Nor Many Waters Page 18

  “And where, then, are you suggesting that I should go?”

  “Anywhere but there.”

  “And if I were anywhere but there, if I were anywhere but with my husband, do you imagine that loving you as I love you I should be able to keep away from London, that I should be able to keep away from you?”

  Her cheeks had flushed and her eyes were glowing, and his breath caught at the picture that her words evoked. But she was ruthlessly practical, she saw the cycle of effect and cause too well to be blind to what that picture meant.

  “I shouldn’t be able to keep away from you,” she went on. “And do you imagine that there would be any happiness for us that way, loving as we do. An intrigue may be all very well when one’s half-hearted. It may be, I don’t know. I’ve no experience of it. But for us who do love, it just wouldn’t do. Sooner or later we’ld find we couldn’t stand it. We’ld cut and run. We’ld fling our lots together. And we’ld be in the mess that I’ld give my life to save you from. No, no, my sweet, I’ve got to go.”

  “Which only means that it’s your life not mine that’s going to be ruined. To go out there with him!”

  Marian looked curiously at him. “He’s not a bad sort, you know, not really, not at heart.”

  “But, darlingest, you’ll hate it.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ll make a decent show of it,” she said.

  Her voice and her eyes were very soft. And his eyes flooded with tears as they looked at her. That this should be the end. It was so incredible, so monstrous that nothing should come out of their loving.

  “It’s such a waste,” he cried, and he began to plead, hotly, eagerly. But she would not listen. Her hand was lifted to bid him cease.

  “My dear,” she said, “it’s no use talking. It’s an impossible situation.”

  VI

  Of what happened during the weeks that followed Marian’s decision to accompany her husband to Australia, I know practically nothing; it was, as she had said, an impossible situation. The typical impossible situation of the play and novel, and such a situation as James Merrick’s imagination had maybe often pictured as a setting. The love dreams of a young man are coloured by what he reads. Most love stories, since it is rare for those who feel themselves to be destined for one another to be free at the hour of their first meeting, have to tell of a happiness that has been foregone or stolen or won to at the price of some other person’s. And Merrick had read Sapho and Spring Floods, La Dame aux Camelias and Mademoiselle de Maupin, and reading them had thought enviously, “How marvellous it must be to be able to feel like that! If only such an experience would come my way!” It is inevitable that he should have felt like that. For though a young man may be in love with love, he is decidedly out of love with the normal conditions and consequences of loving. He sees marriage as the closing of a door; the curtain on adventure and romance. He is in love with freedom. And yet it takes but a little while unless he is very shallow-natured, to realize how grievous a thing is the burden of light loving. To talk of free love is to contradict oneself. He neither is loved nor loves who has no fetters laid on him. Where nothing is at stake, there can be no true rapture won to; and when two people can say, “Well, this has been very jolly, and now we’ll tell each other good-bye, and there’ll be no regrets, no pain on either side,” they are confessing that they have never cared: that that which they have shared together bears the same relationship to love, that does to friendship the exchange of drinks in a Pullman car with a man whom you will never see or think about again. When the itch of curiosity has been set at rest, there can be no more than the solacing of vanity and nervous restlessness in such encounters. Which is not romance.

  And so it is towards the impossible situation, to the passion that sears, but which will leave him free that the imagination of a young man turns. It is not in this way precisely that he will present the matter to himself, his longing will not be honestly self-confessed, but it amounts in point of fact to this: that he wants to be able to feel and to protest an undying passion in circumstances where he may not be taken at his word.

  Sapho was written as an object-lesson to young men, but in actual fact there is no book more calculated to inflame their imagination. It is the story of a man, after all, who gets off apparently scot-free, who knows the ardours and tempests of that woman who was ‘toute la lyre’ and yet is spared the sorry gleaning, who is left free at the last to marry, if he so choose, some quiet country girl, or if he prefer, to distract himself with light-hearted loving. The young men must be few who have read Sapho without envy of Jean Gaussin’s fate. And James Merrick must have often pictured himself in a situation where he would say and would say sincerely. “This is the end, if you leave me, this will be the end. I’ve not loved before and I’ll not love again. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t give to make you happy.” And saying that, to be met with a sad and wistful smile, with a slowly shaken head and a voice that trembles, “My dear, there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t give you; I’m yours completely. But, dearest one, it’s just not possible.” To love like that, under the shadow of separation, pleading and vowing and imploring, with kisses made keener by despair, to feel and believe that your heart is breaking, and yet for that love not to be the curtain to romance: for that love to leave you free, when it is all over, to love again: it was with some such dream of loving that in the days before he met Marian Eagar, James Merrick must assuredly have soothed his dejected hours. And life had chosen to take him at his word.

  As, I think, life always does take us at our word. We are like children struggling with a problem in algebra, and life is the master who works the sum out for us on the blackboard. We think this of life, and that. We build up a dream future for ourselves. “If only it could be like this!” we say. And life stands behind our shoulder and watches us. And smiles, ironically but not maliciously. He is detached and indifferent as he walks over to the blackboard. “So that was what you wanted,” he says. “Well, here it is. This is the thing you asked for. Are you satisfied? does it content you?” And we gasp. For it is not by any means the thing we meant. And we have the letter but not the spirit of our desire.

