by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
A TELEPHONE CALL
Sec. 1
Trafford went back to Solomonson for a day or so, and then to London, toresume the experimental work of the research he had in hand. But he wasso much in love with Marjorie that for some days it was a very dazedmind that fumbled with the apparatus--arranged it and rearranged it, andfell into daydreams that gave the utmost concern to Durgan thebottle-washer.
"He's not going straight at things," said Durgan the bottle-washer tohis wife. "He usually goes so straight at things it's a pleasure towatch it. He told me he was going down into Kent to think everythingout." Mr. Durgan paused impressively, and spoke with a sigh ofperplexity. "He hasn't...."
But later Durgan was able to report that Trafford had pulled himselftogether. The work was moving.
"I was worried for a bit," said Mr. Durgan. "But I _think_ it's allright again. I _believe_ it's all right again."
Sec. 2
Trafford was one of those rare scientific men who really ought to beengaged in scientific research.
He could never leave an accepted formula alone. His mind was like someinsatiable corrosive, that ate into all the hidden inequalities andplastered weaknesses of accepted theories, and bit its way throughevery plausibility of appearance. He was extraordinarily fertile inexasperating alternative hypotheses. His invention of destructive testexperiments was as happy as the respectful irony with which he broughtthem into contact with the generalizations they doomed. He was already,at six-and-twenty, hated, abused, obstructed, and respected. He wasstill outside the Royal Society, of course, and the editors of thescientific periodicals admired his papers greatly, and delayedpublication; but it was fairly certain that that pressure of foreigncriticism and competition which prevents English scientific men of goodfamily and social position from maintaining any such national standardsas we are able to do in art, literature, and politics, would finallycarry him in. And since he had a small professorship worth three hundreda year, which gave him the command of a sufficient research laboratoryand the services of Mr. Durgan, a private income of nearly three hundredmore, a devoted mother to keep house for him, and an invincible faith inTruth, he had every prospect of winning in his particular struggle toinflict more Truth, new lucidities, and fresh powers upon this fractiousand unreasonable universe.
In the world of science now, even more than in the world of literatureand political thought, the thing that is alive struggles,half-suffocated, amidst a copious production of things born dead. Theendowment of research, the organization of scientific progress, thecreation of salaried posts, and the assignment of honours, has attractedto this field just that type of man which is least gifted to penetrateand discover, and least able to admit its own defect or the quality of asuperior. Such men are producing great, bulky masses of imitativeresearch, futile inquiries, and monstrous entanglements of technicalityabout their subjects; and it is to their instinctive antagonism to theidea of a "gift" in such things that we owe the preposterous conceptionof a training for research, the manufacture of mental blinkers that isto say, to avoid what is the very soul of brilliant inquiry--applicablediscursiveness. The trained investigator is quite the absurdest figurein the farce of contemporary intellectual life; he is like a bath-chairperpetually starting to cross the Himalayas by virtue of a licence to doso. For such enterprises one must have wings. Organization and geniusare antipathetic. The vivid and creative mind, by virtue of itsqualities, is a spasmodic and adventurous mind; it resents blinkers, andthe mere implication that it can be driven in harness to the unexpected.It demands freedom. It resents regular attendance from ten to four andpunctualities in general and all those paralyzing minor tests of conductthat are vitally important to the imagination of the authoritative dull.Consequently, it is being eliminated from its legitimate field, and itis only here and there among the younger men that such a figure asTrafford gives any promise of a renewal of that enthusiasm, thatintellectual enterprise, which were distinctive of the great age ofscientific advance.
Trafford was the only son of his parents. His father had been a youngsurgeon, more attracted by knowledge than practice, who had been killedby a scratch of the scalpel in an investigation upon ulcerativeprocesses, at the age of twenty-nine. Trafford at that time was threeyears old, so that he had not the least memory of his father; but hismother, by a thousand almost unpremeditated touches, had built up afigure for him and a tradition that was shaping his life. She had lovedher husband passionately, and when he died her love burnt up like aflame released, and made a god of the good she had known with him. Shewas then a very beautiful and active-minded woman of thirty, and she didher best to reconstruct her life; but she could find nothing so livingin the world as the clear courage, the essential simplicity, and tendermemories of the man she had lost. And she was the more devoted to himthat he had had little weaknesses of temper and bearing, and that anoutrageous campaign had been waged against him that did not cease withhis death. He had, in some medical periodical, published drawings of adead dog clamped to display a deformity, and these had been seized uponby a group of anti-vivisection fanatics as the representation of avivisection. A libel action had been pending when he died; but there isno protection of the dead from libel. That monstrous lie met her onpamphlet cover, on hoardings, in sensational appeals; it seemedimmortal, and she would have suffered the pains of a dozen suttees ifshe could have done so, to show the world how the power and tendernessof this alleged tormentor of helpless beasts had gripped one woman'sheart. It counted enormously in her decision to remain a widow andconcentrate her life upon her son.
She watched his growth with a care and passionate subtlety that even atsix-and-twenty he was still far from suspecting. She dreaded hisbecoming a mother's pet, she sent him away to school and fretted throughlong terms alone, that he might be made into a man. She interestedherself in literary work and social affairs lest she should press uponhim unduly. She listened for the crude expression of growing thought inhim with an intensity that was almost anguish. She was too intelligentto dream of forming his mind, he browsed on every doctrine to find hisown, but she did desire most passionately, she prayed, she prayed inthe darkness of sleepless nights, that the views, the breadths, thespacious emotions which had ennobled her husband in her eyes should riseagain in him.
