‘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.
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��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?’
‘Because he was one of nature’s dukes,’ she answered. ‘That’s why. He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king. Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they’re terribly preoccupied about to-morrow. Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down. None of your titled financiers or soap boilers. A genuine aristocrat. And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius. He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and to-morrow.’ She was silent for a little and then added, as an afterthought: ‘And what’s more, he wasn’t respectable. He didn’t care about appearances. They have their reward. But I don’t mind if we do look like scarecrows.’
‘You’ve paid yourself a nice lot of compliments, said Rampion. But he meditated her words and her spontaneous, natural, untroubled way of living. He envied her her Atavismus.
It was not merely tramping that Mary liked. She got almost as much enjoyment out of the more prosaic settled life they led, when they returned to England. ‘Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon,’ was what Rampion called her, when he saw her cooking the dinner; she did it with such childlike enthusiasm.
‘Think carefully,’ he had warned her before they married
‘You’re going to be poor. Really poor; not poor on a thousand a year like your impecunious friends. There’ll be no servants. You’ll have to cook and mend and do housework. You won’t find it pleasant.’
Mary only laughed. ‘_You’ll_ be the one who won’t find it pleasant,’ she answered, ‘at any rate until I’ve learnt to cook.’
She had never so much as fried an egg when she married him.
Strangely enough that childlike, Marie-Antoinette-ish enthusiasm for doing things—for cooking on a real range, using a real carpet sweeper, a real sewing machine—survived the first novel and exciting months. She went on enjoying herself.
‘I could never go back to being a perfect lady,’ she used to say. ‘It would bore me to death. Goodness knows, housework and managing and looking after the children can be boring and exasperating enough. But being quite out of touch with all the ordinary facts of existence, living in a different planet from the world of daily, physical reality—that’s much worse.’
Rampion was of the same opinion. He refused to make art and thought excuses for living a life of abstraction. In the intervals of painting and writing he helped Mary with the housework.
‘You don’t expect flowers to grow in nice clean vacuums.’ That was his argument. ‘They need mould and clay and dung. So does art.’
For Rampion, there was also a kind of moral compulsion to live the life of the poor. Even when he was making quite a reasonable income, they kept only one maid and continued to do a great part of the housework themselves. It was a case, with him, of noblesse obligeor rather roture oblige. To live like the rich, in a comfortable abstraction from material cares would be, he felt, a kind of betrayal of his class, his own people. If he sat still and paid servants to work for him, he would somehow be insulting his mother’s memory, he would be posthumously telling her that he was too good to lead the life she had led.
There were occasions when he hated this moral compulsion, because he felt that it was compelling him to do foolish and ridiculous things; and hating, he would try to rebel against it. How absurdly shocked he had been, for example, by Mary’s habit of lying in bed of a morning. When she felt lazy, she didn’t get up; and there was an end of it. The first time it happened, Rampion was really distressed.
‘But you can’t stay in bed all the morning,’ he protested.
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? But because you can’t.’
‘But I can,’ said Mary calmly. ‘And I do.’
It shocked him. Unreasonably, as he perceived when he tried to analyse his feelings. But all the same, he was shocked. He was shocked because he had always got up early himself, because all his people had had to get up early. It shocked him that one should lie in bed while other people were up and working. To get up late was somehow to add insult to injury. And yet, obviously, getting up early oneself, unnecessarily, did nothing to help those who had to get up early. Getting up, when one wasn’t compelled to get up, was just a tribute of respect, like taking off one’s hat in a church. And at the same time it was an act of propitiation, a sacrificial appeasement of the conscience
‘One oughtn’t to feel like that,’ he reflected. ‘Imagine a Greek feeling like that!’
It was unimaginable. And yet the fact remained that, however much he might disapprove of the feeling, he did in fact feel like that.
‘Mary’s healthier than I am,’ he thought; and he remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals. ‘They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.’ Mary was like that and it was good. To be a perfect animal and a perfect human—that was the ideal. All the same, he was shocked when she didn’t get up in the morning. He tried not to be; but he was shocked. Rebelling, he would sometimes lie in bed himself till noon, on principle. It was a duty not to be a barbarian of the conscience. But it was a very long time before he could genuinely enjoy his laziness.
Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him. During those first months of their marriage he was often
, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her. Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly. The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.
‘You’re such an absurd old puritan,’ she told him.
The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded. By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he was half a puritan. His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being. Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice. The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself. Theoretically, he approved of Mary’s easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification. And yet, whenever, in those early days, she began to talk in her calm matter-of-fact way of what he had only heard of, portentously, as fornication and adultery, he felt a shock, not in his reason (for that, after a moment’s reflection, approved), but in some deeper layer of his being. And the same part of him obscurely suffered from her great and whole-heartedly expressed capacity for pleasure and amusement, from her easy laughter, her excellent appetite, her unaffected sensuality. It took him a long time to unlearn the puritanism of his childhood. There were moments when his love for his mother turned almost to hatred.
‘She had no right to bring me up like that,’ he said. ‘Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree. No right.’
And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary. He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery. Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.
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