it was in the vein of something evasive in mary's character that she let me hear first of her engagement to justin through the times. away there in scotland she got i suppose new perspectives, new ideas; the glow of our immediate passion faded. the thing must have been drawing in upon her for some time. perhaps she had meant to tell me of it all that night when she had summoned me to burnmore. looking back now i am the more persuaded that she did. but the thing came to me in london with the effect of an immense treachery. within a day or so of the newspaper's announcement she had written me a long letter answering some argument of mine, and saying nothing whatever of the people about her. even then justin must have been asking her to marry him. her mind must have been full of that question. then came a storm of disappointment, humiliation and anger with this realization. i can still feel myself writing and destroying letters to her, letters of satire, of protest. oddly enough i cannot recall the letter that at last i sent her, but it is eloquent of the weak boyishness of my position that i sent it in our usual furtive manner, accepted every precaution that confessed the impossibility of our relationship. "no," she scribbled back, "you do not understand. i cannot write. i must talk to you."
we had a secret meeting.
with beatrice normandy's connivance she managed to get away for the better part of the day, and we spent a long morning in argument in the botanical gardens—that obvious solitude—and afterwards we lunched upon ham and ginger beer at a little open-air restaurant near the broad walk and talked on until nearly four. we were so young that i think we both felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. there is something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too, naïvely noble and adventurous. i can never determine if older people are less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. i still recall the autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in which i had never been before, and which i have never revisited—a memory of walking along narrow garden paths beside queer leaf-choked artificial channels of water under yellow-tinted trees, of rustic bridges going nowhere in particular, and of a kind of brickwork ruined castle, greatly decayed and ivy-grown, in which we sat for a long time looking out upon a lawn and a wide gravel path leading to a colossal frontage of conservatory.
i must have been resentful and bitter in the beginning of that talk. i do not remember that i had any command of the situation or did anything but protest throughout that day. i was too full of the egotism of the young lover to mark mary's moods and feelings. it was only afterwards that i came to understand that she was not wilfully and deliberately following the course that was to separate us, that she was taking it with hesitations and regrets. yet she spoke plainly enough, she spoke with a manifest sincerity of feeling. and while i had neither the grasp nor the subtlety to get behind her mind i perceive now as i think things out that lady ladislaw had both watched and acted, had determined her daughter's ideas, sown her mind with suggestions, imposed upon her a conception of her situation that now dominated all her thoughts.
"dear stephen," reiterated mary, "i love you. i do, clearly, definitely, deliberately love you. haven't i told you that? haven't i made that plain to you?"
"but you are going to marry justin!"
"stephen dear, can i possibly marry you? can i?"
"why not? why not make the adventure of life with me? dare!"
she looked down on me. she was sitting upon a parapet of the brickwork and i was below her. she seemed to be weighing possibilities.
"why not?" i cried. "even now. why not run away with me, throw our two lives together? do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of things! let us go somewhere together——"
"but stephen," she asked softly, "where?"
"anywhere!"
she spoke as an elder might do to a child. "no! tell me where—exactly. where would it be? where should we go? how should we live? tell me. make me see it, stephen."
"you are too cruel to me, mary," i said. "how can i—on the spur of the moment—arrange——?"
"but dear, suppose it was somewhere very grimy and narrow! something—like some of those back streets i came through to get here. suppose it was some dreadful place. and you had no money. and we were both worried and miserable. one gets ill in such places. if i loved you, stephen—i mean if you and i—if you and i were to be together, i should want it to be in sunshine, i should want it to be among beautiful forests and mountains. somewhere very beautiful...."
"why not?"
"because—to-day i know. there are no such places in the world for us. stephen, they are dreams."
"for three years now," i said, "i have dreamed such dreams.
"oh!" i cried out, stung by my own words, "but this is cowardice! why should we submit to this old world! why should we give up—things you have dreamed as well as i! you said once—to hear my voice—calling in the morning.... let us take each other, mary, now. now! let us take each other, and"—i still remember my impotent phrase—"afterwards count the cost!"
"if i were a queen," said mary. "but you see i am not a queen." ...
so we talked in fragments and snatches of argument,and all she said made me see more clearly the large hopelessness of my desire. "at least," i urged, "do not marry justin now. give me a chance. give me three years, mary, three short years, to work, to do something!"
she knew so clearly now the quality of her own intentions.
"dear stephen," she explained, "if i were to come away with you and marry you, in just a little time i should cease to be your lover, i should be your squaw. i should have to share your worries and make your coffee—and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred ways. think! should i be any good as a squaw? how can one love when one knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover indigestion? and i don't want to be your squaw. i don't want that at all. it isn't how i feel for you. i don't want to be your servant and your possession."
"but you will be justin's—squaw, you are going to marry him!"
"that is all different, stevenage. between him and me there will be space, air, dignity, endless servants——"
"but," i choked. "you! he! he will make love to you, mary."
"you don't understand, stephen."
"he will make love to you, mary. mary! don't you understand? these things—— we've never talked of them.... you will bear him children!"
"no," she said.
"but——"
"no. he promises. stephen,—i am to own myself."
"but—he marries you!"
"yes. because he—he admires me. he cannot live without me. he loves my company. he loves to be seen with me. he wants me with him to enjoy all the things he has. can't you understand, stephen?"
"but do you mean——?"
our eyes met.
"stephen," she said, "i swear."
"but—— he hopes."
"i don't care. he has promised. i have his promise. i shall be free. oh! i shall be free—free! he is a different man from you, stephen. he isn't so fierce; he isn't so greedy."
"but it parts us!"
"only from impossible things."
"it parts us."
"it does not even part us, stevenage. we shall see one another! we shall talk to one another."
"i shall lose you."
"i shall keep you."
"but i—do you expect me to be content with this?"
"i will make you content. oh! stephen dear, can't there be love—love without this clutching, this gripping, this carrying off?"
"you will be carried altogether out of my world."
"if i thought that, stephen, indeed i would not marry him."
but i insisted we should be parted, and parted in the end for ever, and there i was the wiser of the two. i knew the insatiable urgency within myself. i knew that if i continued to meet mary i should continue to desire her until i possessed her altogether.
