Point Counter Point (17 page)

Mary felt terribly ashamed. She had seen the painted tombs at Tarquinia; but how little she remembered of them! They had just been curious old works of art like all those other innumerable old works of art she had dutifully seen in company with her mother on their Italian journey the year before. They had really been wasted on her. Whereas if he could have afforded to go to Italy…

‘_They_ were civilized,’ he was saying, ‘they knew how to live harmoniously and completely, with their whole being.’ He spoke with a kind of passion, as though he were angry—with the world, with himself, perhaps. ‘We’re all barbarians,’ he began; but was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing. Mary waited for the paroxysm to subside. She felt anxious and at the same time embarrassed and ashamed, as one feels when one has come upon a man off his guard and displaying a weakness which at ordinary times he is at pains to conceal. She wondered whether she ought to say something sympathetic about the cough, or pretend that she hadn’t noticed it. He solved her problem by referring to it himself.

‘Talk of barbarism,’ he said, when the fit was over. He spoke in a tone of disgust, his smile was wry and angry. ‘Have you ever heard anything more barbarous than that cough? A cough like that wouldn’t be allowed in a civilized society.’

Mary proffered solicitude and advice. He laughed impatiently.

‘My mother’s very words,’ he said. ‘Word for word. You women are all the same. Clucking like hens after their chickens.’

‘But think how miserable you’d be if we didn’t cluck!’

A few days later—with some misgivings—he took her to see his mother. The misgivings were groundless; Mary and Mrs. Rampion seemed to find no difficulties in making spiritual contact. Mrs. Rampion was a woman of about fifty, still handsome and with an expression on her face of calm dignity and resignation. Her speech was slow and quiet. Only once did Mary see her manner change and that was when, Mark being out of the room preparing the tea, she began to talk about her son.

‘What do you think of him?’ she asked, leaning forward towards her guest with a sudden brightening of the eyes.

‘What do I think?’ Mary laughed. ‘I’m not impertinent enough to set up as a judge of my betters. But he’s obviously somebody, somebody that matters.’

Mrs. Rampion nodded, smiling with pleasure. ‘He’s somebody,’ she repeated. ‘That’s what I’ve always said.’ Her face became grave. ‘If only he were stronger! If I could only have afforded to bring him up better. He was always delicate. He ought to have been brought up more carefully than I could do. No, not more carefully. I was as careful as I could be. More comfortably, more healthily. But there, I couldn’t afford it.’ She shook her head.’ ‘There you are.’ She gave a little sigh and, leaning back in her chair, sat there in silence, with folded arms, looking at the floor.

Mary made no comment; she did not know what to say. Once more she felt ashamed, miserable and ashamed.

‘What did you think of my mother? ‘ Rampion asked later, when he was escorting her home.

‘I liked her,’ Mary answered.’very much indeed. Even though she did make me feel so small and petty and bad. Which is another way of saying that I admired her, and liked her because of my admiration.’

Rampion nodded. ‘She
is
admirable,’ he said. ‘She’s courageous and strong and enduring. But she’s too resigned.’

‘But I thought that was one of the wonderful things about her.’

‘She has no right to be resigned,’ he answered, frowning. ‘No right. When you’ve had a life like hers, you oughtn’t to be resigned. You ought to be rebellious. It’s this damned religion. Did I tell you she was religious?’

‘No; but I guessed it, when I saw her,’ Mary answered.

‘She’s a barbarian of the soul,’ he went on. ‘All soul and future. No present, no past, no body, no intellect. Only the soul and the future and in the meantime resignation. Could anything be more barbarous? She ought to rebel.’

‘I should leave her as she is,’ said Mary. ‘She’ll be happier. And you can rebel enough for two.’

Rampion laughed. ‘I’ll rebel enough for millions,’ he said.

At the end of the summer Rampion returned to Sheffield, and a little later the Felphams moved southwards to their London house. It was Mary who wrote the first letter. She had expected to hear from him; but he did not write. Not that there was any good reason why he should. But somehow she had expected that he would write; she was disappointed when he did not. The weeks passed. In the end she wrote to ask him the name of a book about which he had spoken in one of their conversations. The pretext was flimsy; but it served. He answered; she thanked him; the correspondence became an established fact.

