H G Wells Omnibus, page 185
§ 6
Marjorie kept well throughout March and April, and then suddenly she grew unutterably weary and uncomfortable in London. The end of April came hot and close and dry—it might have been July for the heat—the scrap of garden wilted, and the streets were irritating with fine dust and blown scraps of paper and drifting straws. She could think of nothing but the shade of trees, and cornfields under sunlight and the shadows of passing clouds. So Trafford took out an old bicycle and wandered over the home counties for three days, and at last hit upon a little country cottage near Great Missenden, a cottage a couple of girl artists had furnished and now wanted to let. It had a long, untidy vegetable garden and a small orchard and drying-ground, with an old, superannuated humbug of a pear-tree near the centre surrounded by a green seat, and high hedges with the promise of honeysuckle and dog-roses, and gaps that opened into hospitable beechwoods—woods not so thick but that there were glades of bluebells, bracken and, to be exact, in places embattled stinging-nettles. He took it and engaged a minute, active, interested, philoprogenitive servant girl for it, and took Marjorie thither in a taxi-cab. She went out, wrapped in a shawl, and sat under the pear-tree and cried quietly with weakness and sentiment and the tenderness of afternoon sunshine, and forthwith began to pick up wonderfully, and was presently writing to Trafford to buy her a dog to go for walks with, while he was away in London.
Trafford was still struggling along with his research in spite of a constant gravitation to the cottage and Marjorie’s side, but he was also doing his best to grapple with the difficulties of his financial situation. His science notes, which were very uncongenial and difficult to do, and his lecturing, still left his income far behind his expenditure, and the problem of minimising the inevitable fresh inroads on his capital was insistent and distracting. He discovered that he could manage his notes more easily and write a more popular article if he dictated to a typist instead of writing out the stuff in his own manuscript. Dictating made his sentences more copious and open, and the effect of the young lady’s by no means acquiescent back was to make him far more explicit than he tended to be pen in hand. With a pen and alone he felt the boredom of the job unendurably, and, to be through with it, became more and more terse, allusive, and compactly technical, after the style of his original papers. One or two articles by him were accepted and published by the monthly magazines, but as he took what the editors sent him, he did not find this led to any excessive opulence….
But his heart was very much with Marjorie through all this time. Hitherto he had taken her health and vigour and companionship for granted, and it changed his attitudes profoundly to find her now an ailing thing, making an invincible appeal for restraint and consideration and help. She changed marvellously, she gained a new dignity, and her complexion took upon itself a fresh, soft beauty. He would spend three or four days out of a week at the cottage, and long hours of that would be at her side, paper and notes of some forthcoming lecture at hand neglected, talking to her consolingly and dreamingly. His thoughts were full of ideas about education; he was obsessed, as are most intelligent young parents of the modern type, by the enormous possibilities of human improvement that might be achieved—if only one could begin with a baby from the outset, on the best lines, with the best methods, training and preparing it—presumably for a cleaned and chastened world. Indeed he made all the usual discoveries of intelligent modern young parents very rapidly, fully and completely, and overlooked most of those practical difficulties that finally reduce them to human dimensions again in quite the normal fashion.
“I sit and muse sometimes when I ought to be computing,” he said. “Old Durgan watches me and grunts. But think, if we take reasonable care, watch its phases, stand ready with a kindergarten toy directly it stretches out its hand—think what we can make of it!”…
“We will make it the most wonderful child in the world,” said Marjorie. “Indeed! what else can it be?”
“Your eyes,” said Trafford, “and my hands.”
“A girl.”
“A boy.”
He kissed her white and passive wrist.
§ 7
The child was born a little before expectation at the cottage throughout a long summer’s night and day in early September. Its coming into the world was a long and painful struggle; the general practitioner who had seemed two days before a competent and worthy person enough, revealed himself as hesitating, old-fashioned, and ill-equipped. He had a lingering theological objection to the use of chloroform, and the nurse from London sulked under his directions and came and discussed his methods scornfully with Trafford. From sundown until daylight Trafford chafed in the little sitting-room and tried to sleep, and hovered listening at the foot of the narrow staircase to the room above. He lived through interminable hours of moaning and suspense….
