Nor Many Waters Page 19

The last night: the night to which they knew there could be no successor.

  Perhaps, though, fate was charitable to them at the end. Perhaps they were spared that watching of the clock, that torturing knowledge ‘This is for the last time, the very last’; perhaps as they lay quietly, the fury of longing eased, a pause came in their talk; a pause that lengthened; so that unknown, sleep came to them unbidden, so that they lost count of the unhurrying minutes and the unhurrying night; so that when dawn fell across their faces there was left only the merciful haste of cabs and telephones.

  Perhaps.…

  But as I said all this is purely guess-work. It may not have been at all like that.

  §

  Of all that passed during those last weeks this alone I know, that one day they were talking of their position. “Do you realize that if this were America,” he said, “if it were any other country but Italy and this, none of this need have happened? If the divorce laws had not been mediaeval, there’ld have been no need to have brought up that charge of cruelty. You could have divorced your husband on the one count. He’ld have had no defence. It would have gone through quite simply. In Germany or America or France we’ld be man and wife by now.”

  And she had nodded her head.

  “The law’s about a hundred years out of date,” she said. “By the time it’s got level with us we’ll have been in our graves a hundred years.”

  He had set his jaw resolutely.

  “The law. It’s almost worth going into parliament to have a shot at altering it. Though I suppose as a lawyer one could do a good deal in a subterranean way outside. One could put the layman on the right track.”

  She had smiled.

  “It would be rather amusing,” she said, “to get a law altered after it had ceased to matter to you. Still,” she had added thoughtfully, “it would be a thing worth doing.”

  That, he told ,me, that, and one other thing. The last words practically that passed between them.

  “You mustn’t write to me,” she said.

  “Not write!” he echoed.

  She shook her head.

  “It would be more than I could stand. Without your letters it’ll be bad enough, but with them—no, no, it would be too much. Watching the papers every day for news of the next mail. I couldn’t settle down that way.”

  Even so he was unconvinced.

  “Not write!” he said, “but how shall I know that you’ve not forgotten me?”

  She smiled sadly.

  “You need have no fear of that,” she said. “But all the same I’ll find a way of telling you.”

  And her eyes were soft and clouded and, “Is this,” he asked himself, “what people mean when they talk about a broken heart?”

  §

  It was a question that he asked himself many times during the next few weeks; during the weeks when everything he did and everyone he saw appeared to be coming to him through a mist. The routine of his life continued. At Stone Buildings every morning he dictated letters, conveyed property, drafted wills, interviewed clients. And every day at two o’clock precisely he left his desk to walk up Chancery Lane to his high stool at the First Avenue Hotel; to his pint of stout and his two dozen natives. And in the evenings he would climb the rickety stairs in Air Street to the fourth-floor flat that was terribly full of ghosts now for him, and he would bath and shave and change into his evening clothes, and there would be a dinner or a dance or at his Club a quiet hand of bridge. And he would talk of politics and cricket and theatres and personalities. And all the time he would feel that the people he was talking to were not really there; which meant, of course, as he told himself, that he was not there himself. “Which I’m not,” he added. “I’m eight thousand miles away on a ship two-thirds of its way to Sydney.” And when he woke in the morning it was with the desolating sense that his eyes were opening on a day that could hold nothing that could move him in any way, that could please or distress or sadden or annoy him. He was innoculated against emotion. “I might just as well be dead,” he thought, “which I am, really. I’m a ghost in a world of ghosts. I died when that cab drove away. There is nothing I want to do, no one I want to see, nowhere I want to go. And it will be like this always: right to the end.”

  §

  Which, of course, it wasn’t. One cannot live in a vacuum for ever.

  But it would need a writer such as Proust and a book such as À la recherche du temps perdu to describe the stages by which one returns to life after a disaster, whatsoever it may be, the death of a parent, the loss of love, bankruptcy, the failure of ambition, any one of those calamities that make man say ‘This is the end. I shall go on living. But the tale is told.’ It would need a writer such as Proust to convey the significance of those first tentacles of interest flung out tentatively towards a game perhaps, or a party or a new-met personality: that first relaxing to environment, that losing of oneself in a conversation: that momentary forgetting of one’s trouble, of ceasing to be a phantom among phantoms. It is a moment that passes quickly, from whose temporary harbourage one is recalled by the voice that whispers, “Yes, this is all very well, but you’re only drugging yourself. You’re not really happy. You’re not really here. All this means nothing to you.”

  The voice whispers and it is heard. But the moment of oblivion returns; to stay more lengthily, to return more frequently. You find yourself enjoying things; you find yourself looking forward to things; you wake in the morning to the prospect of enjoyment. The voice still whispers, but less often, less loudly, less insistently. Your trouble is moving out of the foreground into the background of your life.