There were years of doubt and waiting. He was a good boy and a bad boy,now brilliant, now touching, now disappointing, now gloriouslyreassuring, and now heart-rending as only the children of our blood canbe. He had errors and bad moments, lapses into sheer naughtiness, phasesof indolence, attacks of contagious vulgarity. But more and more surelyshe saw him for his father's son; she traced the same great curiosities,the same keen dauntless questioning; whatever incidents might disturband perplex her, his intellectual growth went on strong and clear andincreasing like some sacred flame that is carried in procession, haltingperhaps and swaying a little but keeping on, over the heads of atumultuous crowd.
He went from his school to the Royal College of Science, thence tosuccesses at Cambridge, and thence to Berlin. He travelled a little inAsia Minor and Persia, had a journey to America, and then came back toher and London, sunburnt, moustached, manly, and a little strange. Whenhe had been a boy she had thought his very soul pellucid; it had cloudedopaquely against her scrutiny as he passed into adolescence. Thenthrough the period of visits and departures, travel together,separations, he grew into something detached and admirable, a mancuriously reminiscent of his father, unexpectedly different. She ceasedto feel what he was feeling in his mind, had to watch him, infer, guess,speculate about him. She desired for him and dreaded for him with anundying tenderness, but she no longer had any assurance that she couldinterfere to help him. He had his father's trick of falling intothought. Her brown eyes would watch him across the flowers and delicateglass and silver of her dinner table when he dined at home with her.Sometimes he seemed to forget she existed, sometimes he delighted inher, talked to amuse her, petted her; sometimes, and then it was she washa
ppiest, he talked of plays and books with her, discussed generalquestions, spoke even of that broadly conceived scheme of work whichengaged so much of his imagination. She knew that it was distinguishedand powerful work. Old friends of her husband spoke of it to her,praised its inspired directness, its beautiful simplicity. Since thedays of Wollaston, they said, no one had been so witty an experimenter,no one had got more out of mere scraps of apparatus or contrived moreingenious simplifications.
When he had accepted the minor Professorship which gave him a footing inthe world of responsible scientific men, she had taken a house in aquiet street in Chelsea which necessitated a daily walk to hislaboratory. It was a little old Georgian house with worn and gracefulrooms, a dignified front door and a fine gateway of Sussex ironwork muchpainted and eaten away. She arranged it with great care; she had keptmost of her furniture, and his study had his father's bureau, and theselfsame agate paper-weight that had pressed the unfinished paper heleft when he died. She was a woman of persistent friendships, and therecame to her, old connections of those early times trailing fresher andyounger people in their wake, sons, daughters, nephews, disciples; herson brought home all sorts of interesting men, and it was remarkable toher that amidst the talk and discussion at her table, she discoveredaspects of her son and often quite intimate aspects she would never haveseen with him alone.
She would not let herself believe that this Indian summer of her lifecould last for ever. He was no passionless devotee of research, for allhis silence and restraints. She had seen him kindle with anger atobstacles and absurdities, and quicken in the presence of beauty. Sheknew how readily and richly he responded to beauty. Things happened tohave run smoothly with him so far, that was all. "Of course," she said,"he must fall in love. It cannot be long before he falls in love."
Once or twice that had seemed to happen, and then it had come tonothing....
She knew that sooner or later this completion of his possibilities mustcome, that the present steadfastness of purpose was a phase in whichforces gathered, that love must sweep into his life as a deep andpassionate disturbance. She wondered where it would take him, whether itwould leave him enriched or devastated. She saw at times how young hewas; she had, as I suppose most older people have about their juniors,the profoundest doubt whether he was wise enough yet to be trusted witha thing so good as himself. He had flashes of high-spiritedindiscretion, and at times a wildfire of humour flared in his talk. Sofar that had done no worse for him than make an enemy or so inscientific circles. But she had no idea of the limits of hisexcitability. She would watch him and fear for him--she knew thewreckage love can make--and also she desired that he should lose nothingthat life and his nature could give him.
Sec. 3
In the two months of separation that ensued before Marjorie wasone-and-twenty, Trafford's mind went through some remarkable phases. Atfirst the excitement of his passion for Marjorie obscured everythingelse, then with his return to London and his laboratory the immenseinertia of habit and slowly developed purposes, the complex yetconvergent system of ideas and problems to which so much of his life hadbeen given, began to reassert itself. His love was vivid and intense, alight in his imagination, a fever in his blood; but it was a new thing;it had not crept into the flesh and bones of his being, it was awaythere in Surrey; the streets of London, his home, the white-walledchamber with its skylight and high windows and charts of constants, inwhich his apparatus was arranged, had no suggestion of her. She wasoutside--an adventure--a perplexing incommensurable with all thesethings.
He had left Buryhamstreet with Marjorie riotously in possession of hismind. He could think of nothing but Marjorie in the train, and how shehad shone at him in the study, and how her voice had sounded when shespoke, and how she stood and moved, and the shape and sensation of herhands, and how it had felt to hold her for those brief moments in thewood and press lips and body to his, and how her face had gleamed in thelaced shadows of the moonlight, soft and wonderful.
In fact, he thought of Marjorie.
He thought she was splendid, courageous, wise by instinct. He had nodoubt of her or that she was to be his--when the weeks of waiting hadpassed by. She was his, and he was Marjorie's; that had been settledfrom the beginning of the world. It didn't occur to him that anythinghad happened to alter his life or any of his arrangements in any way,except that they were altogether altered--as the world is alteredwithout displacement when the sun pours up in the east. He wasglorified--and everything was glorified.
