Nor Many Waters Read online

  And though his lips too were smiling, his fingers were no longer playing with hers, but were tight clasped upon them, and though he tried to speak lightly, there was a break in his voice.

  “Love,” he said, “but that’s such a fearfully feeble word.” Hard as he tried he couldn’t make it sound offhand. And it was with half a laugh and half a sob that she turned to him to teach him how little a thing in truth were those kisses that she had scattered down the past so lightly.

  §

  They dined that evening at Gramati’s, the first restaurant where they had dined together, and the long narrow room with its painted panels and quaint ceiling was friendly and welcoming, and the thin dyspeptic waiter beamed on them and led them to their favourite table in the right-hand corner opposite the door, and they ordered as they had on that other evening minestrone and fritto misto, and zabaglione, and they drank the same powerful and slightly soured Barola. But on this night of nights the rough wine seemed singularly rich and full and never had fritto misto seemed a more happily compounded blending of varying flavours, and everybody in the room seemed happy; there was a smile on everybody’s face, and in the street outside an organ was crunching gaily, and there did not seem to be such a thing as unhappiness, beneath the sky. And beneath the table their feet were touching, and now and again his fingers would stretch out to hers; and their eyes would meet, glowing and radiant eyes, as they exchanged the confidences of a love that can at last confess its name.

  “I wonder what we should have thought,” he said, “if someone had told us on that first evening that one day we should come to mean this to one another.”

  And she smiled enchantingly. “I always thought,” she said, “that we were going to be good friends.”

  “Even after that party?”

  She laughed at that. “Even after that party,” she said. “I felt sure that if we were to meet we should find it quite easy to make things up. And I felt certain we should meet. And I knew that it would be if anything a bond between us; something for us to laugh over. I understood, you see. I was cross, because it seemed such a pity, because you were spoiling things, and it was so silly of you to be spoiling things. But I understood.”

  And they laughed over that old, that foolish misunderstanding.

  And he asked her when she had first begun to wonder whether one day she might not come to fall in love with him. And she leant forward across the table, her cheek rested between her hands.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been odd. I don’t know that I ever did, not properly. I’ve just gone on day after day; now and again I’ve asked myself whether we were in love; it was really all so different from what one expects it to be. There was never any moment when I said to myself, ‘Look, you’re in love.’ I just gradually came to know I was. There’ve never been any marked stages. Even now I don’t feel there’s been any change. It’s as though automatically the next thing there was to happen’s happened.”

  And sitting there at her side, with his knees touching gently against hers, he wondered whether all their life together it might not be like that: a gentle flowing of one mood into another: a gradual deepening, a gradual growth through the slow stages of maturity. Which was perhaps why they had not come earlier to an avowing of their love. They had known themselves to be part of a long process, they had known they could afford to wait. When it was the case of a light brief loving, the opportunity would pass if you did not snatch at it in the same way that in a quarter-mile race you could not make up lost ground. But you started slowly when you were entered for a Marathon. And perhaps it was because they had been so sure of one another, so sure that they had been destined for one another, that they had not known those agonies of insecurity by which most lovers are beset, the jealous terror of those hours when they are apart, when they wonder whether other’s hands may not be upon the prize they have delayed to seize, the terror that makes of most courtships a restless and tormented time. They had had no need for that. They would be such friends, they would be such lovers. They would be all sufficient for one another. They would go to parties and theatres, they would dance and travel. They would have plenty of friends, their door would be always open. But parties and hospitality and distractions would not be as they were to most people avenues of escape from the boredom of an unsatisfying life; they would be jolly things that she and he could share together, and the best moment would always be when it was all over and they were alone and they turned to one another and laughed and said, “Wasn’t it fun, what did you make of it all?” He was impatient to begin his sharing of all things with her.

  “We’ll go away soon,” he pleaded, “very soon, quite soon.” And her eyes were glowing.

  “The moment you call,” she answered.

  “That’ll be as soon,” he told her, “as you can get your trunks packed.”

  “And where shall we go?” she asked him. And he smiled wooingly.

  “Somewhere very quiet; somewhere strange and foreign, where neither of us have ever been; where neither of us will know a soul; where we can exist in and for each other.”

  And he paused. And there came a dreaming look into his eyes, a dreaming note into his voice. And, “I remember,” he went on, “when I was an undergraduate going for a Mediterranean cruise, and I remember waking one morning early, a few moments before dawn, and coming up on deck and looking out southwards towards Africa; all the previous day we had been near the coast. It had been red and parched and desolate, a wearying day; but that morning it was all very clear and cool and quiet, and the sea was blue, far bluer than the sky, and the sun was rising and across the water its rays were striking, it seemed only a few yards away, on a little climbing town, a Spanish town, and the houses looked so white and clean and cool, and I thought that life there and the people that lived there must be clean, and cool and quiet too, and I thought that I would go there one day, and I turned to one of the sailors and, ‘What’s the name of that place?’ I asked him, and ‘Tangiers’ he told me.”