  It is reluctantly, however, that you see it go: it is jealously that you resist the inroads of returning life. It is as though a gift that you had made were being returned to you; so that you wonder if it had any value. “Is that all it can have meant, all that I can have felt?” you ask. “Can it really be that I’m getting over it.” And life appears to you as a lonely and trivial and shallow thing. Often with a sick heart James Merrick must have asked himself during those weeks of silence whether their loving had after all been only a little thing. He has had no word from her. The days pass; the pain decreases. Is he forgetting? Has she forgotten?

  And then one morning he finds lying on his table a newspaper, its wrapper addressed to him in a familiar writing. And he looks, and his breath stops, and it is sheer agony and sheer delight. It is her message to him; her signal that she has not forgotten. His fingers tremble as they tear the paper.

  At first he does not understand. It is the weekly edition of the Australasian. And he cannot understand why she should have sent it. There is no letter, no enclosure. Dubiously he spreads it out and searches: but there is no clue. Then suddenly on a page half-way through, he pauses, and the blood rushes to his cheeks, and he understands why she has sent it him. An English cricket side is touring in Australia. In this issue is the account of the first Test Match. But his eyes are too full of tears for him to read. She could have found no surer way of telling him that she remembered. This knowledge of hers that he would be curious to read the account of the cricket from an Australian angle, proved more clearly than would the costliest of gifts how completely she had loved him; had loved him enough to understand him. And he rose from his desk and walked over to the window and looked out over the withered and leafless branches, and he did not know whether it was with misery or happiness that his heart was full. This alone he knew, that for the first and last time in his life he had known love. Whatever happened he would never feel like that again. He and Marian were a part of one another. Love was a belonging. He could never belong to another person.

  And standing there, the memory came back to him of that other talk with Marian, their talk of the divorce laws. “You know, it would be amusing to get the law altered,” she had said, “when it had ceased to matter to you how it went.” Remembered how she had added, “There would be things less worth doing.” And as he remembered, a resolve came to him. A resolve to oppose
sturdily with all he possessed of energy and authority the mediaeval inhumanity of the English laws. His life had been spoilt by them; there was no remedy for that. It might be, though, that Marian would have children, that her children might one day find themselves in such a dilemma as their mother had. His life would not, he felt, have been wasted, could Marian’s children be alive in a world where the injustice that had been done their mother was no longer possible.

  “One must have a reason for living,” he thought; “I’ll make that mine.”

  §

  And that is the quarter of a century ago. And twenty-five years is a long time in which to remain faithful to a memory.

  That there have been women in his life seems to me inevitable. A protracted chastity must have left some trace in him. There would be something ‘gaga’ somewhere. And that there is not. He gives the impression of being indifferent to women, and that attitude is only possible to the man whose life is touched physically but not emotionally by them. And emotionally he never has been touched again. At least he has not married.

  It may be that he prefers bachelordom. It is not that he can have any hopes of her coming back to him. Perhaps at this late day he would not even wish her to. They would be different people now. But though there has been set between them the physical barrier of months and years, there has been no spiritual barrier. No intimacy has come to displace that intimacy. There has come never a time when he could not have said truthfully to her, “You stand first as you have stood first, as you always will stand first.” It is to that he holds: to the resolve that there shall never come a time when he will be unable to say to her, “There is no one but you. There never has been, there never will be anyone but you.” In his fashion he has been faithful.

  It would be idle and sentimental, though, to pretend that Merrick has led anything but a happy life. He has had his friends, his work, his games. Being unextravagant he has never had to bother about money. As an athlete he has not been worried by ill health. A Londoner in touch with many interests in the most varied of all cities, his diary has never been anything but a mosaic of engagements. A number of decent people have been fond of him. He has known and met on terms of equality many of the most distinguished of his contemporaries. He has worked loyally and unselfishly for his clients. And he has played a conspicuous part in the struggle for divorce reform.

  Of the injustices that destroyed his happiness many are now removed. There would be no complications to-day in the case of Eagar versus Eagar. A man may be divorced for unfaithfulness alone. The Newspaper reports of divorce proceedings have been restricted, so that men and women may seek private redress for private grievances without making Aunt Sallies of themselves in public. And whether or not it is to be in Merrick’s lifetime that the last ramparts of bigotry go down, and divorce by mutual consent becomes as much a matter of course as a marriage by mutual consent, it must be admitted that what was ultimately in the development of civilized thought inevitable, has been brought at least a decade closer by Merrick’s efforts.

  James Merrick has lived a full and varied life, and most people would say that he had ‘got over’ Marian comfortably enough. But that would be the worldly or, as you choose to look at it, the romantic view of the situation. For the romantic and the worldly view are in this case identical. One falls in love, the course of love is frustrated. And either one denies life by shooting oneself or by going into a monastery, or else one decides that even without love life is well worth living, and one ‘gets over’ it. That is both the worldly and the romantic view.

