The World From Rough Stones

by Malcom Macdonald

  "What do you think"—he paused—"or, as Stevenson would put it: What do you 'say to' them?"

  She looked first at the Sacred then at Profane. "Hail…and Farewell?" she suggested. It was a little too sharp for Walter and his face darkened.

  She giggled.

  "You are somewhat skittish tonight," he said.

  "I have every reason for it," she answered. "And you should be pleased."

  "Oh I should?" He took up her mood.

  "Yes. You remember I told you guidance was at hand in this business of…" and she flapped her hand from the one decoration to the other.

  "Of hallo and goodbye?"

  "Well, see!" She poked her fingers in at the top of her chemise and pulled out her father's letter. "A letter from dear Papa—in which he sets everything straight."

  "Does he now?" Walter was instantly wary. "Well—he is something of an

  expert, you might say. I shall be interested to see how he…er…contrives to distill his…er…experience, for your eyes and ears."

  She held the letter for him to take.

  "No, no!" He went to the washstand and took off his shirt. "You read it to me."

  "'My dear child,'" she read. "'The matters you raise are of vast moment in the lives of people. Yet, to our shame, they have been so little written of or talked of by the pure and reverent that we have abandoned them to the impure and vile—amongst whom exaggeration and misinformation rule unchecked.'" She paused. "No—that wasn't the part."

  Her eyes rapidly scanned the lines. "Ah! Here: 'There is a wise eastern proverb: To satisfy the appetite is not always good. Man alone can say: I shall fast. Appetite thus conquered maketh man king over the beasts. Every…' this is Papa writing again now…'Every young person should be taught before marriage—as your mother, I believe, should have taught you—that the closest conjugal relations should never be allowed without a willingness in both partners that parenthood should follow.'"

  She wondered how much Walter had heard, he was washing himself so loudly. He said, with the faintest edge of sarcasm: "Oh! He does allow it then!"

  "Yes!" she laughed. "You see! You were right! What a goose I have been— and what pleasure we may take now!"

  He was not as pleased as she had expected. "Is there no more?" he asked.

  "Oh yes! He is so wise. You will see. He says: 'In this there should be no pandering to or indulgence of the lower nature while there is an unwillingness to bear as many children as a proper and manly…' I think he might have added 'womanly,'" she complained.

  "No doubt he wrote to encourage himself," Walter said and chuckled—as if it had been a funny remark.

  "'…as many children as a proper, manly, Christian temperance will allow. There is a higher plane of loving than the animal plane.' Shall I go on?"

  "By all means! If we can procure enough of his lines and his planes, we may be able to construct a whole geometry of love."

  She knew something was going very wrong. He was not taking it at all as she had hoped and expected. Still, she now had no other course but to read the letter through: "'There is a higher plane of living than the animal plane. And nowhere in life is self-control so needed as here. For where the lower nature is indulged at the expense of the higher, the man is dwarfed to the precise degree that the

  animal is gorged and swells.'"

  She looked up at his expressionless face before she read on. "'I have known many couples, here in my own parish, in whom failure to obey these simple precepts has led to the most piteous ruin. At the start, overindulgence may lead to no more than simple irritability, backache, headache, nervousness, and lassitude. In every case, I weep to tell you, it has ended by encompassing their total moral and physical ruin.'"

  Walter sat at the foot of her bed, staring with a disconcerting intensity into her face. "Such a pity he does not name them," he said. "One could judge for oneself then."

  "Oh but he explains it," she hastened on, increasingly desperate to convince him. "'The man expends a vast quantity of vital force—enough, after all, to sustain a child through nine long months of gestation. When this force is wasted in the simple gratification of the flesh, its loss can only weaken and deprave him who loses it. But when it is conserved, as Christian control demands, it adds so much and more to the mental and moral force of a man, because it raises him up to a higher plane of being.'"

  Still he fixed her with that steady stare. She raised her eyebrows. "Please continue," he said.

  With heavy heart she read on. "'The happiest married people are those who live in strictest continence, and who call the lower being into existence only for the begetting of children. With one joyful voice, they assert that they thereby enjoy not only better health and greater strength—but supreme happiness also.'" She refolded the letter and looked at him. "Oh, Walter! Is that not beautiful? What a noble ideal we now have set before us!"

  It had been a failure. Her father's thoughts, which had so inspired her and filled her with such hope for their future, had somehow left unsaid those words that might work a similar miracle in Walter. He looked at her so…emptily.

  "Walter?" She hesitated.

  "Your father wrote that?"

  "Your father."

  "Why?" she asked. "It is very much in his style."