The dawn and sunrise came with a quality of beautiful horror. For years afterwards that memory stood out among other memories as something peculiarly strange and dreadful. Day followed an interminable night and broke slowly. Things crept out of darkness, awoke as it were out of mysteries and reclothed themselves in unsubstantial shadows and faint-hued forms. All through that slow infiltration of the world with light and then with colour, the universe it seemed was moaning and endeavouring, and a weak and terrible struggle went on and kept on in that forbidden room whose windows opened upon the lightening world, dying to a sobbing silence, rising again to agonizing cries, fluctuating, a perpetual obstinate failure to achieve a tormenting end. He went out, and behold the sky was a wonder of pink flushed level clouds and golden hope, and nearly every star except the morning star had gone, the supine moon was pale and half-dissolved in blue, and the grass which had been grey and wet, was green again, and the bushes and trees were green. He returned and hovered in the passage, washed his face, listened outside the door for age-long moments, and then went out again to listen under the window….
He went to his room and shaved, sat for a long time thinking, and then suddenly knelt by his bed and prayed. He had never prayed before in all his life….
He returned to the garden, and there neglected and wet with dew was the camp chair Marjorie had sat on the evening before, the shawl she had been wearing, the novel she had been reading. He brought these things in as if they were precious treasures….
Light was pouring into the world again now. He noticed with an extreme particularity the detailed dewy delicacy of grass and twig, the silver edges to the leaves of briar and nettle, the soft clearness of the moss on bank and wall. He noted the woods with the first warmth of autumn tinting their green, the clear, calm sky, with just a wisp or so of purple cloud waning to a luminous pink on the brightening east, the exquisite freshness of the air. And still through the open window, incessant, unbearable, came this sound of Marjorie moaning, now dying away, now reviving, now weakening again….
Was she dying? Were they murdering her? It was incredible this torture could go on. Somehow it must end. Chiefly he wanted to go in and kill the doctor. But it would do no good to kill the doctor!
At last the nurse came out, looking a little scared, to ask him to cycle three miles away and borrow some special sort of needle that the fool of a doctor had forgotten. He went, outwardly meek, and returning was met by the little interested servant, very alert and excited and rather superior—for here was something no man can do—with the news that he had a beautiful little daughter, and that all was well with Marjorie.
He said “Thank God, thank God!” several times, and then went out into the kitchen and began to eat some flabby toast and drink some lukewarm tea he found there. He was horribly fatigued. “Is she all right?” he asked over his shoulder, hearing the doctor’s footsteps on the stairs….
They were very pontifical and official with him.
Presently they brought out a strange, wizened little animal, wailing very stoutly, with a face like a very, very old woman, and reddish skin and hair—it had quite a lot of wet blackish hair of an incredible delicacy of texture. It kicked with a stumpy monkey’s legs and inturned feet. He held it: his heart went out to it. He pitied it beyond measure, it was so weak and ugly. He was astonished and distressed by the fact of its extreme endearing ugliness. He had expected something strikingly pretty. It clenched a fist, and he perceived it had all its complement of fingers and ridiculous, pretentious little finger nails. Inside that fist it squeezed his heart…. He did not want to give it back to them. He wanted to protect it. He felt they could not understand it or forgive, as he could forgive, its unjustifiable feebleness….
Later, for just a little while, he was permitted to see Marjorie—Marjorie so spent, so unspeakably weary, and yet so reassuringly vital and living, so full of gentle pride and gentler courage amidst the litter of surgical precaution, that the tears came streaming down his face and he sobbed shamelessly as he kissed her. “Little daughter,” she whispered and smiled—just as she had always smiled—that sweet, dear smile of hers!—and closed her eyes and said no more….
Afterwards as he walked up and down the garden he remembered their former dispute and thought how characteristic of Marjorie it was to have a daughter in spite of all his wishes.
