One of the worst moments was when Sarah came to me in an acute distress of embarrassment and asked if I could lend her the price of her steamship ticket. She promised faithfully to pay it back out of her salary at the college. This brought me face to face with a problem I had always avoided, the problem of my money. In all the years I had lived with Sarah, we had scarcely mentioned it. Through the family lawyers, she had been given all the necessary authority to settle our bills and manage the household; but she had practically no means of her own. My Mother had died suddenly, still a young woman, without leaving a will. So Sarah had never had the legacy she would otherwise certainly have received.
I tried to get her to accept it now. I wanted to settle an income on her. But she absolutely refused. I had never known her to be so obstinate. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she kept repeating. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’ And, one day, she spoke almost bitterly: ‘I’m not a helpless old woman in need of a pension. As long as I’m able to work, I won’t be beholden to anyone—not even you, Stephen.’ Finally, I had to agree to her idea of the loan. But I tricked her, later, by writing to the President of the college and getting him to pretend to Sarah that there had been a misunderstanding; that her travelling-expenses had been included in their original offer and that they had therefore repaid me themselves.
Elizabeth and I agreed that I should see Sarah off alone. I rode down with her on the boat-train to Southampton. Right at the last, we both started to cry—shedding the hopeless, painful tears of two people who have gotten themselves into a situation they can no longer control or understand. Now that the ship’s siren was blowing and the stewards were shouting, ‘All visitors on shore!’, our parting suddenly became revealed as an altogether meaningless, tragically unnecessary act. I could scarcely even remember my impatience to get rid of Sarah. All I now knew was that I was about to lose the one tremendous little symbol of my childhood’s security: the comforter, the provider, the storyteller, the listener, the tucker-up-in-bed—often rejected, disobeyed, ignored, but relied on, always, to be available and there. Why was she leaving me? Who was sending her away? I, myself. But that made no sense. If life was as crazy as this, then I couldn’t cope with it. I was as helpless as a child in the midst of this mess I had created. And like a child I blurted out, between my sobs: ‘Oh, Aunt Sarah—you know I love you, don’t you?’ She had to steer me, almost blind with blubbering, to the gangway. I was the last to leave the ship.
Going back on the train to London, after this violent emotional discharge, I felt limp and passive and pleasantly relaxed. I had used up all the love in me, for the moment, and was capable only of a cold-hearted, furtive relief. Sarah was gone. All right—that was settled. I would miss her, certainly. But her going had made my life much simpler. From now on, I would never have to consider anybody except Elizabeth.
Soon after Sarah’s departure, Elizabeth rather apologetically mentioned Alexander Strines. ‘You won’t mind my seeing him occasionally, will you, darling? Of course, he’ll quite understand that everything’s different, now. He won’t start dropping in on us when we don’t want him. In fact, there’s no reason why you two should meet—’
‘But why shouldn’t we?’ I asked. ‘I want to. I’d like to show him I’m not such an idiot as he must think me. We’ll probably get along together very well.’
So Strines was invited to the flat, to tea. He arrived with flowers, a wedding-present, and an obviously prepared speech. The flowers were roses. ‘I can now with perfect propriety offer you red ones,’ he told Elizabeth. ‘In certain Latin countries, I’m given to understand, red roses presented to a spinster are considered positively compromising.’ The wedding-present was a china inkwell, ‘almost certainly used by Jane Austen while she was living at Chawton’: I felt sure Strines had hastily selected it as being one of the least-wanted items in his own collection. The speech began with a quotation from Doctor Johnson: ‘you remember what he once said to a Newly-Married Lady?’ I forget what Doctor Johnson said, but it was something unpleasant and dogmatic, which Strines then proceeded to twist into a long-winded compliment. There was no warmth anywhere in the whole proceedings. And I felt that Strines regarded our marriage as a sophisticated kind of joke, of which Elizabeth would soon get tired. ‘My dear Rydal,’ he told her, ‘you’ve always been so full of surprises.’ Then, looking at me with his joyless smile, he added: ‘I hope I have your permission to continue to call your Wife by the name she has made illustrious? It’s a mark of respect, really, for your private rights in her, on which we wouldn’t dream of infringing. Elizabeth Monk is entirely yours. Rydal belongs to all of us.’ ‘Really, Strines,’ Elizabeth interrupted, laughing, but a little nervous, I could see, that I might take offence at his tone, ‘you talk about me as if I were Hyde Park! Do I look as if the public had trampled me flat?’
