but i do want to tell you certain things. i want to tell you them because they are things that affect you closely. there was almost from the first a difference between mary and myself in this, that i wanted to be public about our love, i wanted to be open and defiant, and she—hesitated. she wanted to be secret. she wanted to keep me; i sometimes think that she was moved to become my mistress because she wanted to keep me. but she also wanted to keep everything else in her life,—her position, her ample freedoms and wealth and dignity. our love was to be a secret cavern, endymion's cave. i was ready enough to do what i could to please her, and for a time i served that secrecy, lied, pretended, agreed to false addresses, assumed names, and tangled myself in a net-work of furtive proceedings. these are things that poison and consume honest love.
you will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,—for all passion that wears a mask is perversion—and that thousands of people of our sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications, their true relationships. i do not mean the open offenders, for they are mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and respectable. this underworld is not for us. i wish that i who have looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the repetition of my misadventure. we strattons are daylight men, and if i work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because i know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness, that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code to-day.
and i want to tell you too of something altogether unforeseen that happened to us, and that was this, that from the day that passion carried us and we became in the narrower sense of the word lovers, all the wider interests we had in common, our political intentions, our impersonal schemes, began to pass out of our intercourse. our situation closed upon us like a trap and hid the sky. something more intense had our attention by the feet, and we used our wings no more. i do not think that we even had the real happiness and beauty and delight of one another. because, i tell you, there is no light upon kiss or embrace that is not done with pride. i do not know why it should be so, but people of our race and quality are a little ashamed of mere gratification in love. always we seem in my memory to have been whispering with flushed cheeks, and discussing interminably—situation. had something betrayed us, might something betray, was this or that sufficiently cunning? had we perhaps left a footmark or failed to burn a note, was the second footman who was detailed as my valet even now pausing astonished in the brushing of my clothes with our crumpled secret in his hand? between myself and the clear vision of this world about me this infernal net-work of precautions spread like a veil.
and it was not only a matter of concealments but of positive deceptions. the figure of justin comes back to me. it is a curious thing that in spite of our bitter antagonism and the savage jealousy we were to feel for one another, there has always been, and there remains now in my thought of him, a certain liking, a regret at our opposition, a quality of friendliness. his broad face, which the common impression and the caricaturist make so powerful and eagle-like, is really not a brutal or heavy face at all. it is no doubt aquiline, after the fashion of an eagle-owl, the mouth and chin broad and the eyes very far apart, but there is a minute puckering of the brows which combines with that queer streak of brown discoloration that runs across his cheek and into the white of his eyes, to give something faintly plaintive and pitiful to his expression, an effect enhanced by the dark softness of his eyes. they are gentle eyes; it is absurd to suppose them the eyes of a violently forceful man. and indeed they do not belie justin. it is not by vehemence or pressure that his wealth and power have been attained; it is by the sheer detailed abundance of his mind. in that queer big brain of his there is something of the calculating boy and not a little of the chess champion; he has a kind of financial gift, he must be rich, and grows richer. what else is there for him to do? how many times have i not tried to glance carelessly at his face and scrutinize that look in his eyes, and ask myself was that his usual look, or was it lit by an instinctive jealousy? did he perhaps begin to suspect? i had become a persistent visitor in the house, he might well be jealous of such minor favors as she showed me, for with him she talked but little and shared no thoughts. his manner with her was tinctured by an habituated despair. they were extraordinarily polite and friendly with one another....
i tried a hundred sophistications of my treachery to him. i assured myself that a modern woman is mistress and owner of herself; no chattel, and so forth. but he did not think so, and neither she nor i were behaving as though we thought so. in innumerable little things we were doing our best tacitly to reassure him. and so you see me shaking hands with this man, affecting an interest in his topics and affairs, staying in his house, eating his food and drinking his wine, that i might be the nearer to his wife. it is not the first time that has been done in the world, there are esoteric codes to justify all i did; i perceive there are types of men to whom such relationships are attractive by the very reason of their illicit excitement. but we strattons are honest people, there is no secretive passion in our blood; this is no game for us; never you risk the playing of it, little son, big son as you will be when you read this story. perhaps, but i hope indeed not, this may reach you too late to be a warning, come to you in mid-situation. go through with it then, inheritor of mine, and keep as clean as you can, follow the warped honor that is still left to you—and if you can, come out of the tangle....
it is not only justin haunts the memories of that furtive time, but rachel more. i see her still as she was then, a straight, white-dressed girl with big brown eyes that regarded me now with perplexity, now with a faint dismay. i still went over to see her, and my manner had changed. i had nothing to say to her now and everything to hide. everything between us hung arrested, and nothing could occur to make an end.
i told mary i must cease my visits to the mores. i tried to make her feel my own sense of an accumulating cruelty to rachel. "but it explains away so much," she said. "if you stop going there—everyone will talk. everything will swing round—and point here."
"rachel!" i protested.