§ 8
For weeks and weeks this astonishing and unprecedented being filled the Traffords’ earth and sky. Very speedily its minute quaintness passed, and it became a vigorous delightful baby that was, as the nurse explained repeatedly and very explicitly, not only quite exceptional and distinguished, but exactly everything that a baby should be. Its weight became of supreme importance; there was a splendid week when it put on nine ounces, and an indifferent one when it added only one. And then came a terrible crisis. It was ill; some sort of infection had reached it, an infantile cholera. Its temperature mounted to a hundred and three and a half. It became a flushed misery, wailing with a pathetic feeble voice. Then it ceased to wail. Marjorie became white-lipped and heavy-eyed from want of sleep, and it seemed to Trafford that perhaps his child might die. It seemed to him that the spirit of the universe must be a monstrous calivan since children had to die. He went for a long walk through the October beechwoods, under a windy sky, and in a drift of falling leaves, wondering with a renewed freshness at the haunting futilities of life…. Life was not futile—anything but that, but futility seemed to be stalking it, waiting for it…. When he returned the child was already better, and in a few days it was well again—but very light and thin.
When they were sure of its safety, Marjorie and he confessed the extremity of their fears to one another. They had not dared to speak before, and even now they spoke in undertones of the shadow that had hovered and passed over the dearest thing in their lives.
* * *
CHAPTER THE THIRD
The New Phase
§ 1
In the course of the next six months the child of the ages became an almost ordinary healthy baby, and Trafford began to think consecutively about his scientific work again—in the intervals of effort of a more immediately practical sort.
The recall of molecular physics and particularly of the internal condition of colloids to something like their old importance in his life was greatly accelerated by the fact that a young Oxford don named Behrens was showing extraordinary energy in what had been for a time Trafford’s distinctive and undisputed field. Behrens was one of those vividly clever energetic people who are the despair of originative men. He had begun as Trafford’s pupil and sedulous ape; he had gone on to work that imitated Trafford’s in everything except its continual freshness, and now he was ransacking every scrap of suggestion to be found in Trafford’s work, and developing it with an intensity of uninspired intelligence that most marvellously simulated originality. He was already being noted as an authority; sometimes in an article his name would be quoted and Trafford’s omitted in relation to Trafford’s ideas, and in every way his emergence and the manner of his emergence threatened and stimulated his model and master. A great effort had to be made. Trafford revived the drooping spirits of Durgan by a renewed punctuality in the laboratory. He began to stay away from home at night and work late again, now, however, under no imperative inspiration, but simply because it was only by such an invasion of the evening and night that it would be possible to make headway against Behren’s unremitting industry. And this new demand upon Trafford’s already strained mental and nervous equipment began very speedily to have its effect upon his domestic life.
It is only in romantic fiction that a man can work strenuously to the limit of his power and come home to be sweet, sunny and entertaining. Trafford’s preoccupation involved a certain negligence of Marjorie, a certain indisposition to be amused or interested by trifling things, a certain irritability….
§ 2
And now, indeed, the Traffords were coming to the most difficult and fatal phase in marriage. They had had that taste of defiant adventure which is the crown of a spirited love affair, they had known the sweetness of a maiden passion for a maid, and they had felt all those rich and solemn emotions, those splendid fears and terrible hopes that weave themselves about the great partnership in parentage. And now, so far as sex was concerned, there might be much joy and delight still, but no more wonder, no fresh discoveries of incredible new worlds and unsuspected stars. Love, which had been a new garden, an unknown land, a sunlit sea to launch upon, was now a rich treasure-house of memories. And memories, although they afford a perpetually increasing enrichment to emotion, are not sufficient in themselves for the daily needs of life.
For this, indeed, is the truth of passionate love, that it works outs its purpose and comes to an end. A day arrives in every marriage when the lovers must face each other, disillusioned, stripped of the last shred of excitement—undisguisedly themselves. And our two were married; they had bound themselves together under a penalty of scandalous disgrace, to take the life-long consequences of their passionate association.