He wondered how they would meet again, and dreamt a thousand impossibleand stirring dreams, but he dreamt them as dreams.
At first, to Durgan's infinite distress, he thought of her all day, andthen, as the old familiar interests grappled him again, he thought ofher in the morning and the evening and as he walked between his home andthe laboratory and at all sorts of incidental times--and even when theclose-locked riddles of his research held the foreground and focus ofhis thoughts, he still seemed to be thinking of her as a radiantbackground to ions and molecules and atoms and interwoven systems ofeddies and quivering oscillations deep down in the very heart of matter.
And always he thought of her as something of the summer. The rich decaysof autumn came, the Chelsea roads were littered with variegated leavesthat were presently wet and dirty and slippery, the twilight crept downinto the day towards five o'clock and four, but in his memory of her theleaves were green, the evenings were long, the warm quiet of ruralSurrey in high August filled the air. So that it was with a kind ofamazement he found her in London and in November close at hand. He wascalled to the college telephone one day from a conversation with aproposed research student. It was a middle-aged woman bachelor anxiousfor the D.Sc., who wished to occupy the further bench in the laboratory;but she had no mental fire, and his mind was busy with excuses anddiscouragements.
He had no thought of Marjorie when she answered, and for an instant hedid not recognize her voice.
"Yes, I'm Mr. Trafford."...
"Who is it?" he reiterated with a note of irascibility. "_Who?_"
The little voice laughed. "Why! I'm Marjorie!" it said.
Then she was back in his life like a lantern suddenly become visible ina wood at midnight.
It was like meeting her as a china figure, neat and perfect and twoinches high. It was her voice, very clear and very bright, and quitecharacteristic, as though he was hearing it through the wrong end of atelescope. It was her voice, clear as a bell; confident without ashadow.
"It's _me!_ Marjorie! I'm twenty-one to-day!"
It was like a little arrow of exquisite light shot into the very heartof his life.
He laughed back. "Are you for meeting me then, Marjorie?"
Sec. 4
They met in Kensington Gardens with an air of being clandestine anddefiant. It was one of those days of amber sunlight, soft air, andtender beauty with which London relieves the tragic glooms of the year'sdecline. There were still a residue of warm-tinted leaves in puffs andclusters upon the tree branches, a boat or two ruffled the blueSerpentine, and the waterfowl gave colour and animation to the selvageof the water. The sedges were still a greenish yellow.
The two met shyly. They were both a little unfamiliar to each other.Trafford was black-coated, silk-hatted, umbrella-d, a decorous youngprofessor in the place of the cheerful aeronaut who had fallen so gailyout of the sky. Marjorie had a new tailor-made dress of russet-green,and a little cloth toque ruled and disciplined the hair he had known asa ruddy confusion.... They had dreamt, I think, of extended arms and awild rush to embrace one another. Instead, they shook hands.
"And so," said Trafford, "we meet again!"
"I don't see why we shouldn't meet!" said Marjorie.
There was a slight pause.
"Let's have two of those jolly little green chairs," said Trafford....
They walked across the grass towards the chairs he had indicated, andboth were full of the momentous things they were finding it impossibleto say.
"Ther
e ought to be squirrels here, as there are in New York," he said atlast.
They sat down. There was a moment's silence, and then Trafford's spiritrose in rebellion and he plunged at this--this stranger beside him.
"Look here," he said, "do you still love me, Marjorie?"
She looked up into his face with eyes in which surprise and scrutinypassed into something altogether beautiful. "I love you--altogether,"she said in a steady, low voice.
And suddenly she was no longer a stranger, but the girl who had flittedto his arms breathless, unhesitating, through the dusk. His bloodquickened. He made an awkward gesture as though he arrested an impulseto touch her. "My sweetheart," he said. "My dear one!"
Marjorie's face flashed responses. "It's you," he said.
"Me," she answered.
"Do you remember?"
"Everything!"
"My dear!"
"I want to tell you things," said Marjorie. "What are we to do?"....
He tried afterwards to retrace that conversation. He was chieflyashamed of his scientific preoccupations during that London interval. Hehad thought of a thousand things; Marjorie had thought of nothing elsebut love and him. Her happy assurance, her absolute confidence that hisdesires would march with hers, reproached and confuted every adversethought in him as though it was a treachery to love. He had that sensewhich I suppose comes at times to every man, of entire unworthiness forthe straight, unhesitating decision, the clear simplicity of a woman'spassion. He had dreamt vaguely, unsubstantially, the while he hadarranged his pressures and temperatures and infinitesimal ingredients,and worked with goniometer and trial models and the new calculatingmachine he had contrived for his research. But she had thought clearly,definitely, fully--of nothing but coming to him. She had thought outeverything that bore upon that; reasons for preciptance, reasons fordelay, she had weighed the rewards of conformity against the glamour ofromance. It became more and more clear to him as they talked, that shewas determined to elope with him, to go to Italy, and there have anextraordinarily picturesque and beautiful time. Her definiteness shamedhis poverty of anticipation. Her enthusiasm carried him with her. Ofcourse it was so that things must be done....
