properly. . . . It's a machine and has no conscience about the past, no concern for the future. It darkens men's minds so that they live hideously and their horrible sins are visited upon their children. No, I shan't come back. I can't. . . ."

"There is a great deal of wickedness in this place. It is God's will," said Francis.

"Men's will. The will of men cheated and cozened by their own rapacity. . . . But that is neither here nor there. Will you agree to say nothing to my mother until you hear from me?"

"I'll promise you that," said Francis with a little compunction, for he saw how dark would be the days of waiting with such a secret tugging at his heart and his wife babbling of her children's marriages. "How did you know? Did Mary tell you?"

"Yes, Mary told me. Mary has been rather a trump about it."

"I shall be able to talk to Mary," thought Francis, with a sigh of relief.

* * *

Serge spent the night packing and dismantling his studio. He destroyed a great many of his pictures, called up the porter and made him a present of his furniture and the clothes that were left after he had packed two bags.

In the morning he went to fetch Annie Lipsett. He found her just leaving, but made her go back with him to see the boy. Him he hugged and kissed, and then he gave Annie a cheque for fifty pounds for his education.

"And for God's sake," he said, "don't make him a gentleman. Put him to a trade. If he's any real good he'll get out of it. If he's only middling good he'll stay there and marry and die respectable. If he's bad--God help you; but he won't be that."

Annie said:

"You're going."

"Yes. I'm going."

She was very plucky and fought back her tears. Serge took her shoulders in his hands and said:

"You and I have had a queer sort of love, an impersonal sort of meeting in Heaven here on earth. I never understood before what it must feel like to be a seraph--just a head and wings. We've been so busy fighting our way up out of a slimy pit that we haven't had time to think much about each other--only the boy."

Annie's tears flowed freely and she clung to his hand and said:

"You don't know what you've been to me, but I can tell you now. It was so much to have you for my friend in that time when I had no one. I loved you. . . ."

"I know, I know."

"But all that sort of love went away afterwards when I had the boy. It has been a great thing for him too. . . ."

"I've learned a lot from him."

"That's so wonderful about you. You seem to be always learning. And now you're going. I used to dread your going, but now it doesn't hurt me at all. . . . You will always have me to think gladly of you."

"And I of you. . . . We've made the world richer by a friendship."

"I want to say thank you," she said, "but I can't, not enough."

"Of course you can't. . . . Come along."

* * *

In a few hours Serge was in the express for London. He had a portfolio of pictures and drawings, two bags, and one hundred and twenty pounds in notes. As the train passed out of the dingy murk and his eyes lighted on the green, undefiled country, he drew in great breaths and found it hard not to shout for joy in the new zest for adventure that had come to him.

"That seraph notion," he thought, "I wonder where it comes from? That curious hunger for the state of childhood, the pretence that it is superior to adult life. . . . Surely it all comes from their incompetence in managing their affairs as men and women. They seem to lose their simplicity. I wonder why? . . . Old Lawrie must be right. Mind, body, spirit. You can't poison the spirit. That's God, and He's beyond contamination. Body and mind are the instruments of the spirit. Poison the mind and the body suffers. . . . That's right. Yes: old Lawrie's right. Fear of love and fear of death; the mind hemmed in and losing its bright power of reflection, so that it shows only a distorted image of life. . . . No wonder they hate life when it looks like that. . . . It can't go on for ever. The spirit must break through it all in time . . . in time."

The train rushed along, and he began to think that perhaps the problem was being solved. When men had made it so easy to escape from their cities of captivity, would not their minds also be freed? Would there not be a gradual adjustment of mind to larger surroundings? Or were the minds of men so clothed with centuries of tyranny that swifter transportation also would be used as an instrument of slavery? . . .

"No," he thought, "there is a deeper faith in men than they know. They endure heroically because they are sure that in the end their efforts will lead to deliverance."