  He smiled wearily, as if she had made an unintentional joke. "In fact…" She opened the letter again. "There's a postscript for you. I thought the part I read was so inspiring you would not need it…but…" She read again: "'To Walter I say: a strong lower nature is not a curse but a blessing. God made no mistake in making man what he is; but He never intended the lower nature to rule the higher. The struggle is worth it at all costs.' He's underlined that three times. 'The struggle is worth it at all costs, and the man who gains mastery grows only more manly and more noble. But if lust be given the sway, the man becomes increasingly beastly. Take heart: If you gain and keep the mastery, your struggle will not be endless. When, in middle life, the reproductive urge begins to hush, you will find a growing peacefulness and manly poise which will be marked by increasing intellectual and moral strength. Acquisitions and achievements will then be possible that were quite impossible in your earlier days.'"

  With a trembling heart she looked up to see how he responded; surely he could not now remain so churlish. He must respond to so fair a vision and so eloquent a promise.

  "You see, dear?" she prompted.

  He looked, unseeing, at her, at the bed, at the wall. "Hip hip hip huzza!" he said tonelessly.

  "Walter?"

  "We may take delight in each other now?" he asked.

  "Yes! Oh yes!" She put all the invitation she could manage into the words.

  Walter picked up the letter. "This…permits it."

  "Yes." She was less certain now.

  "And when we are assured that a child is on its way?"

  "Then we…oh let me read it to you again."

  He pulled the letter beyond her reach. "In your own words."

  "Then we live in the greater joy of God's sublime ordinance. In Christian continence. Gaining daily in the power and achievements of our higher natures."

  He looked at her most strangely, half sad, half sardonic. "Then we have not a moment to lose." He smiled, grinned, bared his teeth; his eyes flashed.

  Relief surged through her—and lust. He was such a tease! And he was so… desirable. She wriggled her toes, trembling with the hungers she had repressed. And, then, before she could stop herself, she pulled off her chemise and sat watching him hasten out of his own clothing. She burned with embarrassment at her impulsiveness but kept saying to herself, again and again, that it was all right now. Intellectual knowledge fought with a lifetime of implanted modesty.

  Perhaps that was what threw a pall over them that night and damped, in her, the fires that had cracked and rejoiced so merrily in anticipation. Perhaps it was that they had not snuffed the candle—with the result that Walter did not turn into the dark, fluid, powerful, phantasm of her ecstasy, b
ut remained everyday–sized, sweating Walter, with the blue shadow ready for shaving off his jowls and the white spittle at the corners of his lips. And the light revealed, too, an unexpected aloofness in his eyes. And she, because no deep emotion had transported her away, watched him…how could one characterize it?…sample her. This way and that, he used her as if she were a component, or a piece of equipment, or a fruit to be wormed from an awkward shell. He made no partner of her in his own heedless delirium. To be sure, she still enjoyed it. It was pleasant. Like eating a little delicacy or washing dirt away or coming in out of the cold. But that great, overpowering, sensual alchemy was missing. Some ingredient had vanished from the mixture.

  Walter, too, was not the way he had been at Earlestown. When he had finished his convulsions, he withdrew from her, blew out the light, and lay upon his back, breathing regularly, for a long time. She knew he was not sleeping though.

  "You will be replying to your father?" he said at last.

  "Yes," she said, startled.

  "Then let me suggest the general lines of what you will write."

  She did not at once reply.

  "Well?" he said.

  "Would…would you like to dictate it? I will take it down word for word. I'm sure it would please dear Papa to…"

  "No, no," he cut her short. "Your turn of phrase in these things is so much more felicitous."

  "Very well, dear." He did not make it sound complimentary.

  "You will, of course, begin by thanking him for the trouble he has taken to answer your questions so fully. Say that I, at least, can imagine the effort it must have cost to divert his mind from its everyday paths on to the unaccustomed— not to say alien—byways opened up by your inquiry."

  "Yes indeed!"

  He let the echoes of her enthusiasm die before he continued, speaking in those same flat tones. "Yes indeed. Then you will say that one of the glories of the Church of England is that her clergy do not—like the papists—pursue their better class of parishioners into their homes and rant at them with homilies and tracts…"

  The true drift of his words reached her through his level delivery. "Oh Walter!" she began.

  "You will further add that a daughter who marries must no longer look to her parents for instruction and must, moreover, strive ceaselessly to remember her vow—her freely given vow—of obedience to her husband."

  Wounded tears filled her eyes and fell from her cheeks. In all their long courtship, she had never seen him cold and indifferent to her. Angry, disappointed, disapproving, chiding…yes, he had, though rarely, been all of these. But never so cool. It frightened her.

  But his voice went on, in the same distant vein that seemed so menacing. "Add that it is henceforth he, the captain of her soul, who must sustain her from weakness to strength, guide her from ignorance into the light, and—should the painful need arise—chastise her from disaffection into submission. And your Walter, you may truthfully say, is not the man to shrink from any such duty, however personally repugnant."