When at last they parted under the multiplying lamps of the Novembertwilight, he turned his face eastward. He was afraid of his mother'seyes--he scarcely knew why. He walked along Kensington Gore, and theclustering confused lights of street and house, white and golden andorange and pale lilac, the moving lamps and shining glitter of thetraffic, the luminous interiors of omnibuses, the reflection of carriageand hoarding, the fading daylight overhead, the phantom trees to theleft, the deepening shadows and blacknesses among the houses on hisright, the bobbing heads of wayfarers, were just for him the stir andhue and texture of fairyland. All the world was fairyland. He went tohis club and dined there, and divided the evening between geography, asit is condensed in Baedeker and Murray on North Italy, ItalianSwitzerland and the Italian Riviera, and a study of the marriage laws asthey are expounded in "Whitaker's Almanac," the "EncyclopaediaBritannica," and other convenient works of reference. He replaced thebooks as he used them, and went at last from the library into thesmoking-room, but seeing a man who might talk to him there, he went outat once into the streets, and fetched a wide compass by Baker Street,Oxford Street, and Hyde Park, home.
He was a little astonished at himself and everything.
But it was going to be--splendid.
(What poor things words can be!)
Sec. 5
He found his mother still up. She had been re-reading "The Old Wives'Tale," and she sat before a ruddy fire in the shadow beyond the litcircle of a green-shaded electric light thinking, with the book putaside. In the dimness above was his father's portrait. "Time you were inbed, mother," he said reprovingly, and kissed her eyebrow and stoodabove her. "What's the book?" he asked, and picked it up and put itdown, forgotten. Their eyes met. She perceived he had something to say;she did not know what. "Where have you been?" she asked.
He told her, and they lapsed into silence. She asked another questionand he answered her, and the indifferent conversation ended again. Thesilence lengthened. Then he plunged: "I wonder, mother, if it would putyou out very much if I brought home a wife to you?"
So it had come to this--and she had not seen it coming. She looked intothe glowing recesses of the fire before her and controlled her voice byan effort. "I'd be glad for you to do it, dear--if you loved her," shesaid very quietly. He stared down at her for a moment; then he kneltdown beside her and took her hand and kissed it. "_My dear_," shewhispered softly, stroking his head, and her tears came streaming. For atime they said no more.
Presently he put coal on the fire, and then sitting on the hearthrug ather feet and looking away from her into the flames--in an attitude thattook her back to his boyhood--he began to tell her brokenly andawkwardly of Marjorie.
"It's so hard, mother, to explain these things," he began. "One doesn'thalf understand the things that are happening to one. I want to make youin love with her, dear, just as I am. And I don't see how I can."
"Perhaps I shall understand, my dear. Perhaps I shall understand betterthan you think."
"She's such a beautiful thing--with something about her----. You knowthose steel blades you can bend back to the hilt--and they're steel! Andshe's tender. It's as if someone had taken tears, mother, and made aspirit out of them----"
She caressed and stroked his hand. "My dear," she said, "I know."
"And a sort of dancing daring in her eyes."
"Yes," she said. "But tell me where she comes from, and how you mether--and all the circumstantial things that a sensible old woman canunderstand."
He kissed her hand and sat down beside her, with his shoulder againstthe arm of her chair, his fingers interlaced about his knee. She couldnot keep her touch from his hair, and she tried to force back thethought in her mind that all these talks must end, that very soon indeedthey would end. And she was glad, full of pride and joy too that her sonwas a lover after her heart, a clean and simple lover as his father hadbeen before him. He loved this unknown Marjorie, finely, sweetly,bravely, even as she herself could have desired to have been loved. Shetold herself she did not care very greatly even if this Marjorie shouldprove unworthy. So long as her son was not unworthy.
He pieced his story together. He gave her a picture of the Popes,Marjorie in her family like a jewel in an ugly setting, so it seemed tohim, and the queer dull rage of her father and all that they meant todo. She tried to grasp his perplexities and advise, but chiefly she wasfilled with the thought that he was in love. If he wanted a girl heshould have her, and if he had to take her by force, well, wasn't it hisright? She set small store upon the Popes that night--or anycircumstances. And since she herself had married on the slightest ofsecurity, she was concerned very little that this great adventure was tobe attempted on an income of a few hundreds a year. It was outside herphilosophy that a wife should be anything but glad to tramp the roads ifneed be with the man who loved her. He sketched out valiant plans, wasfor taking Marjorie away in the teeth of all opposition and bringing herback to London. It would have to be done decently, of course, but itwould have, he thought, to be done. Mrs. Trafford found the prospectperfect; never before had he sounded and looked so like that dim figurewhich hung still and sympathetic above them. Ever and again she glancedup at her husband's quiet face....
On one point she was very clear with him.
"You'll live with us, mother?" he said abruptly.
"Not with you. As near as you like. But one house, one woman.... I'llhave a little flat of my own--for you both to come to me."
"Oh, nonsense, mother! You'll have to be with us. Living alone, indeed!"
"My dear, I'd _prefer_ a flat of my own. You don'tunderstand--everything. It will be better for all of us like that."
There came a little pause between them, and then her hand was on hishead again. "Oh, my dear," she said, "I want you to be happy. And lifecan be difficult. I won't
give a chance--for things to go wrong. You'rehers, dear, and you've got to be hers--be each other's altogether. I'vewatched so many people. And that's the best, the very best you can have.There's just the lovers--the real enduring lovers; and the uncompletedpeople who've failed to find it."...
Sec. 6
Trafford's second meeting with Marjorie, which, by the by, happened onthe afternoon of the following day, brought them near to conclusivedecisions. The stiffness of their first encounter in London hadaltogether vanished. She was at her prettiest and in the highestspirits--and she didn't care for anything else in the world. A gauzysilk scarf which she had bought and not paid for that day floatedatmospherically about her straight trim body; her hair had caught theinfection of insurrection and was waving rebelliously about her ears. Ashe drew near her his grave discretion passed from him as clouds passfrom a hillside. She smiled radiantly. He held out both his hands forboth of hers, and never did a maiden come so near and yet not get apublic and shameless kissing.
