“But you’re resolved anyhow to keep yours clear of
my
tragi-comedies,” he flung at her.
Then he apologised.
“I don’t mean that; I don’t know what I’m saying. . . . Oh, I won’t press you now to decide. We’ll wait, Rome. You’ll see, in a month or so, how things have arranged themselves—how easy it will all be. Olga will have recovered her balance by then; she changes from hour to hour, like all Russians. In a few weeks she will be tired of me and want to be in Paris, or back in Russia. She doesn’t really want me; it’s only that she is unstrung by trouble. Upset; that’s what she is. All I ask you to do is to wait.”
“No, Frank. It can never be, unless she goes, sometime, to live with some one else, some other man.
Otherwise she would be liable, even if she left you for a time, to want you again at intervals. I can’t make a third. . . . You see, whatever happens now, your family must always be a real fact to me, not an abstraction. I’ve seen them . . . Katya is just like you—your chin and eyes. . . . The children love you very much; I saw that. . . . And she loves you too. . . .”
“She does not. That’s not love—not as I know love.”
“As to that, we all know love in different ways, I suppose. . . . Truly, Francis, I have quite decided. I can’t live with you. . . . No, no, don’t . . .”
He was holding her in his arms and kissing her face, her lips, her eyes, muttering entreaties.
“If you loved me you’d do it.”
“I do love you, and I shan’t do it.”
“I’m asking nothing dishonourable of you. You don’t think it wrong on general principles; yesterday you were willing to consider it. You’re just refusing life for a quixotic whim . . . refusing, denying life. . . . Rome, you can’t do it. Don’t you know, now you’re in my arms, that you can’t, that it would be to deny the best in us?”
“What’s the best, what’s the worst? I don’t know, and nor do you. I’m not an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or thinks she wants you, has first claim. . . . It’s a question of fairness and decent feeling . . . or bring it down, if you like, to a question of taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of this sort for people like us.”
“Taste. That’s a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I’d almost rather you were religious, and talked of the will of God. One could respect that, at least.”
“I can’t do that, as I happen not to be sure whether
God exists. And it would make nothing simpler really, since one would then have to discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don’t do religious people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier for them; it’s more difficult, since life is more exacting. . . . But it comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual outlook. And this is mine. . . . Oh, don’t make it so damnably difficult for us both, my dearest. . . .”
Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears, all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.
“Go now,” she said at last. “We mustn’t meet again till we can both do it quietly, without such pain. Papa and I are going back to London next week. Write to me sometimes and let me know how you do and where you are. My dearest Frank . . .”
Rome was alone. She sat in a hard Italian chair, quite still, and felt cold and numb, and as if she had died. Drowned she felt, under deep, cold seas of passion and of pain. Wrecked and foundered and drowned, at the bottom of gray seas. Something cried, small and weak and hurt within her, and it was the voice of love, or (as Mr. Jayne would have it) of life; life which she had denied and slain. Never had she greatly loved before; never would she greatly love again; and the great love she now had she was slaying. That was what the hurt voice cried in her
as she sat alone in the great, bare, chilly room, the sad little scaldino on the floor at her feet.
She was dry-eyed now that she was alone, and had no more to face Mr. Jayne’s love and pain. Her own she could bear. Harder and harder, and cooler and more cynical she would grow, as she walked the world alone, leaving love behind. Was that the choice? Did one either do the decent, difficult thing, and wither to bitterness in doing it, or take the easy road, the road of joy and fulfilment, and be thereby enriched and fulfilled? And what was fulfilment, and what enrichment? What, ah, what, was this strange tale that life is; what its meaning, what its purpose, what its end?
Rome did not know. She knew one thing only. Frustration, renunciation, death—whether you called your criterion the will of God, or social ethics, or a quixotic whim, or your own private standards of decency and taste, it led you to these; led you to the same sad place, where you lay drowned dead beneath bitter seas.
Midday chimed over the city. Miss Garden rose, and put on her out-door things, and went forth to meet her papa for lunch. Life moves on, through whatever deserts, and one must compose oneself to meet it, never betraying one’s soul.