Strines didn’t succeed in making me angry: I could afford to tolerate him now, though I still didn’t like him. But I felt immediately drawn to Mary Scriven, whom I met at about this same time. She was a middle-aged woman with a grown-up son and daughter, who lived in a tiny house in a mews and ran an art-gallery which was also used for concerts. She was an easygoing, charming person who seemed to have the secret of combining irony with good-nature and laziness with great activity. When Elizabeth and I went around to visit her, she was alternately cooking, answering telephone-calls and making a costume for some studio party, with a pleasant air of bohemian vagueness. Although Elizabeth and she were such old friends, I felt that she accepted us as a matter of course as an established couple, who might have been together for years. No one had treated me like this before, so I felt an extravagant gratitude to Mary and showed it by buying three blotchy landscapes by one of her ‘discoveries’, whose work she was currently exhibiting at her gallery.
‘I’m afraid they’re really quite ghastly,’ Elizabeth said sadly, when we had brought the landscapes home to the flat and could examine them without politeness. ‘They don’t grow on you, do they?’
‘They shrink on you.’
‘Oh, Stephen, what on earth are we to do with them?’
‘I don’t know. We might give them to the poor.’
Elizabeth kissed me, laughing. ‘That was one of your very sweetest acts,’ she told me. ‘Mary was delighted. I’m so happy that you like her.’
‘I’m sure I’ll always like your real friends.’ The moment the words were out of my mouth, I realized how unkind they sounded. Elizabeth’s face clouded at once.
‘You mean, I haven’t any others?’ she asked quietly.
‘No—Elizabeth! I never said that!’
‘But perhaps it’s true—almost. Yes, I believe it is. Stephen, this isn’t a very pleasant revelation—’
Elizabeth brought the subject up again later. She had evidently been brooding over it.
‘I suppose I’ve cultivated too many acquaintances,’ she said. ‘And they’re like weeds; they grow up around the real friends and choke them off. Why do I bother with all these people, Stephen? Am I so empty and insecure that I need this fuss and noise around me?’
‘I don’t think it’s that, at all. You go right away from everybody, deep into your work; and when you come up to the surface, you want distraction. That’s very natural.’
‘Oh, darling, how much better you make me sound than I really am! So you don’t really disapprove of my acquaintances?’
‘No—of course I don’t disapprove; but—’
‘But what?’
‘I shouldn’t think—I mean, I hope they won’t be so necessary, now. Now you’ve got me.’
‘But, darling—you! That’s something utterly different. You’re my whole life.’
‘Except when you want to be distracted?’
‘Stephen—I didn’t mean to say anything unkind.’
‘I know you didn’t. And I quite understand, really. People like—well, just for example, Strines—they talk your language. I can’t. I probably won’t ever be able to. You get something from th
em that I can’t give you. There’s nothing wrong in that. As long as it amuses you, that’s all I care about. I’m not jealous, or anything. Not any more.’
Elizabeth took me in her arms and looked searchingly into my eyes.
‘My darling,’ she said, ‘I hope you’re being quite, quite frank with me?’
‘Of course I am,’ I assured her. ‘Don’t worry about it. Everything’s quite all right.’
Elizabeth’s intuition was correct, as usual. I wasn’t being frank with her, or even with myself; for I resented the presence of her acquaintances even more than I was ready to admit. In the days before our marriage, I had been able to avoid most of them altogether; but now I had to meet them. Perhaps it would have been better if I had simply refused to go with her to their parties, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this because, obviously, most of her pleasure consisted in taking me along. She wanted to go, she wanted me to go with her, and she wanted me to enjoy myself. That was asking a lot, I couldn’t help feeling. So I usually started out in a mood of suppressed resentment.