  But one cannot talk about ‘getting over’ a love affair. One comes through it, and that is a different matter. One comes through and there is so much that is left behind. It is like a regiment going into action. There is a line of trenches to be stormed; there is the barrage of howitzers and machine guns; there is the wire and the bayonets, the bombs and bullets. It is but a tattered remnant that answers to the muster roll. And though there will be an issuing of new equipment, a marshalling of recruits, a filling up of gaps, though the regiment will march past with its ranks closed, under the same banner, under the same name, it will be no longer the same regiment that stormed those trenches. It has come through; something of it, and that is all.

  Of how much of himself James Merrick left behind I can only guess from my knowledge of that of him which has come through. But there are times when I suspect that it was all that was poetical, all that was romantic and unworldly and uncalculating, that he gave over and for all time into Marian’s keeping. Certainly it is all that is practical and material and calculating that has survived, in this man in his later middle years, who fusses over the arrangement of a vase, over the correct temperature of a room, over the observances of a social code, over the amenities of travel. A man in whom poetry had died. That is what James Merrick has been for twenty years, that is what he will be for the twenty years that lie ahead of him. Those comfortable, agreeable, uneventful years. There are times when I see them as the pouring of so much water through a sieve.

  §

  I shall not forget the day on which Merrick told his story to me. It was a Saturday in early January. There was an international at Twickenham on account of which the football match that I was to have played in had been cancelled. And we sat for a long while over our port in the small drawing-room annexe at the Granville, I listening, he talking. It was after five when I left the Club; after five, and it was cold and there was a light rain falling and the lamps shone mistily down Piccadilly. There was a Test match in Australia. Hobbs had batted all day and made a hundred, and the placards of the evening papers bore in scarlet lettering, “THANK YOU HOBBS.” Australia! with a new day just beginning. And the sun shining high above the Heads and the tramcars clattering down Pitt Street. A Sunday morning, and all the young people hurrying out with their sandwiches and bathing clothes; all that stir of vigorous young life. Manly, Coggee, Bondi, the golden beaches; and the family parties stretched out under the sun upon the sand. And the long rows of bathers in the surf, struggling forward like long lines of infantry in attack into the surge and splash of the rolling Pacific breakers. Australia. The Alien Corn. With somewhere among those thousands, Marian.

  A Marian, though, over whose red-brown head twenty-five years had passed. A Marian whom, as likely as not, Merrick himself would not recognize were he to meet her now. The gold in the hair, the silver in the voice. But it was not only those that went. She would have become, as Merrick had become another Merrick, another Marian. A grandmother very likely, with responsibilities and duties and cares of home. Who could say what would be remaining of the Marian who tapped once on the door of a fourth-floor flat in Air Street? The handwriting upon a wrapper, but what else?

  What else remained, indeed, anywhere of their love? The world that they had loved in, the old world of ease and leisure, of privilege and safety, that had gone. And the London that they had loved in, gone or going; the scaffolding about Devonshire House was black against the sky. And Air Street had been torn down and Regent Street rebuilt. Not a flagstone, not a brick remained, of that dark alley she had hurried down so often. And they themselves twenty-five years later, with what left of those earlier selves, with twenty years still ahead of them, what did it count for in their lives, that they should have known those few weeks of ecstasy and anguish? Were they everything or were they nothing?

  I pondered.

  The long, agreeable, uneventful years; those years that represent, we are told, the stuff of life, the getting down to reality, that constitute success; how was one to weigh them against those few enraptured weeks and what measure is there that can contain them both? What is success in life and what is failure? The long years of service and responsibility; it may be that they are the stuff of life. It may be that poets and novelists are wrong to write of that which occupies only a fraction of a man’s conscious life; that dramatists falsify reality when they bring the curtain down on the grand gesture. It may be that what counts in life are the rea
soned processes of caution and ambition, the steady enterprise that makes for empire and prosperity, for the amenities of social conduct and co-operation, and that to burn with the hard gem-like flame is a less sure passport to immortality. It may be.

  I only know that there are times when I picture the Marian and Merrick that have endured the long trial of their exile, their days filled with pleasant and useful duties; occupied with the demands of friends, the claims of hospitality; visiting, receiving, comforting and exhorting; leading worthy and serviceable lives, the kind of lives that make for the well-ordering of the social scheme. I picture that, and then I think of them as they were, twenty-five years ago, on a grey autumn morning, strained close in each other’s arms, with hell and heaven in their hearts. And I compare and wonder, and I ask myself whether anything that has happened since to either of them has mattered in the least.

  Tahiti—London

  Oct. 1927-Jan. 1928

  For

  RUTH MORRIS

  A BIRTHDAY PRESENT

  AUGUST 15, 1928

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © 1928

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  ISBN: 9781448201235