  She wept now uncontrollably.

  Still he did not stop: "And in conclusion, Mrs. Thornton, you may tell him that it is no fault of yours or mine that you now face the necessity both to write these truths in your letter and apply them in your life. And that is one letter I'd be obliged ye'd show me before ye send it."

  He turned over and, at once, composed himself to sleep.

  She wept on as silently as she could. She was never one for uncontrolled abandonment to any of her senses. And it was not long before thought began to reassert itself, at first in random notions that strayed in and out of her misery, then in longer packages of reason. It occurred to her that Walter did not extemporize that reply to her father; he had composed it earlier. And the only time available had been between the reading of the letter and his time of convulsion. All the time he had been…doing that to her—no, not to her, upon her…all that time, he had been stringing together his sneering, insulting reply to her father's wonderful letter. He had not loved her; he had violated her love.

  When she turned on her side, she felt the sticky slime he had voided into her and her soul was nauseated.

  The Arabella who finally went to sleep was no longer tearful; she was calm and determined. No matter how terrible the struggle, no matter what the cost in all those shallow and trivial expressions of tenderness and affection between them, she would steer her husband from his viciousness and bring him to her way, to God's way. The thought filled her with a righteous joy far more sustaining and enriching than the meretricious passions her lower nature had served up. The light of God's purpose now shone so clear on the path ahead that she would

  never again stumble, never more stray.

  Walter was pleased to see her so radiant when they rose on the following day. The quiet intensity of her weeping had filled him with doubt and he had lain long awake, wondering whether or not to make more gentle love to her. He wanted to show that playing the stern, biblical patriarch was not a role he relished. He pictured in imagination the wonder of that orgy of reconciliation; but by the time he made the first move, she was soundly sleeping.

  That morning, reading The Vicar of Wakefield, Arabella came across a passage so remarkably apt that she copied it, word for word into her journal:

  The modest virgin, the prudent wife, and the careful matron are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains the others up to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances, whose sole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.

  She underlined the words "who reclaims the one from vice." And she added: "What directed my eyes to this passage? Surely these are the ways God chooses to speak to those with ears to hear, and eyes to behold."

  Increasingly in the days that followed, Walter was impelled to wonder where her fire had gone. He tried everything in his limited, juvenile repertoire to bring back the glory that had come against her will at Earlestown and Blackpool. He even tried some of the things little Miss Sanders had shown him—only to earn Arabella's sharp rebuke. In bed she was merely sociable. Their almost nightly exercises were like agreeable diversions—like a picnic or some amusing conversation between their bodies.

  Increasingly, he thought of that time in the graveyard with Molly—or Nora. He began to fear the obsessional, mocking return of that memory. Once or twice, he wept uncomprehendingly at the sense of loss that now pervaded the marriage of which he had once held such great, impossible hopes.

  Naturally, it was not long before these little bagatelles to fill the minutes between waking and sleeping became something less than nightly. It was not long before Walter, to Arabella's proud approbation, began to think of his duties in the world at large—meetings of Manchester engineers and Manchester societies dedicated to the advancement of science, visits to consult works of reference available only in Manchester, trips to the Manchester & Leeds headquarters, and so on. And it was not long before she noticed how these visits greatly diminished the impulses of his lower nature. Often when he returned, he would go three or more days without lurching across the bed and satisfying himself upon her; and sometimes another cause for visiting Manchester would intervene, and the interval before his next assault was even longer.

  It proved how right her father had been. The activities that so engaged dear Walter in Manchester were all of an improving nature and all belonged to the higher being. To the degree the higher being was thus nurtured, the lower withered and died.

  By the time winter fell she was able to record great progress in her journal.

  "I look back," she wrote, "on these first months of my marriage—and what a journey I have come! The ignorant, credulous child has endured the most searing temptations of the flesh and has emerged, I devoutly hope, a mature and Christian woman. Last night, Walter did another of his convulsions on me, which, fortunately, a
re increasingly rare. This time I can truly say I felt but the faintest and most distant twinge of pleasure—no more than would be occasioned by a casual scratching of one's scalp. My passage has become no greater source of delight than my toenails—and this by the devout and assiduous application of Christian principles. How I wish it were none of it necessary! If only we could propagate as modestly and chastely as trees!! And as effectively—Oh Lord, quicken me soon!!!

  "Now I gather strength to inspire Walter to similar heights of Christian achievement. Poor dear man! I know it will be harder for him than for me. And I must try not to feel superior. I must remember that God has made us the weaker vessels and so given us less to conquer. But men He has endowed with such aggression and such a fierce animal nature—and, to be sure, with the greater strength and intellect to overcome it. So I know Walter's nobility will, at last, be even greater, because he will have triumphed over so much more than I.