It was upon Trafford that this exhaustion of the sustaining magic of love pressed most severely, because it was he who had made the greatest adaptations to the exigencies of their union. He had crippled, he perceived more and more clearly, the research work upon which his whole being had once been set, and his hours were full of tiresome and trivial duties and his mind engaged and worried by growing financial anxieties. He had made these abandonments in a phase of exalted passion for the one woman in the world and her unprecedented child, and now he saw, in spite of all his desire not to see, that she was just a weak human being among human beings, and neither she nor little Margharita so very marvellous.
But while Marjorie shrank to the dimensions of reality, research remained still a luminous and commanding dream. In love one fails or one wins home, but the lure of research is for ever beyond the hills, every victory is a new desire. Science has inexhaustibly fresh worlds to conquer….
He was beginning now to realize the dilemma of his life, the reality of the opposition between Marjorie and child and home on the one hand and on the other this big wider thing, this remoter, severer demand upon his being. He had long perceived these were distinct and different things, but now it appeared more and more inevitable that they should be antagonistic and mutually disregardful things. Each claimed him altogether, it seemed, and suffered compromise impatiently. And this is where the particular stress of his situation came in. Hitherto he had believed that nothing of any importance was secret or inexplicable between himself and Marjorie. His ideal of his relationship had assumed a complete sympathy of feeling, an almost instinctive identity of outlook. And now it was manifest they were living in a state of inadequate understanding, that she knew only in the most general and opaque forms, the things that interested him so profoundly, and had but the most superficial interest in his impassioned curiosities. And missing as she did the strength of his intellectual purpose she missed too, she had no inkling of, the way in which her careless expansiveness pressed upon him. She was unaware that she was destroying an essential thing in his life.
He could not tell how far this antagonism was due to inalterable discords of character, how far it might not be an ineradicable sex difference, a necessary aspect of marriage. The talk of old Sir Roderick Dover at the Winton Club germinated in his mind, a branching and permeating suggestion. And then would come a phase of keen sympathy with Marjorie; she would say brilliant and penetrating things, display a swift cleverness that drove all these intimations of incurable divergence clean out of his head again. Then he would find explanations in the differences between his and Marjorie’s training and early associations. He perceived his own upbringing had had a steadfastness and consistency that had been altogether lacking in hers. He had had the rare advantage of perfect honesty in the teaching and tradition of his home. There had never been any shams or sentimentalities for him to find out and abandon. From boyhood his mother’s hand had pointed steadily to the search for truth as the supreme ennobling fact in life. She had never preached this to him, never delivered discourses upon his father’s virtues, but all her conversation and life was saturated with this idea. Compared with this atmosphere of high and sustained direction, the intellectual and moral quality of the Popes, he saw, was the quality of an agitated rag bag. They had thought nothing out, joined nothing together, they seemed to believe everything and nothing, they were neither religious nor irreligious, neither moral nor adventurous. In the place of a religion, and tainting their entire atmosphere, they had the decaying remains of a dead Anglicanism; it was clear they did not believe in its creed, and as clear that they did not want to get rid of it; it afforded them no guidance, but only vague pretensions, and the dismal exercises of Silas Root flourished in its shadows, a fungus, a post-mortem activity of the soul. None of them had any idea of what they were for or what their lives as a whole might mean; they had no standards, but only instincts and an instinctive fear of instincts; Pope wanted to be tremendously respected and complimented by everybody and get six per cent. for his money; Mrs. Pope wanted things to go smoothly; the young people had a general indisposition to do anything that might “look bad,” and otherwise “have a good time.” But neither Marjorie nor any of them had any test for a good time, and so they fluctuated in their conceptions of what they wanted from day to day. Now it was Plessingtonian standards, now Carmel standards, now the standards of Agatha Alimony; now it was a stimulating novel, now a gleam of æsthetic imaginativeness come, Heaven knows whence, that dominated her mood. He was beginning to understand all this at last, and to see the need of coherence in Marjorie’s mood.