One could as soon describe music as tell their conversation. It was amatter of tones and feelings. But the idea of flight together, of thebright awakening in unfamiliar sunshine with none to come between them,had gripped them both. A certain sober gravity of discussion only maskedthat deeper inebriety. It would be easy for them to get away; he had nolectures until February; he could, he said, make arrangements, leave hisresearch. She dreaded disputation. She was for a simple disappearance,notes on pincushions and defiantly apologetic letters from Boulogne, buthis mother's atmosphere had been a gentler one than her home's, with amore powerful disposition to dignity. He still couldn't understand thatthe cantankerous egotism of Pope was indeed the essential man; it seemedto him a crust of bad manners that reason ought to pierce.
The difference in their atmospheres came out in their talk--in hisdesire for a handsome and dignified wedding--though the very heavensprotested--and her resolve to cut clear of every one, to achieve a sortof gaol delivery of her life, make a new beginning altogether, with theminimum of friction and the maximum of surprise. Unused to fighting, hewas magnificently prepared to fight; she, with her intimate knowledge ofchronic domestic conflict, was for the evasion of all the bickerings,scoldings, and misrepresentations his challenge would occasion. Hethought in his innocence a case could be stated and discussed; but nofamily discussion she had ever heard had even touched the realities ofthe issue that occasioned it.
"I don't like this underhand preparation," he said.
"Nor I," she echoed. "But what can one do?"
"Well, oughtn't I to go to your father and give him a chance? Whyshouldn't I? It's--the dignified way."
"It won't be dignified for father," said Marjorie, "anyhow."
"But what right has he to object?"
"He isn't going to discuss his rights with you. He _will_ object."
"But _why?_"
"Oh! because he's started that way. He hit you. I haven't forgotten it.Well, if he goes back on that now----He'd rather die than go back on it.You see, he's ashamed in his heart. It would be like confessing himselfwrong not to keep it up that you're the sort of man one hits. He justhates you because he hit you. I haven't been his daughter for twenty-oneyears for nothing."
"I'm thinking of us," said Trafford. "I don't see we oughtn't to go tohim just because he's likely to be--unreasonable."
"My dear, do as you please. He'll forbid and shout, and hit tables untilthings break. Suppose he locks me up!"
"Oh, Habeas Corpus, and my strong right arm! He's much more likely toturn you out-of-doors."
"Not if he thinks the other will annoy you more. I'll have to bear astorm."
"Not for long."
"He'll bully mother till she cries over me. But do as you please. She'llcome and she'll beg me----Do as you please. Perhaps I'm a coward. I'dfar rather I could slip away."
Trafford thought for a moment. "I'd far rather you could," he answered,in a voice that spoke of inflexible determinations.
They turned to the things they meant to do. "_Italy!_" she whispered,"_Italy!_" Her face was alight with her burning expectation of beauty,of love, of the new heaven and the new earth that lay before them. Theintensity of that desire blazing through her seemed to shame his dulldiscretions. He had to cling to his resolution, lest it should vanish inthat contagious intoxication.
"You understand I shall come to your father," he said, as they drew nearthe gate where it seemed discreet for them to part.
"It will make it harder to get away," she said, with no apparentdespondency. "It won't stop us. Oh! do as you please."
She seemed to dismiss the question, and stood hand-in-hand with him in astate of glowing gravity. She wouldn't see him again for four-and-twentyhours. Then a thought came into her head--a point of great practicalmoment.
"Oh!" she said, "of course, you won't tell father you've seen me."
She met his eye. "Really you mustn't," she said. "You see--he'll make arow with mother for not having watched me better. I don't know what heisn't likely to do. It isn't myself----This is a confidentialcommunication--all this. No one in this world knows I am meeting you. Ifyou _must_ go to him, go to him."
"For myself?"
She nodded, with her open eyes on his--eyes that looked now very blueand very grave, and her lips a little apart.
She surprised him a little, but even this sudden weakness seemedadorable.
"All right," he said.
"You don't think that I'm shirking----?" she asked, a little tooeagerly.
"You know your father best," he answered. "I'll tell you all he says andall the terror of him here to-morrow afternoon."
Sec. 7
In the stillness of the night Trafford found himself thinking overMarjorie; it was a new form of mental exercise, which was destined toplay a large part in his existence for many subsequent years. There hadcome a shadow on his confidence in her. She was a glorious person; shehad a kind of fire behind her and in her--shining through her, like thelights in a fire-opal, but----He wished she had not made him promise toconceal their meeting and their close co-operation from her father. Whydid she do that? It would spoil his case with her father, and it couldforward things for them in no conceivable way. And from that, in somemanner too subtle to trace, he found his mind wandering to anotherproblem, which was destined to reappear with a slowly dwindlingimportance very often in this procedure of thinking over Marjorie in thesmall hours. It was the riddle--it never came to him in the daytime, butonly in those intercalary and detachedly critical periods ofthought--why exactly had she engaged herself to Magnet? Why had she? Hecouldn't imagine himself, in Marjorie's position, doing anything of thesort. Marjorie had ways of her own; she was different.... Well, anyhow,she was splendid and loving and full of courage.... He had got nofurther than this when at last he fell asleep.