At Christmas Rampion came up to London; he had had some things accepted by the newspapers and was unprecedentedly rich—he had ten pounds to do what he liked with. He did not let Mary know of his proximity till the day before his departure.

‘But why didn’t you tell me before?’ she asked reproachfully, when she heard how many days he had already been in London.

‘I didn’t want to inflict myself on you,’ he answered.

‘But you knew I should have been delighted.’

‘You have your own friends.’
Rich
friends, the ironical smile implied.

‘But aren’t you one of my friends?’ she asked, ignoring the implication.

‘Thank you for saying so.’

‘Thank you for being so,’ she answered without affectation or coquetry.

He was moved by the frankness of her avowal, the genuineness and simplicity of her sentiment. He knew, of course, that she liked and admired him; but to know and to be told are different things.

‘I’m sorry, then, I didn’t write to you before,’ he said, and then regretted his words. For they were hypocritical. The real reason why he had kept away from her was not a fear of being badly received; it was pride. He could not afford to take her out; he did not want to accept anything.

They spent the afternoon together and were unreasonably, disproportionately happy.

‘If only you’d told me before,’ she repeated when it was time for her to go. ‘I wouldn’t have made this tiresome engagement for the evening.’

‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he assured her with a return of that ironical tone in which all his references to her life as a member of the monied class were made. The expression of happiness faded from his face. He felt suddenly rather resentful at having been so happy in her company It was stupid to feel like that. What, was the point of being happy on opposite sides of a gulf? ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he repeated, more bitterly. ‘Good food and wine, distinguished people, witty conversation, the theatre afterwards. Isn’t it the ideal evening?’ His tone was savagely contemptuous.

She looked at him with sad, pained eyes, wondering why he should suddenly have started thus to lay waste retrospectively to their afternoon. ‘I don’t know why you talk like that,’ she said. ‘Do you know yourself?’

The question reverberated in his mind long after they had parted. ‘Do you know yourself?’ Of course he knew. But he also knew that there was a gulf.

They met again at Stanton in Easter week. In the interval they had exchanged many letters, and Mary had received a proposal of marriage from the military friend who had wanted to obliterate Stanton with howitzers. To the surprise and somewhat to the distress of her relations, she refused him.

‘He’s such a nice boy,’ her mother had insisted.

‘I know. But one simply can’t take him seriously, can one? ‘

‘Why not?’

‘And then,’ Mary continued, ‘he doesn’t really exist. He isn’t completely there. Just a lump; nothing more. One can t marry someone who isn’t there.’ She thought of Rampion’s violently living face; it seemed to burn, it seemed to be sharp and glowing. ‘One can’t marry a ghost, even when it’s tangible and lumpy—particularly when it’s lumpy.’ She burst out laughing.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Mrs. Felpham with dignity.

‘But
I
do,’ Mary answered. ‘_I_ do. And after all, that’s what chiefly matters in the circumstances.’

Walking with Rampion on the moors, she told him of the laying of this too, too solid military phantom. He made no comment. There was a long silence. Mary felt disappointed and at the same time ashamed of her disappointment. ‘I believe,’ she said to herself, ‘I believe I was trying to get him to propose to me.’

The days passed; Rampion was silent and gloomy. When she asked him the reason, he talked unhappily about his future prospects. At the end of the summer, he would have finished his university course; it would be time to think of a career. The only career that seemed to be immediately open—for he could not afford to wait—was teaching.

‘Teaching,’ he repeated with emphatic horror, ‘teaching! Does it surprise you that I should feel depressed?’ But his misery had other causes besides the prospect of having to teach. ‘Would she laugh at me, if I asked her? ‘ he was wondering. He didn’t think she would. But if she wasn’t going to refuse, was it fair on his part to ask? Was it fair to let her in for the kind of life she would have to lead with him? Or perhaps she had money of her own; and in that case his own honour would be involved.

‘Do you see me as a pedagogue?’ he asked aloud. The pedagogue was his scapegoat.

‘But why should you be a pedagogue, when you can write and draw? You can live on your wits.’

‘But can I? At least pedagogy’s safe.’