Marjorie kept well throughout March and April, and then suddenly she grew unutterably weary and uncomfortable in London. The end of April came hot and close and dry—it might have been July for the heat—the scrap of garden wilted, and the streets were irritating with fine dust and blown scraps of paper and drifting straws. She could think of nothing but the shade of trees, and cornfields under sunlight and the shadows of passing clouds. So Trafford took out an old bicycle and wandered over the home counties for three days, and at last hit upon a little country cottage near Great Missenden, a cottage a couple of girl artists had furnished and now wanted to let. It had a long, untidy vegetable garden and a small orchard and drying-ground, with an old, superannuated humbug of a pear-tree near the centre surrounded by a green seat, and high hedges with the promise of honeysuckle and dog-roses, and gaps that opened into hospitable beechwoods—woods not so thick but that there were glades of bluebells, bracken and, to be exact, in places embattled stinging-nettles. He took it and engaged a minute, active, interested, philoprogenitive servant girl for it, and took Marjorie thither in a taxi-cab. She went out, wrapped in a shawl, and sat under the pear-tree and cried quietly with weakness and sentiment and the tenderness of afternoon sunshine, and forthwith began to pick up wonderfully, and was presently writing to Trafford to buy her a dog to go for walks with, while he was away in London.
Trafford was still struggling along with his research in spite of a constant gravitation to the cottage and Marjorie’s side, but he was also doing his best to grapple with the difficulties of his financial situation. His science notes, which were very uncongenial and difficult to do, and his lecturing, still left his income far behind his expenditure, and the problem of minimising the inevitable fresh inroads on his capital was insistent and distracting. He discovered that he could manage his notes more easily and write a more popular article if he dictated to a typist instead of writing out the stuff in his own manuscript. Dictating made his sentences more copious and open, and the effect of the young lady’s by no means acquiescent back was to make him far more explicit than he tended to be pen in hand. With a pen and alone he felt the boredom of the job unendurably, and, to be through with it, became more and more terse, allusive, and compactly technical, after the style of his original papers. One or two articles by him were accepted and published by the monthly magazines, but as he took what the editors sent him, he did not find this led to any excessive opulence….
But his heart was very much with Marjorie through all this time. Hitherto he had taken her health and vigour and companionship for granted, and it changed his attitudes profoundly to find her now an ailing thing, making an invincible appeal for restraint and consideration and help. She changed marvellously, she gained a new dignity, and her complexion took upon itself a fresh, soft beauty. He would spend three or four days out of a week at the cottage, and long hours of that would be at her side, paper and notes of some forthcoming lecture at hand neglected, talking to her consolingly and dreamingly. His thoughts were full of ideas about education; he was obsessed, as are most intelligent young parents of the modern type, by the enormous possibilities of human improvement that might be achieved—if only one could begin with a baby from the outset, on the best lines, with the best methods, training and preparing it—presumably for a cleaned and chastened world. Indeed he made all the usual discoveries of intelligent modern young parents very rapidly, fully and completely, and overlooked most of those practical difficulties that finally reduce them to human dimensions again in quite the normal fashion.
“I sit and muse sometimes when I ought to be computing,” he said. “Old Durgan watches me and grunts. But think, if we take reasonable care, watch its phases, stand ready with a kindergarten toy directly it stretches out its hand—think what we can make of it!”…
“We will make it the most wonderful child in the world,” said Marjorie. “Indeed! what else can it be?”
“Your eyes,” said Trafford, “and my hands.”
“A girl.”
“A boy.”
He kissed her white and passive wrist.
§ 7
The child was born a little before expectation at the cottage throughout a long summer’s night and day in early September. Its coming into the world was a long and painful struggle; the general practitioner who had seemed two days before a competent and worthy person enough, revealed himself as hesitating, old-fashioned, and ill-equipped. He had a lingering theological objection to the use of chloroform, and the nurse from London sulked under his directions and came and discussed his methods scornfully with Trafford. From sundown until daylight Trafford chafed in the little sitting-room and tried to sleep, and hovered listening at the foot of the narrow staircase to the room above. He lived through interminable hours of moaning and suspense….