  To the young man who read La Dame aux Camelias enviously, the impossible situation comes. He loves and he is loved where he is free to love and is not free to marry. And there are the tears and protestations, the raptures and the anguish; the bitterly sweet days, rendered bitterer and sweeter by the foreknowledge of separation. He has the thing he asked for: the door of the future is not closed: there is a date upon a calendar after which he can return to his old life and interests and opportunities. And with a sick heart he realizes how completely other a thing this is from that which he had dreamed; how useless a thing is that freedom he had so highly rated.

  For he had seen the impossible situation in terms not of love but of those casual courtships that had distracted his idle hours. He had pictured it, not as something completely other, but as an intensifying of those hours. He had not realized that previously he had only valued freedom because he had faith in the future’s possibilities. But that now, believing no longer that the future can hold anything better than that which he holds and is about to lose, freedom is without value. He is in a country where it is a coin that has no currency. There is nothing that it will purchase.

  And the days will pass. And the anguish and the rapture will grow more deep, the hour which his imagination had fondly pictured will draw close: the hour of parting when, from books and from an experience that had known love-making but not known love, he had fancied that the misery of a farewell kiss would be consoled by the knowledge of an abundant future; the hour when he will have to learn that nothing can be had both ways; that the future and the freedom of the future are a negligible medicine.

  The hour will come. There will be the piling of luggage on a car; the waving of a hand from the steps of an hotel; with a brooding wail—and than the slow whistle of an express, there is no sound i
n the world more wistful—a long lean train sets out across a continent. There is a liner swinging outwards from a quay; the faces of those watching from the wharf grow indistinct; a white figure turns away trailing a parasol. The hour has come. And it is just no use trying to be literary about it.

  The impossible situation: life had taken James Merrick very adequately at his word.

  §

  But as I said, of what happened during those weeks, I know practically nothing. Merrick has never spoken of them. I do not even know if they were lovers; whether it was to the memory of a realized or unrealized love that the remainder of his life was held in trust.

  To an unrealized, the romanticists will say. And they will quote Dante and Wagner and Louys’ Aphrodite and all that Turgenev literature of renunciation and regret. The ideal, they will say, is destroyed by actuality; the perfect love, as all else that is perfect, exists only within the imagination. And for an irresolute and dreaming nature it may well be that it is the love that has had least contact with reality that can resist most vigorously the despoiling years. For such a one it may be.

  James Merrick was not, however, that type of person. He lived in a world of facts. His imagination was inactive. That long fidelity which is only possible for the man who has had by one woman all other women spoiled for him would need I fancy, in Merrick’s case, more sturdy nourishment than a dream. A fact that Marian, who loved him enough to understand him, must have realized. And though it may well be that Merrick himself hesitated, remembering the disenchantment that had been the invariable consequence of conquest, Marian must have known that unless she revealed to him all that a true union could mean, some other woman would. And that prospect, the prospect of being no more than a forerunner, was something that a woman so purposeful as Marian could never face. That, anyhow, is the way I picture it.

  With the mind’s eye, I see a summer evening, exquisite and tranquil, with the air cool and mild, and the last lights faded in the sky; and Merrick returned from cricket, stretched lazy and indolent in a chair, with the shimmer of one shaded lamp turned on, too tired to read, flung back there, dreaming; half sad, half happy; and there is a faint knock upon the door, and a white figure is standing on the stairs; a smile fluttering on her lips, a smile that comes seemingly from vast distances of wisdom. And it is silently that she steps across the room. And Merrick is seated on the floor against her knees, and he does not know whether it is excitement or fear that makes his heart beat madly. And her finger-tips pass slowly through his hair and: “You must not be frightened,” her voice says softly, “this isn’t going to be like anything that’s been before.”

  And next morning as he sits at his office desk looking out over the green trees of Lincoln’s Inn, he pictures with a sense of nostalgia, too acute almost to be endured, all that marriage to Marian would have meant, all the beauty and the sweetness that would have been transfused across his life. Life would be a different thing, and he a different person were he to be Marian’s husband. The sentimentalists were not always wrong. Love did alter things. How could any man, he wonders, be spiteful and revengeful at an office desk, who had known twelve hours back the rapture and purity of such a love as Marian’s? You could not on the morrow of such a night be anything but gentle and chivalrous and courteous to other men. You could not within twelve hours of a thing like that be bullying and tyrannical, be sharp and shrewd, calculating and worldly wise. You could not be cynical and bitter and contemptuous. You could not be sour towards what was fresh and buoyant and unpractical. You could not be the man of affairs seeing life in terms of money and advancement. “If I had Marian,” he thinks, “I’ld be incapable of doing anything petty in my life.”