As an ironic comment upon his reflections the train ran into a real "old particular" London fog and was held up for half an hour outside the station. In that half-hour his thoughts ran swiftly. He had never been to London before, and he was moved by a boyish excitement at the prospect of entering it. That he found absurd. It would be hardly at all different from the place he had just left. That had held little for him: this could hold nothing at all. He had no ambition, and often ludicrously had learned the scorn a man can come by who prefers anything to his own advancement; often he had seen how profitable it was for a man to sacrifice his talent to his vanity, and how incredible to such a man that it could be possible to sacrifice vanity to talent. From all he had heard of London, the greatest city in the world, its subservience to ambitious men was as immense as its renown. In our town, Benskin and his school of little fishes had dubbed Serge "amateur" by way of killing him. He had liked the isolation that had followed, but now he thought that isolation could be of little use to a man, except he could spring from it to greater freedom and a purer joy in his work. "Amateur." . . . Being interpreted, that means one who loves his work, as its contrary, "professional," signifies one who works for gain. . . . These cities were professional. They rejected him, as they rejected all amateurs. . . . So be it. Serge felt no bitterness. He was a free man. He asked nothing: he had been given much, first of all the power to enjoy. . . . He chuckled to think that the only usefulness the suspicious world of professional men would allow him lay--apparently--in succouring females in distress. Knight-errantry, once the loftiest of professions, was descended into the hands of the contemned amateurs.

"At bottom," said Serge, "the difference between them and me is that I take women seriously and they don't."

* * *

His stay in London was shorter even than he had thought it would be. He visited Basil first, and found him working desperately, paintings, charcoal drawings, black-and-white, Christmas cards, book illustrations, designs for menus, chocolate boxes--all slipshod, formal, but just neatly and obviously charming. Through his teeth he asked Serge what the hell he had come for and went on working. Serge turned over a pile of drawings on the table by the window.

"Benskin would dote on you now. . . . How you must hate art to be able to do them so well!"

Basil grunted. "I hate everything."

"You always were extreme."

Basil laid down his pen.

"Did she send you?"

"No. She doesn't know I'm in London. I came to you first because I thought your point of view might be helpful when I come to tackle her. I've got nothing to go upon except her letter to Mary, which wasn't particularly illuminating."

"It wouldn't be. It's just funny to her--just funny, do you hear? I've implored her, on my knees I've begged her just to help me to understand her, to give me some clue as to what it is that she really wants, to keep us from going to smash, and she just sat and listened to me with that slow grin of hers. . . . I frightened her, I think, the last time, and the grin faded from her face, but she became as hard as a stone. . . . She didn't care. She didn't care. And I think she wanted to break me. . . . She hasn't done it. Do you hear? She hasn't done it!"

"Did you weep?"

"I . . . I broke down."

"Ah! Not a good way of convincing her of your capacity to give her what she wants."

Basil strode angrily about the studio, waving his arms and shouting.

"It's not a bit of good. It's done now. . . . It's all over. It's finished."

"It won't be finished until you've done thinking about it. There doesn't seem to be much prospect of that."

"I'm not going to discuss it with you."

"I don't want to. What are the facts? You've accused her of infidelity. Who's the man?"

"Fry. . . . His wife's divorcing him. That's evidence enough, isn't it?"

"I'm not concerned with the evidence. I only want to know whether it's necessary that there should be a divorce."

"She's left me."

"I might persuade her to return."

"Could you?"

"I might. . . ."

"I'll forgive her. . . . If she will come to me as a contrite woman. . . ."

"That's slush. If you are going to spend your lives in quarrelling as to which is really the magnanimous party, I shan't stir a finger. . . . Do you want her?"

"If she . . ."

"If you want her, there can be no conditions. . . ."

"But she . . ."

Serge saw that it was hopeless. Basil was clinging to his grievances, nursing them, cherishing them. They had become more precious to him than his own happiness, than his wife, than the well-being of his children. . . . Still there was hope that on Minna's side there might be magnanimity and generosity enough to uproot the thick-set hedge with which Basil had surrounded himself.

* * *

Minna was in rooms in the Marylebone Road, near Madame Tussaud's. She had a woman friend with her, a queer inanimate creature who looked as though she had stepped out of the waxworks--a model of Nell Gwynne. Minna seemed quite happy. She was lying on a sofa eating Turkish delight and reading "Jane Eyre." She dropped her book as Serge entered and her friend glided away.

"I _am_ glad to see you," she said. "It's so dull. Isn't it a beastly business?"

"I've just been to see Basil."

"Is he still weeping?"

Serge ignored that question and asked her another.

"What's the trouble between you two?"

"Basil says I'm----"

"I know that, but that's only the outcome of the trouble."

Minna was interested. She sat up on the sofa with her hands between her knees.

"How clever you are, Serge! No one else has ever thought of that. Everybody else is quarrelling as to whether I did or did not."

"Did you?"

