discovery followed hard upon that meeting. i had come over to martens with some book as a pretext; the man had told me that lady mary awaited me in her blue parlor, and i went unannounced through the long gallery to find her. the door stood a little ajar, i opened it softly so that she did not hear me, and saw her seated at her writing-desk with her back to me, and her cheek and eyebrow just touched by the sunlight from the open terrace window. she was writing a note. i put my hand about her shoulder, and bent to kiss her as she turned. then as she came round to me she started, was for a moment rigid, then thrust me from her and rose very slowly to her feet.
i turned to the window and became as rigid, facing justin. he was standing on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid and inexpressive and—very white. the sky behind him, appropriately enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. so we remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite tableau vivant. we two seemed to hang helplessly upon justin, and he was the first of us to move.
he made a queer, incomplete gesture with one hand, as if he wanted to undo the top button of his waistcoat and then thought better of it. he came very slowly into the room. when he spoke his voice had neither rage nor denunciation in it. it was simply conversational. "i felt this was going on," he said. and then to his wife with the note of one who remarks dispassionately on a peculiar situation. "yet somehow it seemed wrong and unnatural to think such a thing of you."
his face took on something of the vexed look of a child who struggles with a difficult task. "do you mind," he said to me, "will you go?"
i took a moment for my reply. "no," i said. "since you know at last—— there are things to be said."
"no," said mary, suddenly. "go! let me talk to him."
"no," i said, "my place is here beside you."
he seemed not to hear me. his eyes were fixed on mary. he seemed to think he had dismissed me, and that i was no longer there. his mind was not concerned about me, but about her. he spoke as though what he said had been in his mind, and no doubt it had been in his mind, for many days. "i didn't deserve this," he said to her. "i've tried to make your life as you wanted your life. it's astonishing to find—i haven't. you gave no sign. i suppose i ought to have felt all this happening, but it comes upon me surprisingly. i don't know what i'm to do." he became aware of me again. "and you!" he said. "what am i to do? to think that you—while i have been treating her like some sacred thing...."
the color was creeping back into his face. indignation had come into his voice, the first yellow lights of rising jealousy showed in his eyes.
"stephen," i heard mary say, "will you leave me to talk to my husband?"
"there is only one thing to do," i said. "what is the need of talking? we two are lovers, justin." i spoke to both of them. "we two must go out into the world, go out now together. this marriage of yours—it's no marriage, no real marriage...."
i think i said that. i seem to remember saying that; perhaps with other phrases that i have forgotten. but my memory of what we said and did, which is so photographically clear of these earlier passages that i believe i can answer for every gesture and nearly every word that i have set down, becomes suddenly turbid. the high tension of our first confrontation was giving place to a flood of emotional impulse. we all became eager to talk, to impose interpretations and justifications upon our situation. we all three became divided between our partial attention to one another and our urgent necessity to keep hold of our points of view. that i think is the common tragedy of almost all human conflicts, that rapid breakdown from the first cool apprehension of an issue to heat, confusion, and insistence. i do not know if indeed we raised our voices, but my memory has an effect of raised voices, and when at last i went out of the house it seemed to me that the men-servants in the hall were as hushed as beasts before a thunderstorm, and all of them quite fully aware of the tremendous catastrophe that had come to martens. and moreover, as i recalled afterwards with astonishment, i went past them and out into the driving rain unprotected, and not one of them stirred a serviceable hand....
what was it we said? i have a vivid sense of declaring not once only but several times that mary and i were husband and wife "in the sight of god." i was full of the idea that now she must inevitably be mine. i must have spoken to justin at times as if he had come merely to confirm my view of the long dispute there had been between us. for a while my mind resisted his extraordinary attitude that the matter lay between him and mary, that i was in some way an interloper. it seemed to me there was nothing for it now but that mary should stand by my side and face justin with the world behind him. i remember my confused sense that presently she and i would have to go straight out of martens. and she was wearing a tea-gown, easy and open, and the flimsiest of slippers. any packing, any change of clothing, struck me as an incredible anti-climax. i had visions of our going forth, hand in hand. outside was the soughing of a coming storm, a chill wind drove a tumult of leaves along the terrace, the door slammed and yawned open again, and then came the rain. justin, i remember, still talking, closed the door. i tried to think how i could get to the station five miles away, and then what we could do in london. we should seem rather odd visitors to an hotel—without luggage. all this was behind my valiant demand that she should come with me, and come now.
and then my mind was lanced by the thin edge of realization that she did not intend to come now, and that justin was resolved she should not do so. after the first shock of finding herself discovered she had stood pale but uncowed before her bureau, with her eyes rather on him than on me. her hands, i think, were behind her upon the edge of the writing flap, and she was a little leaning upon them. she had the watchful alert expression of one who faces an unanticipated but by no means overwhelming situation. she cast a remark to me. "but i do not want to come with you," she said. "i have told you i do not want to come with you." all her mind seemed concentrated upon what she should do with justin. "you must send him away," he was saying. "it's an abominable thing. it must stop. how can you dream it should go on?"
"but you said when you married me i should be free, i should own myself! you gave me this house——"
"what! to disgrace myself!"
i was moved to intervene.
"you must choose between us, mary," i cried. "it is impossible you should stay here! you cannot stay here."
she turned upon me, a creature at bay. "why shouldn't i stay here? why must i choose between two men? i want neither of you. i want myself. i'm not a thing. i'm a human being. i'm not your thing, justin—nor yours, stephen. yet you want to quarrel over me—like two dogs over a bone. i am going to stay here—in my house! it's my house. i made it. every room of it is full of me. here i am!"
she stood there making this magnificently extravagant claim; her eyes blazing blue, her hair a little dishevelled with a strand across her cheek.
both i and justin spoke together, and then turned in helpless anger upon one another. i remember that with the clumsiest of weak gestures he bade me begone from the house, and that i with a now rather deflated rhetoric answered i would go only with mary at my side. and there she stood, less like a desperate rebel against the most fundamental social relations than an indignant princess, and demanded of us and high heaven, "why should i be fought for? why should i be fought for?"
and then abruptly she gathered her skirts in her hand and advanced. "open that door, stephen," she said, and was gone with a silken whirl and rustle from our presence.
we were left regarding one another with blank expressions.
her departure had torn the substance out of our dispute. for the moment we found ourselves left with a new situation for which there is as yet no tradition of behavior. we had become actors in that new human comedy that is just beginning in the world, that comedy in which men still dispute the possession and the manner of the possession of woman according to the ancient rules, while they on their side are determining ever more definitely that they will not be possessed....
we had little to say to one another,—mere echoes and endorsements of our recent declarations. "she must come to me," said i. and he, "i will save her from that at any cost."
that was the gist of our confrontation, and then i turned about and walked along the gallery towards the entrance, with justin following me slowly. i was full of the wrath of baffled heroics; i turned towards him with something of a gesture. down the perspective of the white and empty gallery he appeared small and perplexed. the panes of the tall french windows were slashed with rain....