Sec. 8
Trafford's little attempt to regularise his position was as creditableto him as it was inevitably futile. He sought out 29, Hartstone Squarein the morning on his way to his laboratory, and he found it one of agreat row of stucco houses each with a portico and a dining-room windowon the ground floor, and each with a railed area from which troglodyticservants peeped. Collectively the terrace might claim a certain uglydignity of restraint, there was none of your Queen Anne nonsense of artor beauty about it, and the narrow height, the subterranean kitchens ofeach constituent house, told of a steep relentless staircase and thedays before the pampering of the lower classes began. The houses formeda square, as if the British square so famous at Waterloo for its doggedresistance to all the forces of the universe had immortalized itself inbuildings, and they stared upon a severely railed garden of hardy shrubsand gravel to which the tenants had the inestimable privilege of access.They did not use it much, that was their affair, but at any rate theyhad keys and a nice sense of rights assured, and at least it kept otherpeople out.
Trafford turned out of a busy high road full of the mixed exhilaratingtraffic of our time, and came along a quiet street into this place, andit
seemed to him he had come into a corner of defence and retreat, intoan atmosphere of obstinate and unteachable resistances. But thisillusion of conservativism in its last ditch was dispelled altogether inMr. Pope's portico. Youth flashed out of these solemnities like a dartshot from a cave. Trafford was raising his hand to the solid brassknocker when abruptly it was snatched from his fingers, the door wasflung open and a small boy with a number of dirty books in a strap flewout and hit him with projectile violence.
"Blow!" said the young gentleman recoiling, and Trafford recoveringsaid: "Hullo, Theodore!"
"Lord!" said Theodore breathless, "It's you! _What_ a lark! Your name'snever mentioned--no how. What _did_ you do?... Wish I could stop and seeit! I'm ten minutes late. _Ave atque vale_. So long!"
He vanished with incredible velocity. And Mr. Trafford was alone inpossession of the open doorway except for Toupee, who after a violentoutbreak of hostility altered his mind and cringed to his feet in abjectand affectionate propitiation. A pseudo-twin appeared, said "Hello!" andvanished, and then he had an instant's vision of Mr. Pope, newspaper inhand, appearing from the dining-room. His expression of surprise changedto malevolence, and he darted back into the room from which he hademerged. Trafford decided to take the advice of a small brass plate onhis left hand, and "ring also."
A housemaid came out of the bowels of the earth very promptly andushered him up two flights of stairs into what was manifestly Mr. Pope'sstudy.
It was a narrow, rather dark room lit by two crimson-curtained windows,and with a gas fire before which Mr. Pope's walking boots were warmingfor the day. The apartment revealed to Trafford's cursory inspectionmany of the stigmata of an Englishman of active intelligence andliterary tastes. There in the bookcase were the collected works ofScott, a good large illustrated Shakespeare in numerous volumes, and acomplete set of bound _Punches_ from the beginning. A pile of backnumbers of the _Times_ stood on a cane stool in a corner, and in alittle bookcase handy for the occupier of the desk were Whitaker,Wisden and an old peerage. The desk bore traces of recent epistolaryactivity, and was littered with the printed matter of Aunt Plessington'smovements. Two or three recent issues of _The Financial Review ofReviews_ were also visible. About the room hung steel engravingsapparently of defunct judges or at any rate of exceedingly grimindividuals, and over the mantel were trophies of athletic prowess, abat witnessing that Mr. Pope had once captained the second eleven atHarrogby.
Mr. Pope entered with a stern expression and a sentence prepared. "Well,sir," he said with a note of ironical affability, "to what may I ascribethis--intrusion?"
Mr. Trafford was about to reply when Mr. Pope interrupted. "Will you beseated," he said, and turned his desk chair about for himself, andoccupying it, crossed his legs and pressed the finger tips of his twohands together. "Well, sir?" he said.
Trafford remained standing astraddle over the boots before the gas fire.
"Look here, sir," he said; "I am in love with your daughter. She's oneand twenty, and I want to see her--and in fact----" He found it hard toexpress himself. He could think only of a phrase that soundedridiculous. "I want--in fact--to pay my addresses to her."
"Well, sir, I don't want you to do so. That is too mild. I objectstrongly--very strongly. My daughter has been engaged to a verydistinguished and able man, and I hope very shortly to hear that thatengagement----Practically it is still going on. I don't want you tointrude upon my daughter further."
"But look here, sir. There's a certain justice--I mean a certainreasonableness----"
Mr. Pope held out an arresting hand. "I don't wish it. Let that beenough."
"Of course it isn't enough. I'm in love with her--and she with me. I'man entirely reputable and decent person----"
"May I be allowed to judge what is or is not suitable companionship formy daughter--and what may or may not be the present state of heraffections?"
"Well, that's rather the point we are discussing. After all, Marjorieisn't a baby. I want to do all this--this affair, openly and properly ifI can, but, you know, I mean to marry Marjorie--anyhow."
"There are two people to consult in that matter."
"I'll take the risk of that."
"Permit me to differ."
A feeling of helplessness came over Trafford. The curious irritation Mr.Pope always roused in him began to get the better of him. His faceflushed hotly. "Oh really! really! this is--this is nonsense!" he cried."I never heard anything so childish and pointless as your objection----"
"Be careful, sir!" cried Mr. Pope, "be careful!"
"I'm going to marry Marjorie."
"If she marries you, sir, she shall never darken my doors again!"
"If you had a thing against me!"
"_Haven't_ I!"