“It’s good to have you back again, my Rome,” Vicky said. “I miss you at my parties. There are lots of new people I want you to meet. An adorable Oxford youth, whom you’ll find after your own heart. Already
he writes essays like a polished gentleman of the world, and he a round-faced cherub barely out of school. A coming man, my dear, mark my words. Such brilliance, such style, such absurd urbanity! Denman introduced him. I prefer him enormously to Denman’s other cronies—that affected Mr. Le Gallienne, for instance, and that conceited young Beardsley. Not but that young Beardsley, too, has a wit. I’ll say that for Denman—he keeps a witty table. . . . Well, have you brought papa back still a good Roman? Father Stanton says, by the way, we’re to call the Pope’s church in this country the Italian Mission. It’s quite time papa had a change of creed, anyhow; I begin to fear for his health since he read
Robert Elsmere
and wasn’t driven by it to honest doubt.”
“Neither,” said Rome, “was he driven by the Forum to the pagan gods. One begins to think that papa is settling down.”
“Oh, I trust not. Dear papa, he’s not old yet. . . . What a country you have come back to, though, my dear. Strikes everywhere—dockers, railwaymen, miners, even tailors. . . . Maurice is perfectly happy, encouraging them all. But, darling Maurice, I’m
seriously
afraid he may cut Amy’s throat one day. Serve her right, the little cat. If I were Maurice I’d beat her. Perhaps he will one day, when he’s not quite sober. I wish she’d run off with one of the vulgar men she flirts with, and leave him in peace.
He’ll
never run off, because he won’t leave the children to her. Poor old boy, he’s so desperately up against things the whole time. Mamma’s miserable about him, I know, though she never says a word. However, she’s consoled by all her nice grandchildren. Even grandpapa, you know, admits that the deplorable modern generation is doing its duty as regards multiplication. Why
do
old Bibly clergymen like grandpapa
think it so important to produce more life? One would think, one really
would
think, that there was plenty of that already. But no. Be fruitful, they say : multiply: replenish the earth. It says so in Genesis, and clergymen of grandpapa’s generation can’t get away from Genesis. Poor grandpapa. He’s writing to the
Guardian
, as usual, about the Modern Woman. She’s dreadfully on his mind. Latchkeys. He doesn’t think women ought to have them. Why not? He doesn’t explain. Man may open their front doors with keys, but women must, he thinks, always ring up the unfortunate maids. He can think of no reasons why; he is past reasons, but not past convictions. What, he asked, in Stanley’s drawing-room the other day, is to take the place for women, of the old sanctities and safeties? ‘The new safeties, I imagine, sir,’ Denman replied. Grandpapa grunted and frowned. He thinks women on bicycles really indecent, poor old dear. As a matter of fact, Denman does too—at least, ungraceful—which to him is the same thing. But Rome, my dear, you simply must get one. We’re all doing it now. It’s glorious; the nearest approach to wings permitted to men and women here below. Intoxicating! Stanley lives on hers, now her son has safely arrived. And it’s transforming clothes. Short jackets and cloth caps are coming in. Bustles are no more. And, my dear—
bloomers
are seen in the land! Yes, actually. Stanley cycles in them; she looks delightful, whatever Denman says. No, I don’t. Charles doesn’t approve. Conspicuous, he thinks. And, of course, so it is. Well, men will be men. They’ll never be civilised where women are concerned, most of them. But the poor silly old world really does march a little. We’re all getting most thrillingly
fin-de-siècle
. I wonder if all times have been as deliriously modern, while they lasted, as our times.”
“Probably,” said Rome. “It’s one of the more certain, though more ephemeral, qualities that times have. I wonder at what age grandpapa began deploring it. Not during the Regency or under William the Fourth, I imagine. I suppose
his
grandpapa was deploring it then.”
“Oh, and there’s another shocking female modernism become quite common this winter, my dear.
Cigarettes!