"no," she said, overbearing me, "you must keep on going to ridinghanger. you must. you must."...
for a long time i had said nothing to mary of the burthen these pretences were to me; it had seemed a monstrous ingratitude to find the slightest flaw in the passionate love and intimacy she had given me. but at last the divergence of our purposes became manifest to us both. a time came when we perceived it clearly and discussed it openly. i have still a vivid recollection of a golden october day when we had met at the edge of the plantation that overlooks bearshill. she had come through the gardens into the pine-wood, and i had jumped the rusty banked stream that runs down the bearshill valley, and clambered the barbed wire fence. i came up the steep bank and through a fringe of furze to where she stood in the shade; i kissed her hand, and discovered mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was dripping blood. "mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed with my arm held aloof.
we sat down side by side upon the warm pine needles that carpeted the sand, and she made a mothering fuss about my petty wound, and bound it in my handkerchief. we looked together across the steep gorge at the blue ridge of trees beyond. "anyone," she said, "might have seen us this minute."
"i never thought," i said, and moved a foot away from her.
"it's too late if they have," said she, pulling me back to her. "over beyond there, that must be hindhead. someone with a telescope——!"
"that's less credible," i said. and it occurred to me that the grey stretch of downland beyond must be the ridge to the west of ridinghanger.
"i wish," i said, "it didn't matter. i wish i could come and go and fear nobody—and spend long hours with you—oh! at our ease."
"now," she said, "we spend short hours. i wonder if i would like—— it's no good, stephen, letting ourselves think of things that can't be. here we are. kiss that hand, my lover, there, just between wrist and thumb—the little hollow. yes, exactly there."
but thoughts had been set going in my mind. "why," i said presently, "should you always speak of things that can't be? why should we take all this as if it were all that there could be? i want long hours. i want you to shine all the day through on my life. now, dear, it's as if the sun was shown ever and again, and then put back behind an eclipse. i come to you half-blinded, i go away unsatisfied. all the world is dark in between, and little phantom yous float over it."
she rested her cheek on her hand and looked at me gravely.
"you are hard to satisfy, brother heart," she said.
"i live in snatches of brightness and all the rest of life is waiting and thinking and waiting."
"what else is there? haven't we the brightness?"
"i want you," i said. "i want you altogether."
"after so much?"
"i want the more. mary, i want you to come away with me. no, listen! this life—don't think i'm not full of the beauty, the happiness, the wonder—— but it's a suspense. it doesn't go on. it's just a dawn, dear, a splendid dawn, a glory of color and brightness and freshness and hope, and—no sun rises. i want the day. everything else has stopped with me and stopped with[pg 163] you. i do nothing with my politics now,—i pretend. i have no plans in life except plans for meeting you and again meeting you. i want to go on, i want to go on with you and take up work and the world again—you beside me. i want you to come out of all this life—out of all this immense wealthy emptiness of yours——"
"stop," she said, "and listen to me, stephen."
she paused with her lips pressed together, her brows a little knit.
"i won't," she said slowly. "i am going on like this. i and you are going to be lovers—just as we are lovers now—secret lovers. and i am going to help you in all your projects, hold your party together—for you will have a party—my house shall be its centre——"
"but justin——"
"he takes no interest in politics. he will do what pleases me."
i took some time before i answered. "you don't understand how men feel," i said.
she waited for what else i had to say. i lay prone, and gathered together and shaped and reshaped a little heap of pine needles. "you see—— i can't do it. i want you."
she gripped a handful of my hair, and tugged hard between each word. "haven't you got me?" she asked between her teeth. "what more could you have?"
"i want you openly."
she folded her arms beneath her. "no," she said.
for a little while neither of us spoke.
"it's the trouble of the deceit?" she asked.
"it's—the deceit."
"we can stop all that," she said.
i looked up at her face enquiringly.
"by having no more to hide," she said, with her eyes full of tears. "if it's nothing to you——"
"it's everything to me," i said. "it's overwhelming me. oh mary, heart of my life, my dear, come out of this! come with me, come and be my wife, make a clean thing of it! let me take you away, and then let me marry you. i know it's asking you—to come to a sort of poverty——"
but mary's blue eyes were alight with anger. "isn't it a clean thing now, stephen?" she was crying. "do you mean that you and i aren't clean now? will you never understand?"
"oh clean," i answered, "clean as eve in the garden. but can we keep clean? won't the shadow of our falsehoods darken at all? come out of it while we are still clean. come with me. justin will divorce you. we can stay abroad and marry and come back."
mary was kneeling up now with her hands upon her knees.
"come back to what?" she cried. "parliament?—after that? you boy! you sentimentalist! you—you duffer! do you think i'd let you do it for your own sake even? do you think i want you—spoilt? we should come back to mope outside of things, we should come back to fret our lives out. i won't do it, stephen, i won't do it. end this if you like, break our hearts and throw them away and go on without them, but to turn all our lives into a scandal, to give ourselves over to the mean and the malicious, a prey to old women—and you damned out of everything! a man partly forgiven! a man who went wrong for a woman! no!"
she sprang lightly to her feet and stood over me as i knelt before her. "and i came here to be made love to, stephen! i came here to be loved! and you talk that nonsense! you remind me of everything—wretched!"
she lifted up her hands and then struck down with them, a gesture of infinite impatience. her face as she bent to me was alive with a friendly anger, her eyes suddenly dark. "you duffer!" she repeated....