  And as he spoke there rose very visibly before his memory the picture of that early morning, its peace and beauty and tranquillity; but more vividly still, effacing the other picture, the forecast of what of life there might be there for him and Marian. The marvel of that picture. The peace and beauty and tranquillity of a life that love had sweetened, and strengthened and made deep: a forecast so lovely that he drew such a deep breath as one draws when looking for the first time over some unimagined prospect. And at his side Marian sighed softly.

  “It won’t be my fault,” she said, “if you’re not happy.”

  So they sat talking there and dreaming of all that they would make of their life together, till long after the last diner had left the restaurant, and the waiters had begun in protest to pile the cleared tables into a heap in preparation for the morning’s sweeping.

  V

  “And first thing to-morrow I shall tell my father.”

  With those words Merrick had waved good-bye to her from the step of the hansom cab as she had stood silhouetted in the doorway of her flat, her fingers lifted to lips that were still warm from kisses, but before the morning had advanced many minutes he recognized very clearly that only news of the most propitious nature could be divulged at such a moment and nothing in his experience of his father’s nature could lead him to suppose that his father would see in such a light the news that was to be broken to him. He had not worked for four years in Lincoln’s Inn without learning that there were certain mornings when such subjects as advance of salary, protracted week-end leave, parental guarantees of overdraft were better postponed till food and wine had mellowed a perturbed spirit. One glance at his father’s face as he passed in the passage was sufficient to warn him that this was not the morning on which it would be prudent to announce anything more alarming than some vastly profitable transference of title deeds. “I think,” was his decision, “that I should be well advised to dine at home to-night.” And taking a telegraph form from his desk he wrote
to Marian a long and facetious telegram. The kind of telegram, full of personal railleries, that lovers send to one another. He wrote to her as though he were a reporter describing a cricket match, whose start had had to be postponed owing to bad weather. And he smiled to himself as he pictured the spirit in which she would receive the telegram. His passion for cricket had been always cause for mockery and taunts. “It’ll make her smile,” he predicted. “Anyhow it’ll give her an excuse to ring me up for an explanation.” Which it did, to the dislocation for half an hour of the firm’s transactions.

  “If you mention cricket to me again,” she concluded, laughingly, “I’ll divorce you within two hours of our marriage.”

  And he smiled to himself, thinking how little cricket, how little any of the things that had formerly comprised his life, mattered to him now. How easily he could dispense with any of them.

  And it was so differently that he had thought of marriage in the days before he had known Marian. He had always pictured himself ultimately as being married; to someone in his own world, who would share his interests and his friendships, who would give him a background. He had never conceived it as anything desperately romantic. He would be in love with her, of course. But then love was something that he had seen always as a sideshow, as a flavouring to life, as something that fitted or did not fit into the picture. It was the picture that mattered: the composite life composed of work and games: of tastes and friendships and ambitions. His marriage was to be something that would stabilize and complete that framework. He had never imagined that there would come a time when it would be his relationship with a woman that would comprise that framework, and that of the other things he would find use only for such ones as could find place for themselves upon that framework. Which was in truth how he was feeling now. It was his life with Marian that mattered. Other things—his work, his friends, his play—could group themselves round that relationship as they chose. Never in the self-confident course of his twenty-seven years had he faced the future with less misgiving.

  §

  Much, however, of his calm deserted him as he rang that evening at the bell of his father’s house. It was not, after all, such an easy matter that he had to speak of. In the intoxication of his delight he had scarcely realized how opposed this marriage of his would be to every tradition for which his parents stood. He had been pacing a dream continent, from which he was recalled to actuality by the massive brasswork of the knocker at which as a child he had gazed with such awestruck eyes. It was so formal and so familiar. Rogers opening the door and seeming no older and no fatter than he had in those days when he had welcomed Merrick home from school, smiling and bending forward just as he had always done. “Good evening, Mr. James, it’s a long while since we have had the pleasure of seeing you.” The old formula, the master changed to mister. That was the only difference. And the wide heavily banistered staircase, so typical of Victorian stolidity. And his mother a grey and wan figure, with a grey shawl draped about her shoulders, rising from her straight-backed chair, putting down her spectacles, her face momentarily aglow with pleasure.

  “Darling, how nice to see you! And you’re staying the night, aren’t you?”

  He shook his head. He had to be back at his flat for the morning’s post, he told her; and her face was shadowed with disappointment. “I’d been so hoping,” she said. “Still, it’s nice to have this much of you. Now come and tell me all that you’ve been doing.”

  It was all rather oddly moving. He supposed that life must be rather drab now for his mother, with her eldest son in India, and himself at the other end of London, with no current of young life moving through the house, and her husband too tired in the evenings to care greatly for entertainment. One day must be very like another for her. She would be so happy to see him married to the kind of girl she would have chosen for him, with grandchildren to make life fresh and new for her. It was a pity things had not gone that way, that Marian had not been free when they had met, that they could not have had a courtship and a wedding in keeping with the traditions of his house. Announcements in the Morning Post, photographs in the weekly papers, visits to relations; all the fun and excitement of a wedding: the bridesmaids, the presents, the champagne. And afterwards, when they were back from their honeymoon, a jolly house-warming in one of those quiet houses in a quiet square, that are the secret and the life of London: and people asking them out, and every one happy and glad about it. That was the kind of marriage he should have had. It was a pity for his mother’s sake that he could not have had it.

