Herbert Wells - Marriage

Trafford put his untasted tea upon the mantelshelf, and confronted his mother with a question point blank. "Does Marjorie care for me?" he asked.

"You're the sun of her world."

"But she goes her way."

"She's clever, she's full of life, full of activities, eager to make and arrange and order; but there's nothing she is, nothing she makes, that doesn't centre on you."

"But if she cared, she'd understand!"

"My dear, do you understand?"

He stood musing. "I had everything clear," he said. "I saw my way to Labrador...."

Her little clock pinged the hour. "Good God!" he said, "I'm to be at dinner somewhere at seven. We're going to a first night. With the Bernards, I think. Then I suppose we'll have a supper. Always life is being slashed to tatters by these things. Always. One thinks in snatches of fifty minutes. It's dementia...."

They dined at the Loretto Restaurant with the Bernards and Richard Hampden and Mrs. Godwin Capes, the dark-eyed, quiet-mannered wife of the dramatist, a woman of impulsive speech and long silences, who had subsided from an early romance (Capes had been divorced for her while she was still a mere girl) into a markedly correct and exclusive mother of daughters. Through the dinner Marjorie was watching Trafford and noting the deep preoccupation of his manner. He talked a little to Mrs. Bernard until it was time for Hampden to entertain her, then finding Mrs. Capes was interested in Bernard, he lapsed into thought. Presently Marjorie discovered his eyes scrutinizing herself.

She hoped the play would catch his mind, but the play seemed devised to intensify his sense of the tawdry unreality of contemporary life. Bernard filled the intervals with a conventional enthusiasm. Capes didn't appear.

"He doesn't seem to care to see his things," his wife explained.

"It's so brilliant," said Bernard.

"He has to do it," said Mrs. Capes slowly, her sombre eyes estimating the crowded stalls below. "It isn't what he cares to do."

The play was in fact an admirable piece of English stagecraft, and it dealt exclusively with that unreal other world of beings the English theatre has for its own purposes developed. Just as Greece through the ages evolved and polished and perfected the idealized life of its Homeric poems, so the British mind has evolved their Stage Land to embody its more honourable dreams, full of heroic virtues, incredible honour, genial worldliness, childish villainies, profound but amiable waiters and domestics, pathetic shepherds and preposterous crimes. Capes, needing an income, had mastered the habits and customs of this imagined world as one learns a language; success endorsed his mastery; he knew exactly how deeply to underline an irony and just when it is fit and proper for a good man to call upon "God!" or cry out "Damn!" In this play he had invented a situation in which a charming and sympathetic lady had killed a gross and drunken husband in self-defence, almost but not quite accidentally, and had then appealed to the prodigious hero for assistance in the resulting complications. At a great cost of mental suffering to himself he had told his First and Only Lie to shield her. Then years after he had returned to England—the first act happened, of course in India—to find her on the eve of marrying, without any of the preliminary confidences common among human beings, an old school friend of his. (In plays all Gentlemen have been at school together, and one has been the other's fag.) The audience had to be interested in the problem of what the prodigious hero was to do in this prodigious situation. Should he maintain a colossal silence, continue his shielding, and let his friend marry the murderess saved by his perjury, or——?... The dreadful quandary! Indeed, the absolute—inconvenience!

Marjorie watched Trafford in the corner of the box, as he listened rather contemptuously to the statement of the evening's Problem and then lapsed again into a brooding quiet. She wished she understood his moods better. She felt there was more in this than a mere resentment at her persistence about the new house....

Why didn't he go on with things?...

This darkling mood of his had only become manifest to her during the last three or four years of their life. Previously, of course, he had been irritable at times.

Were they less happy now than they had been in the little house in Chelsea? It had really been a horrible little house. And yet there had been a brightness then—a nearness....

She found her mind wandering away upon a sort of stock-taking expedition. How much of real happiness had she and Trafford had together? They ought by every standard to be so happy....

She declined the Bernard's invitation to a chafing-dish supper, and began to talk so soon as she and Trafford had settled into the car.

"Rag," she said, "something's the matter?"

"Well—yes."

"The house?"

"Yes—the house."

Marjorie considered through a little interval.

"Old man, why are you so prejudiced against a bigger house?"

"Oh, because the one we have bores me, and the next one will bore me more."

"But try it."

"I don't want to."

"Well," she said and lapsed into silence.

"And then," he asked, "what are we going to do?"

"Going to do—when?"

"After the new house——"

"I'm going to open out," she said.

He made no answer.

"I want to open out. I want you to take your place in the world, the place you deserve."

"A four-footman place?"

"Oh! the house is only a means."

He thought upon that. "A means," he asked, "to what? Look here, Marjorie, what do you think you are up to with me and yourself? What do you see me doing—in the years ahead?"

She gave him a silent and thoughtful profile for a second or so.

"At first I suppose you are going on with your researches."

"Well?"

"Then——I must tell you what I think of you, Rag. Politics——"

"Good Lord!"

"You've a sort of power. You could make things noble."

"And then? Office?"

"Why not? Look at the little men they are."

"And then perhaps a still bigger house?"

"You're not fair to me."

He pulled up the bearskin over his knees.

"Marjorie!" he said. "You see——We aren't going to do any of those things at all.... No! ..."

"I can't go on with my researches," he explained. "That's what you don't understand. I'm not able to get back to work. I shall never do any good research again. That's the real trouble, Marjorie, and it makes all the difference. As for politics——I can't touch politics. I despise politics. I think this empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it, silly, silly beyond words; temporary, accidental, foolish, a mere stop-gap—like a gipsey's roundabout in a place where one will presently build a house.... You don't help make the house by riding on the roundabout.... There's no clear knowledge—no clear purpose.... Only research matters—and expression perhaps—I suppose expression is a sort of research—until we get that—that sufficient knowledge. And you see, I can't take up my work again. I've lost something...."

She waited.

"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "and I feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I've been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Business and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's attention or imagination wander—and it's so degrading. Hopelessly degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. I don't want to buy things. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It's exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened—on nothing! Nothing!"