"What have you?"
There was a quite perceptible pause before Pope fired his shot.
"Does any decent man want the name of Trafford associated with hisdaughter. Trafford! Look at the hoardings, sir!"
A sudden blaze of anger lit Trafford. "My God!" he cried and clenchedhis fists and seemed for a moment ready to fall upon the man beforehim. Then he controlled himself by a violent effort. "You believe inthat libel on my dead father?" he said, with white lips.
"Has it ever been answered?"
"A hundred times. And anyhow!--Confound it! I don't believe--_you_believe it. You've raked it up--as an excuse! You want an excuse foryour infernal domestic tyranny! That's the truth of it. You can't bear acreature in your household to have a will or preference of her own. Itell you, sir, you are intolerable--intolerable!"
He was shouting, and Pope was standing now and shouting too. "Leave myhouse, sir. Get out of my house, sir. You come here to insult me, sir!"
A sudden horror of himself and Pope seized the younger man. He stiffenedand became silent. Never in his life before had he been in a bawlingquarrel. He was amazed and ashamed.
"Leave my house!" cried Pope with an imperious gesture towards the door.
Trafford made an absurd effort to save the situation. "I am sorry, sir,I lost my temper. I had no business to abuse you----"
"You've said enough."
"I apologise for that. I've done what I could to manage thingsdecently."
"Will you go, sir?" threatened Mr. Pope.
"I'm sorry I came," said Trafford.
Mr. Pope took his stand with folded arms and an expression of wearypatience.
"I did what I could," said Trafford at the door.
The staircase and passage were deserted. The whole house seemed to havecaught from Mr. Pope that same quality of seeing him out....
"Confound it!" said Trafford in the street. "How on earth did all thishappen?"...
He turned eastward, and then realized that work would be impossible thatday. He changed his direction for Kensington Gardens, and in theflower-bordered walk near the Albert Memorial he sat down on a chair,and lugged at his moustache and wondered. He was extraordinarilyperplexed, as well as ashamed and enraged by this uproar. How had itbegun? Of course, he had been stupidly abusive, but the insult to hisfather had been unendurable. Did a man of Pope's sort quite honestlybelieve that stuff? If he didn't, he deserved kicking. If he did, ofcourse he was entitled to have it cleared up. But then he wouldn'tlisten! Was there any case for the man at all? Had he, Trafford, reallyput the thing so that Pope would listen? He couldn't remember. What wasit he had said in reply to Pope? What was it exactly that Pope had said?
It was already vague; it was a confused memory of headlong words andanswers; what wasn't vague, what rang in his ears still, was the hoarsediscord of two shouting voices.
Could Marjorie have heard?
Sec. 9
So Marjorie carried her point. She wasn't to be married tamely after thecommon fashion which trails home and all one's beginnings into the newlife. She was to be eloped with, romantically and splendidly, into aglorious new world. She walked on shining clouds, and if she felt someremorse, it was a very tender and satisfactory remorse, and with a clearconviction below it
that in the end she would be forgiven.
They made all their arrangements elaborately and carefully. Trafford gota license to marry her; she was to have a new outfit from top to toe togo away with on that eventful day. It accumulated in the shop, and theymarked the clothes _M.T._ She was watched, she imagined, but as herfather did not know she had seen Trafford, nothing had been said to her,and no attempt was made to prohibit her going out and coming in.Trafford entered into the conspiracy with a keen interest, a certainamusement, and a queer little feeling of distaste. He hated to hide anyact of his from any human being. The very soul of scientific work, yousee, is publication. But Marjorie seemed to justify all things, and whenhis soul turned against furtiveness, he reminded it that the alternativewas bawling.
One eventful afternoon he went to the college, and Marjorie slippedround by his arrangement to have tea with Mrs. Trafford....
He returned about seven in a state of nervous apprehension; cameupstairs two steps at a time, and stopped breathless on the landing. Hegulped as he came in, and his eyes were painfully eager. "She's been?"he asked.
But Marjorie had won Mrs. Trafford.
"She's been," she answered. "Yes, she's all right, my dear."
"Oh, mother!" he said.
"She's a beautiful creature, dear--and such a child! Oh! such a child!And God bless you, dear, God bless you....
"I think all young people are children. I want to take you both in myarms and save you.... I'm talking nonsense, dear."
He kissed her, and she clung to him as if he were something too preciousto release.
Sec. 10
The elopement was a little complicated by a surprise manoeuvre of Mrs.Pope's. She was more alive to the quality of the situation, poor lady!than her daughter suspected; she was watching, dreading, perhaps evenfurtively sympathizing and trying to arrange--oh! trying dreadfully toarrange. She had an instinctive understanding of the deep blue quiet inMarjorie's eyes, and the girl's unusual tenderness with Daffy and thechildren. She peeped under the blind as Marjorie went out, noted thecare in her dress, watched her face as she returned, never plumbed herwith a question for fear of the answer. She did not dare to breathe ahint of her suspicions to her husband, but she felt things were adriftin swift, smooth water, and all her soul cried out for delay. Sopresently there came a letter from Cousin Susan Pendexter at Plymouth.The weather was beautiful, Marjorie must come at once, pack up and comeand snatch the last best glow of the dying autumn away there in thewest. Marjorie's jerry-built excuses, her manifest chagrin andreluctance, confirmed her mother's worst suspicions.
She submitted and went, and Mrs. Pope and Syd saw her off.
