Herbert Wells - Marriage

She didn't. Her next question showed as much. "Will it affect your F.R.S.?" she asked.

"Oh! that's safe enough, and it doesn't matter anyhow. The F.R.S.! Confound the silly little F.R.S.! As if that mattered. It's seeing all my great openings—misused. It's seeing all I might be doing. This brings it all home to me. Don't you understand, Marjorie? Will you never understand? I'm getting away from all that! I'm being hustled away by all this work, this silly everyday work to get money. Don't you see that unless I can have time for thought and research, life is just darkness to me? I've made myself master of that stuff. I had at any rate. No one can do what I can do there. And when I find myself—oh, shut out, shut out! I come near raving. As I think of it I want to rave again." He paused. Then with a swift transition: "I suppose I'd better eat some breakfast. Is that egg boiled?"

She gave him an egg, brought his coffee, put things before him, seated herself at the table. For a little while he ate in silence. Then he cursed Behrens.

"Look here!" she said. "Bad as I am, you've got to reason with me, Rag. I didn't know all this. I didn't understand... I don't know what to do."

"What is there to do?"

"I've got to do something. I'm beginning to see things. It's just as though everything had become clear suddenly." She was weeping. "Oh, my dear! I want to help you. I have so wanted to help you. Always. And it's come to this!"

"But it's not your fault. I didn't mean that. It's—it's in the nature of things."

"It's my fault."

"It's not your fault."

"It is."

"Confound it, Marjorie. When I swear at Behrens I'm not swearing at you."

"It's my fault. All this is my fault. I'm eating you up. What's the good of your pretending, Rag. You know it is. Oh! When I married you I meant to make you happy, I had no thought but to make you happy, to give myself to you, my body, my brains, everything, to make life beautiful for you——"

"Well, haven't you?" He thrust out a hand she did not take.

"I've broken your back," she said.

An unwonted resolution came into her face. Her lips whitened. "Don't you know, Rag," she said, forcing herself to speak——"Don't you guess? You don't know half! In that bureau there——In there! It's stuffed with bills. Unpaid bills."

She was weeping, with no attempt to wipe the streaming tears away; terror made the expression of her wet face almost fierce. "Bills," she repeated. "More than a hundred pounds still. Yes! Now. Now! "

He drew back, stared at her and with no trace of personal animus, like one who hears of a common disaster, remarked with a quiet emphasis: "Oh, damn! "

"I know," she said, "Damn!" and met his eyes. There was a long silence between them. She produced a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. "That's what I amount to," she said.

"It's your silly upbringing," he said after a long pause.

"And my silly self."

She stood up, unlocked and opened her littered desk, turned and held out the key to him.

"Why?" he asked.

"Take it. You gave me a cheque-book of my own and a corner of my own, and they—they are just ambushes—against you."

He shook his head.

"Take it," said Marjorie with quiet insistence.

He obeyed. She stood with her eyes on the crumpled heap of bills. They were not even tidily arranged. That seemed to her now an extreme aggravation of her offence.

"I ought to be sent to the chemist's," she remarked, "as one sends a worthless cat."

Trafford weighed this proposition soberly for some moments. "You're a bother, Marjorie," he said with his eyes on the desk; "no end of a bother. I'd better have those bills."

He looked at her, stood up, put his hands on her shoulders, drew her to him and kissed her forehead. He did it without passion, without tenderness, with something like resignation in his manner. She clung to him tightly, as though by clinging she could warm and soften him.

"Rag," she whispered; "all my heart is yours.... I want to help you.... And this is what I have done."

"I know," he said—almost grimly.

He repeated his kiss.

Then he seemed to explode again. "Gods!" he cried, "look at the clock. I shall miss that Croydon lecture!" He pushed her from him. "Where are my boots?..."

Marjorie spent the forenoon and the earlier part of the afternoon repeating and reviewing this conversation. Her mind was full of the long disregarded problem of her husband's state of mind. She thought with a sympathetic astonishment of his swearing, of his startling blow upon the table. She hadn't so far known he could swear. But this was the real thing, the relief of vehement and destructive words. His voice, saying "damnation and damnation," echoed and re-echoed in her ears. Somehow she understood that as she had never understood any sober statement of his case. Such women as Marjorie, I think, have an altogether keener understanding of people who have lost control of themselves than they have of reasoned cases. Perhaps that is because they themselves always reserve something when they state a reasoned case.

She went on to the apprehension of a change in him that hitherto she had not permitted herself to see—a change in his attitude to her. There had been a time when she had seemed able without an effort to nestle inside his heart. Now she felt distinctly for the first time that that hadn't happened. She had instead a sense of her embrace sliding over a rather deliberately contracted exterior.... Of course he had been in a hurry....

She tried to follow him on his journey to Croydon. Now he'd have just passed out of London Bridge. What was he thinking and feeling about her in the train? Now he would be going into the place, wherever it was, where he gave his lecture. Did he think of Behrens and curse her under his breath as he entered that tiresome room?...

It seemed part of the prevailing inconvenience of life that Daffy should see fit to pay an afternoon call.

Marjorie heard the sobs and uproar of an arrested motor, and glanced discreetly from the window to discover the dark green car with its green-clad chauffeur which now adorned her sister's life, and which might under different circumstances, have adorned her own. Wilkins—his name was Wilkins, his hair was sandy and his expression discreet, and he afforded material for much quiet humorous observation—descended smartly and opened the door. Daffy appeared in black velvet, with a huge black fur muff, and an air of being unaware that there were such things as windows in the world.

It was just four, and the cook-general, who ought to have been now in her housemaid's phase, was still upstairs divesting herself of her more culinary characteristics. Marjorie opened the door.

"Hullo, old Daffy!" she said.

"Hullo, old Madge!" and there was an exchange of sisterly kisses and a mutual inspection.

"Nothing wrong?" asked Daffy, surveying her.

" Wrong? "

"You look pale and—tired about the eyes," said Daffy, leading the way into the drawing-room. "Thought you might be a bit off it, that's all. No offence, Madge."

"I'm all right," said Marjorie, getting her back to the light. "Want a holiday, perhaps. How's every one?"

"All right. We're off to Lake Garda next week. This new play has taken it out of Will tremendously. He wants a rest and fresh surroundings. It's to be the biggest piece of work he's done—so far, and it's straining him. And people worry him here; receptions, first nights, dinners, speeches. He's so neat, you know, in his speeches.... But it wastes him. He wants to get away. How's Rag?"

"Busy."

"Lecturing?"

"And his Research of course."

"Oh! of course. How's the Babe?"