  And as the evening passed this sense of disloyalty to tradition deepened. The setting of that family dinner, the heavy walnut table; the heavy silver candlesticks; the trencher of venison; the shadowed room with the gleam of its gilt-framed portraits glimmering on the panelled walls, was marvellously typical of the prosperity and solidity of Victorian life in the upper middle classes. It had all been so solid and respectable; the large nurseries, the sense of obligations, the resolve of each son in turn to build for himself a house the exact replica of, though a little larger than, his father’s.

  It was not quite so drab of course, that Victorian era, as it had been painted. There had been the traditional years of a young man’s wild oats: the gaming and the drinking and the wandering in places where he would never be embarrassed by chance encounters with his sister’s friends. The worlds did not mix as they do now. But the wild oats sown and the debts settled and the ledgers cast, there was the prudent solid marriage, the creation and support of property and a sound Conservative voting at the polls. That was the world to which his father had been bred; the world in which he had expected his son to take his place. Just how much of a shock, Merrick wondered, would it be for them when they learned the truth? He was not particularly looking forward to the ordeal of his confession. It was as well, he reflected, that his father’s Burgundy was of a fortifying nature.

  He contrived, however, to make his voice sound offhand.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ve got some rather disquieting news for you.”

  His mother, who was the victim of many terrors, looked up from her sewing quickly.

  “Oh, my dear, you’re not ill?” she cried. “You haven’t got to have an operation?”

  “Nothing as serious as that.”

  “It’s debt, then. You’ve got into the hands of moneylenders. Dear one, how foolish of you!”

  Merrick stretched out his hand and patted her knee gently.

  “Nothing so alarming as that, my dear. It’s just that I’m going to get married. No, no,” he added hastily, as he saw his mother’s face flush eagerly with relieved, surprised delight. “I’m afraid that it’s not a marriage that you’ll be terribly pleased about. She’s married. There’ll have to be a divorce first.”

  To his mother, as to his grandfather, divorce was one of those things that just didn’t happen to people that one knew. One read about it as one read about murder and theft and blackmail. But it had its existence in a world one did not enter. “Divorce,” she repeated the word in a dull, stupefied, uncomprehending voice. Her husband showed no such alarm, however. In small matters he might be difficult and fussy, but when faced with a really difficult problem he was invariably level-headed and calm-eyed. No one could be more practical at the right moment.

  “I see,” he said, “and do we know the lady?”

  “You’ve never met her, Father. But you know all about her. Mrs. Herbert Eagar.”

  “Um. And you’re proposing to marry her when her case is through.”

  “No, Father.”

  “How do you mean—no?”

  “I’ve advised her to withdraw her suit.”

  “That, James, seems curious advice.”

  “You know, Father, what you said about that case. It’s a grubby business. The kind of thing that it takes a lifetime to live down. Could you tolerate the idea of allowing a woman you were in love with to go through it?”

  “I see no alternative if you
propose to marry her.”

  “There’s the alternative of our going away together and letting him divorce her.”

  “Of having yourself cited as the co-respondent.”

  “Yes.”

  At the word co-respondent, Merrick’s mother started in her chair, but his father did not relax his detached judicial attitude. At such moments he was unconcerned with the emotional aspects of a case. The facts alone counted with him. And as he was dealing only with the facts, there was no need for him to grow angry and impatient.

  There was silence for a moment while Mr. Merrick leaned back in his chair, stroking slowly his long smooth chin bone; deliberating calmly: when he spoke his words had the finality of a Judge’s summing up.

  “This is all,” he said, “as you know of course, a complete surprise. I have not met Mrs. Eagar. I know nothing of her except what I have learnt in the course of this unhappy case. She may be, very probably she is, the most delightful person. Very likely she would make you a very charming and loyal wife. Into that I cannot enter. Anyhow, I should never, I hope, make any attempt to influence you. I shall feel that I have done my duty to you as your father when I have set forth the facts as I see them. For I cannot believe that in the excitement of falling in love you have seen the facts in their true perspective.”

  He paused. No stranger who had listened could have believed that it was a father who was talking to a son in that shadowed library; so detached and judicial was his tone. But Merrick knew his father well enough to realize that that detachment did not mean indifference, but simply a refusal to rely for his effects on an emotional appeal. “You can always get what you want,” Mr. Merrick had once said, “by appealing to people’s emotions. But unless you’ve touched their intelligence, they’ll regret their decision afterwards. People’s decisions, to be binding and to be satisfactory, must be based on reason.” And it was to the reason always that he appealed. Even when Merrick had been a school-boy his father had discussed situations rather than exhorted him.