There was no doubt that Elizabeth, who was ordinarily so considerate, had a blind spot here. She seemed unable to put herself in my place and know how I would be feeling. This wasn’t very surprising. She was so completely at home in that world, she breathed its air so easily, that it was hard for her to realize I was gasping like a stranded fish. And, of course, she didn’t altogether want to realize it, because that would destroy her own pleasure. She wanted this part of her life to stay the way it had been before we met, only with myself included in it.
When I recalled those parties now, I saw Elizabeth in the extreme distance, right over at the other end of a room which memory had probably magnified to at least twice its actual size. A perverse pride or stubbornness would make me move away from her, as far as I could get, the moment the introductions were over. I wasn’t going to ride through the party hanging on to her skirts, I told myself. But, actually, I was trying to punish Elizabeth, in my own mean little way, for having brought me. For I knew she would have liked me to stay near her. She’d keep glancing anxiously in my direction to see how I was getting along.
There she would stand, smiling and shining in her own unquestioned brilliance as one of the three or four first-magnitude stars around which the whole gathering was constellated; and I, in my sulky corner, might as well have been several light-years away. I couldn’t hear what the big stars were talking about, and I almost convinced myself that I didn’t want to. They were admirable people, no doubt, in their everyday lives; good to their families, bold against injustice, humble and earnest in their work, wearing their well-earned fame as simply as their clothes—but nothing they said in this atmosphere could be otherwise than trivial: surface-chatter no deeper than the lips and the front teeth. They weren’t really enjoying themselves, I thought. All their animation was a trick of light flashing from the outer coat of their eyeballs. They weren’t even bored; though their voices had the fashionable, graceful modulations of boredom. No—this was merely their way of relaxing and resting from the serious business of being themselves. Perhaps what actually separated and cut me off from these men and women was just that I had nothing to rest from: no vocation, no responsibility, no job. Being reminded of this made me feel guilty and inferior; and I think that was the chief reason why I hated those parties so much.
I would have preferred to be left alone in my corner, but I wasn’t. Lots of people talked to me. The ones of my own age usually embarrassed me, sooner or later, by asking what I did, or by speaking about Elizabeth with the implication that being her husband was the one justification for my existence. A few didn’t know who I was and said, ‘I hear she’s just got married. What’s he like?’ And then there were the older ones who came over to inspect me with smiling, half-malicious curiosity. Later they withdrew and gossiped, just out of earshot, nodding their heads and very carefully avoiding my eyes. Some of their verdicts, it seemed, were favourable. If I wasn’t dismissed as a bore, I would be looked up and down appreciatively, by women and sometimes by men, as an attractive boy, Elizabeth’s pickup. Outwardly, I think I managed to take all this fairly well. I kept a smile of sorts on my face, most of the time, answered politely when spoken to, and even produced an occasional laugh. I used to drink a good deal: that helped. But it was dangerous, too; because I would be more than half drunk by the time the party was over, and then I had to be careful what I said to Elizabeth when we were alone together. I had resolved, over and over again, not to bring up the subject of parties or tell her how I felt about them, as long as she was working on her novel. I reserved the right to sulk a little, but I wasn’t going to be as selfish as all that, I told myself.
However, the day came, as I suppose it was bound to, when I’d drunk a bit more than usual and was in a slightly worse humour; and suddenly—almost before I was aware of what was happening—the lid blew off my good resolutions, as we were driving home in a taxi.
‘You don’t know what these people are really like,’ I told Elizabeth. ‘They make a fuss of you, because they think you’re Somebody. But they don’t give a damn about you, or anyone else, as a human being. They can’t. They haven’t any feelings, except spite and bitchiness.’
‘My darling,’ said Elizabeth, taking my hand in hers, ‘some one’s been horrid to you, haven’t they? Tell me who it was—’
‘Oh—what does that matter? Nobody special. They’re all alike.’
‘Stephen—I’m so terribly sorry. I’d no idea—’
‘You needn’t be sorry. I don’t care.’