The dawn and sunrise came with a quality of beautiful horror. For years afterwards that memory stood out among other memories as something peculiarly strange and dreadful. Day followed an interminable night and broke slowly. Things crept out of darkness, awoke as it were out of mysteries and reclothed themselves in unsubstantial shadows and faint-hued forms. All through that slow infiltration of the world with light and then with colour, the universe it seemed was moaning and endeavouring, and a weak and terrible struggle went on and kept on in that forbidden room whose windows opened upon the lightening world, dying to a sobbing silence, rising again to agonizing cries, fluctuating, a perpetual obstinate failure to achieve a tormenting end. He went out, and behold the sky was a wonder of pink flushed level clouds and golden hope, and nearly every star except the morning star had gone, the supine moon was pale and half-dissolved in blue, and the grass which had been grey and wet, was green again, and the bushes and trees were green. He returned and hovered in the passage, washed his face, listened outside the door for age-long moments, and then went out again to listen under the window….
He went to his room and shaved, sat for a long time thinking, and then suddenly knelt by his bed and prayed. He had never prayed before in all his life….
He returned to the garden, and there neglected and wet with dew was the camp chair Marjorie had sat on the evening before, the shawl she had been wearing, the novel she had been reading. He brought these things in as if they were precious treasures….
Light was pouring into the world again now. He noticed with an extreme particularity the detailed dewy delicacy of grass and twig, the silver edges to the leaves of briar and nettle, the soft clearness of the moss on bank and wall. He noted the woods with the first warmth of autumn tinting their green, the clear, calm sky, with just a wisp or so of purple cloud waning to a luminous pink on the brightening east, the exquisite freshness of the air. And still through the open window, incessant, unbearable, came this sound of Marjorie moaning, now dying away, now reviving, now weakening again….
Was she dying? Were they murdering her? It was incredible this torture could go on. Somehow it must end. Chiefly he wanted to go in and kill the doctor. But it would do no good to kill the doctor!
At last the nurse came out, looking a little scared, to ask him to cycle three miles away and borrow some special sort of needle that the fool of a doctor had forgotten. He went, outwardly meek, and returning was met by the little interested servant, very alert and excited and rather superior—for here was something no man can do—with the news that he had a beautiful little daughter, and that all was well with Marjorie.
He said “Thank God, thank God!” several times, and then went out into the kitchen and began to eat some flabby toast and drink some lukewarm tea he found there. He was horribly fatigued. “Is she all right?” he asked over his shoulder, hearing the doctor’s footsteps on the stairs….
They were very pontifical and official with him.
Presently they brought out a strange, wizened little animal, wailing very stoutly, with a face like a very, very old woman, and reddish skin and hair—it had quite a lot of wet blackish hair of an incredible delicacy of texture. It kicked with a stumpy monkey’s legs and inturned feet. He held it: his heart went out to it. He pitied it beyond measure, it was so weak and ugly. He was astonished and distressed by the fact of its extreme endearing ugliness. He had expected something strikingly pretty. It clenched a fist, and he perceived it had all its complement of fingers and ridiculous, pretentious little finger nails. Inside that fist it squeezed his heart…. He did not want to give it back to them. He wanted to protect it. He felt they could not understand it or forgive, as he could forgive, its unjustifiable feebleness….
Later, for just a little while, he was permitted to see Marjorie—Marjorie so spent, so unspeakably weary, and yet so reassuringly vital and living, so full of gentle pride and gentler courage amidst the litter of surgical precaution, that the tears came streaming down his face and he sobbed shamelessly as he kissed her. “Little daughter,” she whispered and smiled—just as she had always smiled—that sweet, dear smile of hers!—and closed her eyes and said no more….
Afterwards as he walked up and down the garden he remembered their former dispute and thought how characteristic of Marjorie it was to have a daughter in spite of all his wishes.
