Herbert Wells - Marriage

"No," he said, after thought. "You're all Labrador older."

"I always have failed," she considered, "when it came to any special temptations, Rag. I can't stand not having a thing!"

He made no answer.

"And you're still the same old Rag, you know," she went on. "Who weakens into kindness if I cry. Who likes me well-dressed. Who couldn't endure to see me poor."

"Not a bit of it. No! I'm a very different Rag with a very different Marjorie. Yes indeed! Things—are graver. Why!—I'm lame for life—and I've a scar. The very look of things is changed...." He stared at her face and said: "You've hidden the looking-glass and you think I haven't noted it——"

"It keeps on healing," she interrupted. "And if it comes to that—where's my complexion?" She laughed. "These are just the superficial aspects of the case."

"Nothing ever heals completely," he said, answering her first sentence, "and nothing ever goes back to the exact place it held before. We are different, you sun-bitten, frost-bitten wife of mine."...

"Character is character," said Marjorie, coming back to her point. "Don't exaggerate conversion, dear. It's not a bit of good pretending we shan't fall away, both of us. Each in our own manner. We shall. We shall, old man. London is still a tempting and confusing place, and you can't alter people fundamentally, not even by half-freezing and half-starving them. You only alter people fundamentally by killing them and replacing them. I shall be extravagant again and forget again, try as I may, and you will work again and fall away again and forgive me again. You know——It's just as though we were each of us not one person, but a lot of persons, who sometimes meet and shout all together, and then disperse and forget and plot against each other...."

"Oh, things will happen again," said Trafford, in her pause. "But they will happen again with a difference—after this. With a difference. That's the good of it all.... We've found something here—that makes everything different.... We've found each other, too, dear wife."

She thought intently.

"I am afraid," she whispered.

"But what is there to be afraid of?"

" Myself ."

She spoke after a little pause that seemed to hesitate. "At times I wish—oh, passionately!—that I could pray."

"Why don't you?"

"I don't believe enough—in that. I wish I did."

Trafford thought. "People are always so exacting about prayer," he said.

"Exacting."

"You want to pray—and you can't make terms for a thing you want. I used to think I could. I wanted God to come and demonstrate a bit.... It's no good, Madge.... If God chooses to be silent—you must pray to the silence. If he chooses to live in darkness, you must pray to the night...."

"Yes," said Marjorie, "I suppose one must."

She thought. "I suppose in the end one does," she said....

Mixed up with this entirely characteristic theology of theirs and their elaborate planning-out of a new life in London were other strands of thought. Queer memories of London and old times together would flash with a peculiar brightness across their contemplation of the infinities and the needs of mankind. Out of nowhere, quite disconnectedly, would come the human, finite: "Do you remember——?"

Two things particularly pressed into their minds. One was the thought of their children, and I do not care to tell how often in the day now they calculated the time in England, and tried to guess to a half mile or so where those young people might be and what they might be doing. "The shops are bright for Christmas now," said Marjorie. "This year Dick was to have had his first fireworks. I wonder if he did. I wonder if he burnt his dear little funny stumps of fingers. I hope not."

"Oh, just a little," said Trafford. "I remember how a squib made my glove smoulder and singed me, and how my mother kissed me for taking it like a man. It was the best part of the adventure."

"Dick shall burn his fingers when his mother's home to kiss him. But spare his fingers now, Dadda...."

The other topic was food.

It was only after they had been doing it for a week or so that they remarked how steadily they gravitated to reminiscences, suggestions, descriptions and long discussions of eatables—sound, solid eatables. They told over the particulars of dinners they had imagined altogether forgotten; neither hosts nor conversations seemed to matter now in the slightest degree, but every item in the menu had its place. They nearly quarrelled one day about hors-d'œuvre . Trafford wanted to dwell on them when Marjorie was eager for the soup.

"It's niggling with food," said Marjorie.

"Oh, but there's no reason," said Trafford, "why you shouldn't take a lot of hors-d'œuvre . Three or four sardines, and potato salad and a big piece of smoked salmon, and some of that Norwegian herring, and so on, and keep the olives by you to pick at. It's a beginning."

"It's—it's immoral," said Marjorie, "that's what I feel. If one needs a whet to eat, one shouldn't eat. The proper beginning of a dinner is soup—good, hot, rich soup. Thick soup—with things in it, vegetables and meat and things. Bits of oxtail."

"Not peas."

"No, not peas. Pea-soup is tiresome. I never knew anything one tired of so soon. I wish we hadn't relied on it so much."

"Thick soup's all very well," said Trafford, "but how about that clear stuff they give you in the little pavement restaurants in Paris. You know— Croûte-au-pot , with lovely great crusts and big leeks and lettuce leaves and so on! Tremendous aroma of onions, and beautiful little beads of fat! And being a clear soup, you see what there is. That's—interesting. Twenty-five centimes, Marjorie. Lord! I'd give a guinea a plate for it. I'd give five pounds for one of those jolly white-metal tureens full—you know, full , with little drops all over the outside of it, and the ladle sticking out under the lid."

"Have you ever tasted turtle soup?"

"Rather. They give it you in the City. The fat's—ripping. But they're rather precious with it, you know. For my own part, I don't think soup should be doled out. I always liked the soup we used to get at the Harts'; but then they never give you enough, you know—not nearly enough."

"About a tablespoonful," said Marjorie. "It's mocking an appetite."

"Still there's things to follow," said Trafford....

They discussed the proper order of a dinner very carefully. They decided that sorbets and ices were not only unwholesome, but nasty. "In London," said Trafford, "one's taste gets—vitiated."...

They weighed the merits of French cookery, modern international cookery, and produced alternatives. Trafford became very eloquent about old English food. "Dinners," said Trafford, "should be feasting, not the mere satisfaction of a necessity. There should be— amplitude . I remember a recipe for a pie; I think it was in one of those books that man Lucas used to compile. If I remember rightly, it began with: 'Take a swine and hew it into gobbets.' Gobbets! That's something like a beginning. It was a big pie with tiers and tiers of things, and it kept it up all the way in that key.... And then what could be better than prime British-fed roast beef, reddish, just a shade on the side of underdone, and not too finely cut. Mutton can't touch it."

"Beef is the best," she said.

"Then our English cold meat again. What can equal it? Such stuff as they give in a good country inn, a huge joint of beef—you cut from it yourself, you know as much as you like—with mustard, pickles, celery, a tankard of stout, let us say. Pressed beef, such as they'll give you at the Reform, too, that's good eating for a man. With chutney, and then old cheese to follow. And boiled beef, with little carrots and turnips and a dumpling or so. Eh?"