"No. That comes long after the mischief's done. The trouble between Basil and me is simply this. Basil wants me to be a mother to him and I can't. People are simply sickening about mothers. I'm a woman first and a mother afterwards. Being a mother grows out of being a woman. . . . Basil wants me to be a work of art in theory and a mother in practice. I simply couldn't do it. . . . It's my own fault. I knew Basil was like that before I married him. I had a sort of blind moment when I thought I could change him. You can't change people. I can't change myself. . . . I ought to have left him long ago, but Basil's the sort of man you can't leave. He clings. He plays on your nerves and makes you frightened. He looks at you with his big eyes and seems so helpless that you're afraid to leave him, and you don't like hurting him. He simply _makes_ you be a mother to him and then takes advantage of it, and things go from bad to worse. . . . London seemed to frighten him, took away all his courage and his ambition. London's too big for him. He wants to be at the top of the tree all at once, simply because he's afraid of the climb. . . . We should have done better to stay at home."

"That wouldn't have made any difference."

"No, I suppose not. I am I and Basil is Basil and that's the whole story, and it's just like a man of that sort to turn round and try to kill you when you won't let him cling to you any longer."

Minna's voice became venomous.

"Grievances again!" thought Serge, and he saw then how impossible was his position. He could not tell Minna of Basil's willingness to take her back upon conditions. Either of them or both must surrender their grievances if anything were to be done. That seemed to be extremely improbable.

"You will not go back, then?"

"I'm quite willing to go back, if Basil----"

More conditions! Oh, the folly of insistence upon rights! . . . Serge dropped the subject, accepted the inevitable and asked:

"Then it is to go on?"

"That rests with Basil."

"If he does not withdraw the petition I suppose you will not defend."

"I shall defend my honour if I have to spend my last penny on it. I'm not going to have mud thrown at me and say 'Thank you' for it. I don't trust Basil. He's a vindictive little beast. He's sure to say our marriage was happy. . . . Besides, I must think of the children."

"I wish you would."

"I do. Their mother's honour is precious to them."

"Personally," said Serge, "I would sell my honour for twopence."

"Oh! you! . . . But then you don't care what anybody thinks of you."

"Not a straw."

"Then it isn't any good talking to you. You really are an immoral man. . . . If Basil goes for me, I shall go for him. You'd hold up the other cheek, I know, but then you're not human. I told my children once to think before they struck, and Benny said, 'I do think, and then I strike. . . .' I'm like that too. I'm not going to listen to you. I'm not going back to Basil, I'm not going to lie down and let him weep over my sins in public. He's a little beast and everybody shall know that he's a little beast. . . ."

Minna had worked herself up into a state of anger. She was hot and red in the face with it, and looked coarse and unpleasant.

Serge said to himself:

"No wonder knight-errantry is dead, since women have taken upon themselves to be as stupidly selfish as men."

He made one last effort, and suggested that she should take the more sensible course and leave it to Basil unopposed to set the cumbrous machinery of the law in motion, if only for the sake of her father and mother. To that Minna only replied with a brilliant but spiteful caricature of Mrs. Folyat's state of mind as slowly she digested the unpalatable truth that all marriages were not made in Heaven.

* * *

Serge wrote to Francis that night and told him that there was no hope, since both Minna and Basil were resolute to part. All that could be looked for was that they would injure each other as little as possible in the process. So far as he could see, the pain of uprooting was over. The pair were absolutely divorced. Unhappily, they seemed determined to call down on each other the disapprobation of the world, in their frenziedly childish desire to hurt each other. . . . Serge begged Francis to make his mother take a reasonable, human view of it, since Minna would need friendliness and assistance, and suggested that he should come to an arrangement with Basil's family for the maintenance of the children.

His letter ended thus:

"Good-bye, my dear father. I was your first disappointment, but in the end you and I recognised each other. That is permanent. It will be with me wherever I go, with you to the end of your life. You are of those who believe that understanding is not given to us. Your belief must be a bitter comfort to you. I believe that men are rapidly coming to an end of their material activity so that soon they will be forced to find understanding or perish. . . . Do you remember a night when you and I watched the rest acting an absurd play, and I said involuntarily, 'Round the corner'? Modern life is theatrical. Everybody is playing a part, because they are without understanding. Life for modern men and women is for ever round the corner because they attempt to tackle their affairs with the minds of children, children who believe everything they are told and examine nothing. They play with everything. They can do nothing else. Unhappily, life is a serious business which yields its reward of joy only to simplicity, sincerity, and purity, or, if you like the old trinity better--faith, hope, and charity. The old beliefs are true--nearly all that you preach, I mean; but from repetition they have become stale and meaningless. They need restatement. . . . I am going back to the sea, not because I believe that the 'great wide spaces of the earth'--what a lot of twaddle is talked about them!--have a monopoly of truth, but because I must move and keep moving. It is in the air. Perhaps I feel it before other men. The salvation of human life lies in movement, circulation. . . . More simply and less philosophically I am going because it amuses me to go. I like passing through the world saluting the few men of courage and good heart whom one can find, and, of such men, my dear father, I count you not the least."