§ 8
For weeks and weeks this astonishing and unprecedented being filled the Traffords’ earth and sky. Very speedily its minute quaintness passed, and it became a vigorous delightful baby that was, as the nurse explained repeatedly and very explicitly, not only quite exceptional and distinguished, but exactly everything that a baby should be. Its weight became of supreme importance; there was a splendid week when it put on nine ounces, and an indifferent one when it added only one. And then came a terrible crisis. It was ill; some sort of infection had reached it, an infantile cholera. Its temperature mounted to a hundred and three and a half. It became a flushed misery, wailing with a pathetic feeble voice. Then it ceased to wail. Marjorie became white-lipped and heavy-eyed from want of sleep, and it seemed to Trafford that perhaps his child might die. It seemed to him that the spirit of the universe must be a monstrous calivan since children had to die. He went for a long walk through the October beechwoods, under a windy sky, and in a drift of falling leaves, wondering with a renewed freshness at the haunting futilities of life…. Life was not futile—anything but that, but futility seemed to be stalking it, waiting for it…. When he returned the child was already better, and in a few days it was well again—but very light and thin.
When they were sure of its safety, Marjorie and he confessed the extremity of their fears to one another. They had not dared to speak before, and even now they spoke in undertones of the shadow that had hovered and passed over the dearest thing in their lives.
* * *
CHAPTER THE THIRD
The New Phase
§ 1
In the course of the next six months the child of the ages became an almost ordinary healthy baby, and Trafford began to think consecutively about his scientific work again—in the intervals of effort of a more immediately practical sort.
The recall of molecular physics and particularly of the internal condition of colloids to something like their old importance in his life was greatly accelerated by the fact that a young Oxford don named Behrens was showing extraordinary energy in what had been for a time Trafford’s distinctive and undisputed field. Behrens was one of those vividly clever energetic people who are the despair of originative men. He had begun as Trafford’s pupil and sedulous ape; he had gone on to work that imitated Trafford’s in everything except its continual freshness, and now he was ransacking every scrap of suggestion to be found in Trafford’s work, and developing it with an intensity of uninspired intelligence that most marvellously simulated originality. He was already being noted as an authority; sometimes in an article his name would be quoted and Trafford’s omitted in relation to Trafford’s ideas, and in every way his emergence and the manner of his emergence threatened and stimulated his model and master. A great effort had to be made. Trafford revived the drooping spirits of Durgan by a renewed punctuality in the laboratory. He began to stay away from home at night and work late again, now, however, under no imperative inspiration, but simply because it was only by such an invasion of the evening and night that it would be possible to make headway against Behren’s unremitting industry. And this new demand upon Trafford’s already strained mental and nervous equipment began very speedily to have its effect upon his domestic life.
It is only in romantic fiction that a man can work strenuously to the limit of his power and come home to be sweet, sunny and entertaining. Trafford’s preoccupation involved a certain negligence of Marjorie, a certain indisposition to be amused or interested by trifling things, a certain irritability….
§ 2
And now, indeed, the Traffords were coming to the most difficult and fatal phase in marriage. They had had that taste of defiant adventure which is the crown of a spirited love affair, they had known the sweetness of a maiden passion for a maid, and they had felt all those rich and solemn emotions, those splendid fears and terrible hopes that weave themselves about the great partnership in parentage. And now, so far as sex was concerned, there might be much joy and delight still, but no more wonder, no fresh discoveries of incredible new worlds and unsuspected stars. Love, which had been a new garden, an unknown land, a sunlit sea to launch upon, was now a rich treasure-house of memories. And memories, although they afford a perpetually increasing enrichment to emotion, are not sufficient in themselves for the daily needs of life.
For this, indeed, is the truth of passionate love, that it works outs its purpose and comes to an end. A day arrives in every marriage when the lovers must face each other, disillusioned, stripped of the last shred of excitement—undisguisedly themselves. And our two were married; they had bound themselves together under a penalty of scandalous disgrace, to take the life-long consequences of their passionate association.