‘But what did they say?’
‘It isn’t what they say. It’s just that I get a bit tired, sometimes, of being treated like a gigolo.’
‘Darling—you can’t be serious!’
‘A very respectable one, of course. A gigolo with money. What do you call a rich gigolo? A rigolo, perhaps?’
‘But how horrible! Are you quite certain you aren’t—imagining some of this?’
‘Oh, I’m exaggerating, naturally. And, anyhow, this is only the way I feel. It’s my own fault, really, for minding. I’ll get used to it in time. I’ll probably end up being just as bitchy as they are.’
‘But that would be dreadful. I don’t want you ever to change. Oh, Stephen—you, being bitchy—!’ Elizabeth started to laugh.
‘I suppose I am pretty funny,’ I said crossly. She turned serious at once.
‘Oh no, darling—forgive me. It’s only that I’m a bit bewildered. I hadn’t realized. You see, I’m so indecently proud of you. I love to show you off. It never occurred to me that that could hurt you … How very selfish I’ve been, haven’t I?’
‘I don’t think so, at all.’
‘But it shan’t happen again, darling. I promise you. Never.’
I didn’t ask Elizabeth what she meant by that, because I didn’t want to bring the whole question out into the open and share in the responsibility for settling it. I was the selfish one, not she. But I knew then, as she knew, that a decision had been made that would affect our entire future life. It was Elizabeth who had to make the sacrifice. I don’t think she ever seriously regretted it; but, still, I let her make it alone. I didn’t move an inch to help her.
The next morning, while we were having breakfast, she smiled at me and said: ‘Stephen, did you know you were married to an Artistic Temperament?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well—I know this is tiresome of me; but, the last few days I’ve been feeling so terribly restless. Should you mind dreadfully if we went abroad somewhere, quite soon?’
‘Of course I shouldn’t. I’d love to. But what about your novel?’
‘Oh, the novel’s even more restless than I am. It wants a change of air. The wretched thing’s so sickly. If it can’t get out of this climate, it threatens to go into a decline.’
‘We mustn’t let that happen,’ I said, grinning with joy.
‘Darling, you’re so wonderfully sweet and unders
tanding. Are you quite sure you really want to go?’
‘You know I do … But, Elizabeth, are you sure you want to?’
‘But, Stephen, it was I who suggested it—’
‘I know. Only—’
‘Only what, darling?’
‘Nothing … I mean—well then, that’s settled. Where are we going to?’
‘Let’s look at the atlas, shall we? Oh, isn’t this exciting?’
So I let it happen. Nothing whatever was said about acquaintances and parties. With Elizabeth’s help, my cowardice avoided the issue completely. We left London a week later; and, except for two short visits, we never returned.
*
About the beginning of June, Elizabeth wrote to Mary Scriven:
‘Well, Mary darling, here we are established at last. Looking back, it’s hard to remember quite how we arrived. We stopped in Paris a day or two, took a sniff at Brussels and quite a deep breath of Nürnberg, nosed at Munich but somehow didn’t altogether trust its smell, then caught an intoxicating whiff of Vienna on the east wind and followed it in full cry. Vienna was as lovely as ever, but so full of things to see that I couldn’t settle to any work. Then a Dutch painter we’d made friends with told us about this place. It’s a largish but little-known lake called the Schwarzsee, in the neighbourhood of Bad Ischl and Gmunden. We’ve taken a house here for the summer.
‘Can’t you visit us? You would love it, I’m sure. There are high mountains with the snow still on them, so aloof and grand, shining like a whole arctic world, up there in the sky. Down on their lower slopes there are larch-woods, dark green, with the young green tips much lighter than last year’s growth; they smell so heavenly in the hot sun. When it rains, there’s a wonderful lush wooden wetness in the air, and you feel as refreshed as if you were the earth itself, drinking in the water. But I think I like the still grey days best, so uncannily still, when the lake is a great bright motionless looking-glass, with the mountains and the woods and the village and ourselves all upside down in it.
The World in the Evening Page 15