I haven’t perpetrated that myself yet, as Charles thinks that unfeminine too, and I’m sure the children would steal them and be sick. Besides, I don’t think it really becoming to an elegant female. But Stanley does. That literary set of hers is a funny mixture of forwardness and reaction. Forward women and reactionary men, I think. Grandpapa hasn’t tumbled to Stanley’s cigarettes yet. My hat, when he does! Well, it’s a funny world. I suppose my daughters will grow up smoking like their brothers, without thinking twice about it. . . . The darlings, they’re all so troublesome just now. That kindergarten can’t or won’t teach Imogen to speak properly. If she gabbles like this at three, what will she do at thirty? And Hughie drawls and contradicts . . .”
Their talk then ran along family lines.
Stanley pedalled swiftly, a sturdy, attractive figure in serge knickerbockers (“bloomers,” they were called while that graceful and sensible fashion of our ancestresses endured) along a smooth, sandy road between pine woods. The April sunlight flickered on the pale brown, needle-strewn road; the light wind sang in the
pines and blew dark curls of hair from under Stanley’s sailor hat-brim. Her bicycle basket was full of primroses. Her round, brown cheeks glowed pink; her lips were parted in a low, tuneless song (tuneless because Stanley could never get a tune right). It expressed her happiness, relieved the pressure of her joy at being alive. Such a day! Such a bicycle I Such sweet and merry air I
She stopped, got off her bicycle, leant it against a gate, and lay down flat on her back in the wood, staring up into the green gloom. London, Denman, her baby, were far off. She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realising the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savour the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next—that was life.
Then, presently, the moment lost its keenness, and she was no longer alone with beauty. Her husband and her baby broke the charmed circle, looking in. How she loved them! But they took from her something; her loneliness, that queer, eerie separateness, that only bachelors and spinsters know. They need not, to know it, be unattached, virgin bachelors and spinsters; love does not spoil separateness, but households do.
Stanley rose to her feet, brushed the pine-needles from her neat clothes and untidy hair, put on her sailor hat, and got on her bicycle again. Before her there was a long slope down. To take it, brakeless, feet up on the rest, was like flying. Stanley was no longer a mystic, a wife, or a mother; she was a hoydenish little girl out for a holiday.
She reached Weybridge station, and entrained for
London in one of the halting, smoke-palled, crawling trains of the period. In it she read Ibsen’s
Dolls’ House
, for she and Denman were going to see it next week at the Independent Theatre. What a play I What moralising! What
purpose
! What deplorable solemnity! There seemed, to the set of light-hearted and cynical æsthetes among whom Stanley moved, nothing to do about the
Dolls’ House
but to laugh at it. These strange, solemn Scandinavians! Yet numbers of cultured readers in England took it seriously, as cultured English readers love to take foreign plays. They found it impressive and fine, almost a gospel. Further, the bourgeois, the Philistines, the people who are inaccurately said to spend more time than the elect
in the street
(why is this believed of them?), mocked at it, so that there must be something in it, for, as has been well said (or if it has not it should have been) majorities are always wrong.
“The fact is,” said Stanley to herself, “the fact is, cultivated people like tracts. Especially cultivated women like tracts about their own emancipation. And of course, in a way, they’re right. . . . But plays with purposes . . .”
It will be observed that Stanley, whom nature had made to welcome purposes wherever found, had well assimilated the spirit of her literary group, which preferred art to be for the sake of art only. She had, as Vicky said of her, so much Zeitgeist. What seemed to her and her friends the good drama of the moment was light social comedy, full of gay, sparkling nonsense and epigrams for the sake of epigrams. Or the more profound and mordaunt wit of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who had lately begun to write plays. Mr. Shaw had, indeed, purpose, but his wit carried it off.
Waterloo. Even the trains of 1891 got there at last. Stanley went to look for her bicycle. Finding it and
wheeling it off, she felt herself to be one of the happiest persons in the station. She had everything. A bicycle, a husband, a baby, a house, freedom, love, literary and social opportunity, charming friends. Life was indeed felicitous to such as she.