‘What do you want to be safe for?’ she asked, almost contemptuously.

Rampion laughed. ‘You wouldn’t ask if you’d had to live on a weekly wage, subject to a week’s notice. Nothing like money for promoting courage and selfconfidence.’

‘Well then, to that extent money’s a good thing. Courage and selfconfidence are virtues.’

They walked on for a long time in silence. ‘Well, well,’ said Rampion at last, looking up at her, ‘you’ve brought it on yourself.’ He made an attempt at laughter. ‘Courage and selfconfidence are virtues; you said so yourself. I’m only trying to live up to your moral standards. Courage and selfconfidence! I’m going to tell you that I love you.’ There was another long silence. He waited; his heart was beating as though with fear.

‘Well?’ he questioned at last. Mary turned towards him and, taking his hand, lifted it to her lips.

Before and after their marriage Rampion had many occasions of admiring those wealth-fostered virtues. It was she who made him give up all thought of teaching and trust exclusively to his wits for a career. She had confidence for both.

‘I’m not going to marry a schoolmaster,’ she insisted. And she didn’t; she married a dramatist who had never had a play performed, except at the Stanton-in-Teesdale church bazaar, a painter who had never sold a picture.

‘We shall starve,’ he prophesied. The spectre of hunger haunted him; he had seen it too often to be able to ignore its existence.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mary, strong in the knowledge that people didn’t starve. Nobody that she knew had ever been hungry. ‘Nonsense.’ She had her way in the end.

What made Rampion the more reluctant to take the unsafe course was the fact that it could only be taken at Mary’s expense.

‘I can’t live on you,’ he said. ‘I can’t take your money.’

‘But you’re not taking my money,’ she insisted, ‘you’re simply an investment. I’m putting up capital in the hope of getting a good return. You shall live on me for a year or two, so that I may live on you for the rest of my life. It’s business; it’s positively sharp practice.

He had to laugh.

‘And in any case,’ she continued, ‘you won’t live very long on me. Eight hundred pounds won’t last for ever.’

He agreed at last to borrow her eight hundred pounds at the current rate of interest. He did it reluctantly, feeling that he was somehow betraying his own people. To start life with eight hundred pounds—it was too easy, it was a shirking of difficulties, a taking of unfair advantages. If it had not been for that sense of responsibility which he felt towards his own talents, he would have refused the money and either desperately risked the career of literature without a penny, or gone the safe and pedagogical way. When at last he consented to take the money, he made it a condition that she should never accept anything from her relations. Mary agreed.

‘Not that they’ll be very anxious to give me anything,’ she added with a laugh.

She was right. Her father’s horror at the misalliance was as profound as she had expected. Mary was in no danger, so far as he was concerned, of becoming rich.

They were married in August and immediately went abroad. They took the train as far as Dijon and from there began to walk south-east, towards Italy. Rampion had never been out of England before. The strangeness of France was symbolical to him of the new life he had just begun, the new liberty he had acquired. And Mary herself was no less symbolically novel than the country through which they travelled. She had not only selfconfidence, but a recklessness which was altogether strange and extraordinary in his eyes. Little incidents impressed him. There was that occasion, for example, when she left her spare pair of shoes behind in the farm where they had spent the night. It was only late in the afternoon that she discovered her loss. Rampion suggested that they should walk back and reclaim them. She would not hear of it.

‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘It’s no use bothering. Let the boots bury their boots.’ He got quite angry with her. ‘Remember you’re not rich any more,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t afford to throw away a good pair of shoes. We shan’t be able to buy a new pair till we get home.’ They had taken a small sum with them for their journey and had vowed that in no circumstances would they spend more. ‘Not till we get home,’ he repeated.

‘I know, I know,’ she answered impatiently. ‘I shall learn to walk barefoot.’

And she did.

‘I was born to be a tramp,’ she declared one evening when they were lying on hay in a barn. ‘I can’t tell you how I enjoy not being respectable. It’s the Atavismus coming out. You bother too much, Mark. Consider the lilies of the field.’

‘And yet,’ Rampion meditated, ‘Jesus was a poor man. Tomorrow’s bread and boots must have mattered a great deal in his family. How was it that he could talk about the future like a millionaire?’