It was upon Trafford that this exhaustion of the sustaining magic of love pressed most severely, because it was he who had made the greatest adaptations to the exigencies of their union. He had crippled, he perceived more and more clearly, the research work upon which his whole being had once been set, and his hours were full of tiresome and trivial duties and his mind engaged and worried by growing financial anxieties. He had made these abandonments in a phase of exalted passion for the one woman in the world and her unprecedented child, and now he saw, in spite of all his desire not to see, that she was just a weak human being among human beings, and neither she nor little Margharita so very marvellous.
But while Marjorie shrank to the dimensions of reality, research remained still a luminous and commanding dream. In love one fails or one wins home, but the lure of research is for ever beyond the hills, every victory is a new desire. Science has inexhaustibly fresh worlds to conquer….
He was beginning now to realize the dilemma of his life, the reality of the opposition between Marjorie and child and home on the one hand and on the other this big wider thing, this remoter, severer demand upon his being. He had long perceived these were distinct and different things, but now it appeared more and more inevitable that they should be antagonistic and mutually disregardful things. Each claimed him altogether, it seemed, and suffered compromise impatiently. And this is where the particular stress of his situation came in. Hitherto he had believed that nothing of any importance was secret or inexplicable between himself and Marjorie. His ideal of his relationship had assumed a complete sympathy of feeling, an almost instinctive identity of outlook. And now it was manifest they were living in a state of inadequate understanding, that she knew only in the most general and opaque forms, the things that interested him so profoundly, and had but the most superficial interest in his impassioned curiosities. And missing as she did the strength of his intellectual purpose she missed too, she had no inkling of, the way in which her careless expansiveness pressed upon him. She was unaware that she was destroying an essential thing in his life.
He could not tell how far this antagonism was due to inalterable discords of character, how far it might not be an ineradicable sex difference, a necessary aspect of marriage. The talk of old Sir Roderick Dover at the Winton Club germinated in his mind, a branching and permeating suggestion. And then would come a phase of keen sympathy with Marjorie; she would say brilliant and penetrating things, display a swift cleverness that drove all these intimations of incurable divergence clean out of his head again. Then he would find explanations in the differences between his and Marjorie’s training and early associations. He perceived his own upbringing had had a steadfastness and consistency that had been altogether lacking in hers. He had had the rare advantage of perfect honesty in the teaching and tradition of his home. There had never been any shams or sentimentalities for him to find out and abandon. From boyhood his mother’s hand had pointed steadily to the search for truth as the supreme ennobling fact in life. She had never preached this to him, never delivered discourses upon his father’s virtues, but all her conversation and life was saturated with this idea. Compared with this atmosphere of high and sustained direction, the intellectual and moral quality of the Popes, he saw, was the quality of an agitated rag bag. They had thought nothing out, joined nothing together, they seemed to believe everything and nothing, they were neither religious nor irreligious, neither moral nor adventurous. In the place of a religion, and tainting their entire atmosphere, they had the decaying remains of a dead Anglicanism; it was clear they did not believe in its creed, and as clear that they did not want to get rid of it; it afforded them no guidance, but only vague pretensions, and the dismal exercises of Silas Root flourished in its shadows, a fungus, a post-mortem activity of the soul. None of them had any idea of what they were for or what their lives as a whole might mean; they had no standards, but only instincts and an instinctive fear of instincts; Pope wanted to be tremendously respected and complimented by everybody and get six per cent. for his money; Mrs. Pope wanted things to go smoothly; the young people had a general indisposition to do anything that might “look bad,” and otherwise “have a good time.” But neither Marjorie nor any of them had any test for a good time, and so they fluctuated in their conceptions of what they wanted from day to day. Now it was Plessingtonian standards, now Carmel standards, now the standards of Agatha Alimony; now it was a stimulating novel, now a gleam of æsthetic imaginativeness come, Heaven knows whence, that dominated her mood. He was beginning to understand all this at last, and to see the need of coherence in Marjorie’s mood.