  And leaning forwards, his head upon his hands, he pictures the long succession of days and weeks, of months and years that lie ahead of him, the long uncertain years with the memory of Marian growing weaker hour by hour. “If I forget her,” he thinks, “I’m done for. I must cling tight to the memory of her. It’ll be all I’ve got. It’ll be all I’ll have. I’ll be nothing without that, nothing.”

  Those few, those precious hours.

  §

  ‘In a dream untroubled of hope’ it must have been, that those last weeks passed. A lovely and a roseate dream. For happiness can be achieved even under the shadow of separation. These things are relative. You cannot mark out that which is timeless in terms of time. And Marian and Merrick were in harmony with an eternal process. Their happiness would be so complete they would not be able to believe that there should be set a limit to it.

  “It seems,” he would say, “impossible that this can ever end. We belong so completely to one another. I can’t imagine that we shall be separated.”

  “We shan’t be,” she would answer, “in the things that matter.”

  Most of their spare time they would spend together. Eagar would be unlikely to place any check upon her movements. He would have no cause to be suspicious. He had won his fight. Ill-feeling dies with the firing of the last shot. The hour for reconciliation had come. It would be time enough when the ship sailed and the new life had started, for the business of mutual self-adjustment to be set in hand. He had gained his point. He could afford to wait. So that Merrick and Marian were saved the wearing and ignoble subterfuge of an intrigue. They were free to spend as they chose their brief time of freedom, to wander picnicking among the hackneyed and immortal haunts of lovers, Epping and Hampstead, Friday Street and Marlow, lying out on the green grass under the kindly skies: and on the wet days to go to plays and dances, to hear music together, and read books.

  I have spent many hours in Merrick’s library; lying along cushions on the floor, taking book after book down from the shelves, listening languidly to the music that he played from the far corner on the pianola. But I doubt if it was out of those books they read, or to that music that they listened. To most love affairs there is the association of some piece of music, but they are the few who are lured, as Swann was, to the perfection of some Vinteuil’s sonata. Most lovers are frightened of the unchallenged masterpiece; there is a cold and in hospitable quality about those eternal rhythms that were played a hundred years before they were born and will be listened to centuries after they are dead. They turn rather to those light favourites of an hour, those trifles of the stage and music hall that please for a season and are forgotten; in whose brief and ample flowering they find a kinship of mortality with their own short-lived summer.

  I do not know what were the tunes to which they danced, the songs they played to one another on the gramophone: I do not know what were their equivalents for those songs of ours for whose trace the next generation will search in vain. ‘Side by Side.’ ‘Me and my Shadow.’

  ’ Wherever you go

  Whatever you do

  I want you to know

  I love you.’

  Those foolish and worthless trifles that touch the heart more nearly than the stately sonatas can. What may have been the equivalent for them I do not know. But I like to think of them seated in the stalls of the St. James’s Theatre, hand close locked in hand, listening to the sonorous blank verse of Paolo:

  ‘… O face immured beside a faery sea

  That leaned down at dead midnight to be kissed . . .

  Those sounding lines that thrilled and have ceased to thrill. Those lines that Merrick would not have the heart now to re-read.

  ‘A dream untroubled of hope.’…

  So untroubled that they could discuss calmly the future they were not to share.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if it would be always like this if we were free; if we’ld always be as happy as we are now.”

  “Oh, I expect we’ld find something to quarrel over,” she would laugh.

  “Do you think so. Really think so?” And his forehead would pucker solemnly.

  But Marian could never allow a discussion to remain serious for long.

  “Oh, my dear, there’ld be hundreds of things. There’ld be children, I expect, and you’ld
probably be teaching your daughter to play cricket and I’ld object.”

  Though Merrick smiled, however, he remained thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said, “I wonder. If we were free, if we could marry now, would we really get like everybody else and quarrel and become indifferent and start affairs? Were all the married people that we see making such a compromise of things just like we are, once?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Perhaps, my dear,” she said, “we’ve been spared a lot.”

  But he shook his head. That he could not believe; that he refused steadfastly to believe. They would not have become like everyone else. They would not have quarrelled and nagged and been unfaithful. They would not have grown bored with one another. They would not have exhausted one another. The harmony between them would have grown deeper and stronger as time passed. Whatever happened he would go on believing that. The sentimentalists were not always wrong. There was such a thing in life as a love that deepened.

  There were times, though, when it was less easy to be brave; times when ‘the yoke of inauspicious stars’ grew hard to carry. Particularly as the hour of parting grew more close: as the time came for the marking of a last day upon the calendar.

  “If only,” she wailed, “it hadn’t got to be like that. That last night, watching the hands of the clock go round. If only the last night could have come without our knowing it was the last night, if something could happen to make our last night one that we never thought would be our last! I don’t know how I shall be able to face it, that saying to myself, ‘This is the last time, the very last.’”

  And there were no words that he could find to comfort her.

  “Watching the hands of the clock go round,” she sobbed, “saying ‘Another five hours, another hour, another half-hour! hearing it tick away our happiness. Oh, my dear one, how’ll I be able to stand it? I’ll die surely.’”