Herbert Wells - Marriage

The difference in their atmospheres came out in their talk—in his desire for a handsome and dignified wedding—though the very heavens protested—and her resolve to cut clear of every one, to achieve a sort of gaol delivery of her life, make a new beginning altogether, with the minimum of friction and the maximum of surprise. Unused to fighting, he was magnificently prepared to fight; she, with her intimate knowledge of chronic domestic conflict, was for the evasion of all the bickerings, scoldings, and misrepresentations his challenge would occasion. He thought in his innocence a case could be stated and discussed; but no family discussion she had ever heard had even touched the realities of the issue that occasioned it.

"I don't like this underhand preparation," he said.

"Nor I," she echoed. "But what can one do?"

"Well, oughtn't I to go to your father and give him a chance? Why shouldn't I? It's—the dignified way."

"It won't be dignified for father," said Marjorie, "anyhow."

"But what right has he to object?"

"He isn't going to discuss his rights with you. He will object."

"But why? "

"Oh! because he's started that way. He hit you. I haven't forgotten it. Well, if he goes back on that now——He'd rather die than go back on it. You see, he's ashamed in his heart. It would be like confessing himself wrong not to keep it up that you're the sort of man one hits. He just hates you because he hit you. I haven't been his daughter for twenty-one years for nothing."

"I'm thinking of us," said Trafford. "I don't see we oughtn't to go to him just because he's likely to be—unreasonable."

"My dear, do as you please. He'll forbid and shout, and hit tables until things break. Suppose he locks me up!"

"Oh, Habeas Corpus, and my strong right arm! He's much more likely to turn you out-of-doors."

"Not if he thinks the other will annoy you more. I'll have to bear a storm."

"Not for long."

"He'll bully mother till she cries over me. But do as you please. She'll come and she'll beg me——Do as you please. Perhaps I'm a coward. I'd far rather I could slip away."

Trafford thought for a moment. "I'd far rather you could," he answered, in a voice that spoke of inflexible determinations.

They turned to the things they meant to do. " Italy! " she whispered, " Italy! " Her face was alight with her burning expectation of beauty, of love, of the new heaven and the new earth that lay before them. The intensity of that desire blazing through her seemed to shame his dull discretions. He had to cling to his resolution, lest it should vanish in that contagious intoxication.

"You understand I shall come to your father," he said, as they drew near the gate where it seemed discreet for them to part.

"It will make it harder to get away," she said, with no apparent despondency. "It won't stop us. Oh! do as you please."

She seemed to dismiss the question, and stood hand-in-hand with him in a state of glowing gravity. She wouldn't see him again for four-and-twenty hours. Then a thought came into her head—a point of great practical moment.

"Oh!" she said, "of course, you won't tell father you've seen me."

She met his eye. "Really you mustn't," she said. "You see—he'll make a row with mother for not having watched me better. I don't know what he isn't likely to do. It isn't myself——This is a confidential communication—all this. No one in this world knows I am meeting you. If you must go to him, go to him."

"For myself?"

She nodded, with her open eyes on his—eyes that looked now very blue and very grave, and her lips a little apart.

She surprised him a little, but even this sudden weakness seemed adorable.

"All right," he said.

"You don't think that I'm shirking——?" she asked, a little too eagerly.

"You know your father best," he answered. "I'll tell you all he says and all the terror of him here to-morrow afternoon."

In the stillness of the night Trafford found himself thinking over Marjorie; it was a new form of mental exercise, which was destined to play a large part in his existence for many subsequent years. There had come a shadow on his confidence in her. She was a glorious person; she had a kind of fire behind her and in her—shining through her, like the lights in a fire-opal, but——He wished she had not made him promise to conceal their meeting and their close co-operation from her father. Why did she do that? It would spoil his case with her father, and it could forward things for them in no conceivable way. And from that, in some manner too subtle to trace, he found his mind wandering to another problem, which was destined to reappear with a slowly dwindling importance very often in this procedure of thinking over Marjorie in the small hours. It was the riddle—it never came to him in the daytime, but only in those intercalary and detachedly critical periods of thought—why exactly had she engaged herself to Magnet? Why had she? He couldn't imagine himself, in Marjorie's position, doing anything of the sort. Marjorie had ways of her own; she was different.... Well, anyhow, she was splendid and loving and full of courage.... He had got no further than this when at last he fell asleep.

Trafford's little attempt to regularise his position was as creditable to him as it was inevitably futile. He sought out 29, Hartstone Square in the morning on his way to his laboratory, and he found it one of a great row of stucco houses each with a portico and a dining-room window on the ground floor, and each with a railed area from which troglodytic servants peeped. Collectively the terrace might claim a certain ugly dignity of restraint, there was none of your Queen Anne nonsense of art or beauty about it, and the narrow height, the subterranean kitchens of each constituent house, told of a steep relentless staircase and the days before the pampering of the lower classes began. The houses formed a square, as if the British square so famous at Waterloo for its dogged resistance to all the forces of the universe had immortalized itself in buildings, and they stared upon a severely railed garden of hardy shrubs and gravel to which the tenants had the inestimable privilege of access. They did not use it much, that was their affair, but at any rate they had keys and a nice sense of rights assured, and at least it kept other people out.

Trafford turned out of a busy high road full of the mixed exhilarating traffic of our time, and came along a quiet street into this place, and it seemed to him he had come into a corner of defence and retreat, into an atmosphere of obstinate and unteachable resistances. But this illusion of conservativism in its last ditch was dispelled altogether in Mr. Pope's portico. Youth flashed out of these solemnities like a dart shot from a cave. Trafford was raising his hand to the solid brass knocker when abruptly it was snatched from his fingers, the door was flung open and a small boy with a number of dirty books in a strap flew out and hit him with projectile violence.

"Blow!" said the young gentleman recoiling, and Trafford recovering said: "Hullo, Theodore!"

"Lord!" said Theodore breathless, "It's you! What a lark! Your name's never mentioned—no how. What did you do?... Wish I could stop and see it! I'm ten minutes late. Ave atque vale . So long!"

He vanished with incredible velocity. And Mr. Trafford was alone in possession of the open doorway except for Toupee, who after a violent outbreak of hostility altered his mind and cringed to his feet in abject and affectionate propitiation. A pseudo-twin appeared, said "Hello!" and vanished, and then he had an instant's vision of Mr. Pope, newspaper in hand, appearing from the dining-room. His expression of surprise changed to malevolence, and he darted back into the room from which he had emerged. Trafford decided to take the advice of a small brass plate on his left hand, and "ring also."