Francis kept this letter and through his hours of torment often read it. It let in air.

XXXII

THE CUTTING OF A KNOT

_Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth._ ISAIAH, xxiv. 17.

IT is one of the most disconcerting phenomena of existence that, when passionate love has answered its purpose, it simply disappears, leaving its instruments wedded by such truth as they have discovered in each other or divorced by the lies they have forged for each other's delight. Very rarely, however, is the issue so simple. The bone-and-shadow business comes into play here also, and most people marry with very little passionate love and a great deal of careful imitation of it, so that most marriages are strangled in their birth with a very tangled web of lies.

It was so with Frederic and Jessie Folyat in their marriage, and they were never so nearly united as when jealousy came between them. Their marriage feast did coldly furnish forth the funeral of love, and over love's dead body they quarrelled. They had scenes, hysterical skirmishes and almost as hysterical reconciliations. There was grim sport in it all, a sort of fascination in the stealthy prying and spying, each crouching and shrinking in readiness for the other's spring, the snarling bravado with which each dared the other to come on, a little further, a little further, inviting to a caress, repelling with a scratching blow; and all smooth-seeming, veiled, polite, with polished airs and graceful manners and feigned interest and inquiry: a pooling of the common stock only to wrangle over the division of it again. The gambling fever was in it. At any moment all might be lost upon a throw, a little gain, a little loss, more gain, more gain, a little more and the other might be beggared, the game won. But neither dared let the game come to an end. When one was near ruin, grey-faced, anxiously glaring for the turn of the card, the other cheated and the game went on. It absorbed both. Neither could do without it. It was a drug. Their craving for it was agony; its satisfaction a seeming delight.

They were very skilful and cunning to let no trace of it appear on the surface of their lives. Frederic abandoned all pursuit of Annie Lipsett, he deserted the company of his flattering fools, for these things trespassed upon the field of his fevered sport. It was very rarely that they went of their own accord to seek purchasable pleasures. Visits they paid, when politeness and discretion compelled, and everybody found them charming. They could be good company and their talents were useful. They became popular and were much in request to organise entertainments, bazaars, jumble sales, and such functions.

* * *

In his business Frederic became more cunning, quicker-witted, and his reputation gained. His practice increased. His whole life was concentrated on his home and his office. He grew lean and alert, but he was always tired.

In the early days of his management of the Bradby-Folyat estate he had borrowed large sums of money. These debts he was able considerably to reduce, and very soon there were no arrears of interest outstanding. As he began to feel himself on more solid ground his habit of exaggeration lost much of its hold upon him, and men who had previously avoided him began to seek his company. Many who had dismissed him as a bore now came to see qualities in him, and, as he gained the acquaintance of a better class of men, the quality of the work that passed through his hands improved.

Over Minna's disaster he behaved well. He explained the legal aspect of divorce to his father, and by telling him what he heard men saying about it--men who had known Basil Haslam, men of the world--helped him to understand that there was less malice than idle curiosity in gossip, that scandal was the thing of a day, and that sympathy was to a great extent on Minna's side and altogether with her parents. . . . Francis was not greatly comforted. He felt that the attitude of mind of Frederic's "men of the world" was rather dirty, but he appreciated the kindness, which was greater than he had looked for. He was not at all easy, remembering Serge's and his own attitude towards Frederic's imbroglio, when Frederic rushed up to town, pounced on Herbert Fry, and insisted on his marrying Minna. . . . As it happened, it was a fatal step. Minna complied only because she thought the marriage would infuriate Basil (the horrible ordeal through which she had passed had deprived her of all control), and Fry because he loved her and because his affairs were more complicated than any one knew save himself, and, having to leave the country, he preferred to pass into exile with a beloved companion. His life had come to ruin, and he thought that to have Minna for his wife would be a step towards reconstruction and would help to blot out the past. . . . Frederic came back glowing with virtue and manly pride, feeling that he had made an honest woman of his sister.