I do not like to tell how a week later Marjorie explained herself andher dressing-bag and a few small articles back to London from Plymouth.Suffice it that she lied desperately and elaborately. Her mother hadnever achieved such miracles of mis-statement, and she added a vigourthat was all her own. It is easier to sympathize with her than exonerateher. She was in a state of intense impatience, and--what isstrange--extraordinarily afraid that something would separate her fromher lover if she did not secure him. She was in a fever ofdetermination. She could not eat or sleep or attend to anythingwhatever; she was occupied altogether with the thought of assuringherself to Trafford. He towered in her waking vision over town and landand sea.
He didn't hear the lies she told; he only knew she was magnificentlycoming back to him. He met her at Paddington, a white-faced, tired,splendidly resolute girl, and they went to the waiting registrar'sforthwith.
She bore herself with the intentness and dignity of one who is takingthe cardinal step in life. They kissed as though it was a symbol, andwere keenly business-like about cabs and luggage and trains. At lastthey were alone in the train together. They stared at one another.
"We've done it, Mrs. Trafford!" said Trafford.
She snapped like an over-taut string, crumpled, clung to him, andwithout a word was weeping passionately in his arms.
It surprised him that she could weep as she did, and still more to seeher as she walked by his side along the Folkestone pier, altogetherrecovered, erect, a little flushed and excited like a child. She seemedto miss nothing. "Oh, smell the sea!" she said, "Look at the lights!Listen to the swish of the water below." She watched the luggagespinning on the wire rope of the giant crane, and he watched her faceand thought how beautiful she was. He wondered why her eyes couldsometimes be so blue and sometimes dark as night.
The boat cleared the pier and turned about and headed for France. Theywalked the upper deck together and stood side by side, she very close tohim.
"I've never crossed the sea before," she said.
"Old England," she whispered. "It's like leaving a nest. A little rowof lights and that's all the world I've ever known, shrunken to thatalready."
Presently they went forward and peered into the night.
"Look!" she said. "_Italy!_ There's sunshine and all sorts of beautifulthings ahead. Warm sunshine, wonderful old ruins, green lizards...." Shepaused and whispered almost noiselessly: "_love_----"
They pressed against each other.
"And yet isn't it strange? All you can see is darkness, and clouds--andbig waves that hiss as they come near...."
Sec. 11
Italy gave all her best to welcome them. It was a late year, a goldenautumn, with skies of such blue as Marjorie had never seen before. Theystayed at first in a pretty little Italian hotel with a garden on thelake, and later they walked over Salvator to Morcote and by boat toPonte Tresa, and thence they had the most wonderful and beautiful trampin the world to Luino, over the hills by Castelrotto. To the left ofthem all day was a broad valley with low-lying villages swimming in aluminous mist, to the right were purple mountains. They passed throughpaved streets with houses the colour of flesh and ivory, with balconieshung with corn and gourds, with tall church campaniles rising high, andgreat archways giving upon the blue lowlands; they tramped along avenuesof sweet chestnut and between stretches of exuberant vineyard, in whichmen and women were gathering grapes--purple grapes, a hatful for asoldo, that rasped the tongue. Everything was strange and wonderful toMarjorie's eyes; now it would be a wayside shrine and now a yoke ofsoft-going, dewlapped oxen, now a chapel hung about with _ex votos_, andnow some unfamiliar cultivation--or a gipsy-eyed child--or a scorpionthat scuttled in the dust. The very names of the villages were likejewels to her, Varasca, Croglio, Ronca, Sesia, Monteggio. They walked,or sat by the wayside and talked, or rested at the friendly table ofsome kindly albergo. A woman as beautiful as Ceres, with a white neckall open, made them an omelette, and then fetched her baby from itscradle to nurse it while she talked to them as they made their meal. Andafterwards she filled their pockets with roasted chestnuts, and sentthem with melodious good wishes upon their way. And always high over allagainst the translucent blue hung the white shape of Monte Rosa, thatwarmed in colour as the evening came.
Marjorie's head was swimming with happiness and beauty, and with everyfresh delight she recurred again to the crowning marvel of thisclean-limbed man beside her, who smiled and carried all her luggage in ahuge rucksack that did not seem to exist for him, and watched her andcaressed her--and was hers, _hers!_
At Baveno there were letters. They sat at a little table outside a cafeand read them, suddenly mindful of England again. Incipient forgivenessshowed through Mrs. Pope's reproaches, and there was also a simple,tender love-letter (there is no other word for it) from old Mrs.Trafford to her son.
From Baveno they set off up Monte Mottarone--whence one may see the Alpsfrom Visto to Ortler Spitz--trusting to find the inn still open, and ifit was closed to get down to Orta somehow before night. Or at the worstsleep upon the mountain side.
(Monte Mottarone! Just for a moment taste the sweet Italian name uponyour lips.) These were the days before the funicular from Stresa, whenone trudged up a rude path through the chestnuts and walnuts.
As they ascended the long windings through the woods, they met an oldpoet and his
wife, coming down from sunset and sunrise. There was a wordor two about the inn, and they went upon their way. The old man turnedever and again to look at them.
"Adorable young people," he said. "Adorable happy young people....
"Did you notice, dear, how she held that dainty little chin of hers?...
"Pride is such a good thing, my dear, clear, straight pride liketheirs--and they were both so proud!...
"Isn't it good, dear, to think that once you and I may have looked likethat to some passer-by. I wish I could bless them--sweet, swift youngthings! I wish, dear, it was possible for old men to bless young peoplewithout seeming to set up for saints...."
BOOK THE SECOND MARJORIE MARRIED