H G Wells Omnibus, page 345
Our little general servant tapped at the door – Marion always liked the servant to tap – and appeared.
‘Tea, M’m,’ she said – and vanished, leaving the door open.
‘I will go upstairs,’ said I, and stopped. ‘I will go upstairs,’ I repeated, ‘and put my bag in the spare room.’
We remained motionless and silent for a few seconds.
‘Mother is having tea with us today,’ Marion remarked at last, and dropped the worried end of ball-fringe and stood up slowly….
And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations hanging over us, we presently had tea with the unsuspecting Mrs Ramboat and the spaniel. Mrs Ramboat was too well trained in her position to remark upon our sombre preoccupation. She kept a thin trickle of talk going, and told us, I remember, that Mr Ramboat was ‘troubled’ about his cannas.
‘They don’t come up and they won’t come up. He’s been round and had an explanation with the man who sold him the bulbs – and he’s very heated and upset.’
The spaniel was a great bore, begging and doing small tricks first at one and then at the other of us. Neither of us used his name. You see we had called him Miggles, and made a sort of trio in the baby-talk of Mutney and Miggles and Ming.
§8
Then presently we resumed our monstrous, momentous duologue. I can’t now make out how long that duologue went on. It spread itself, I know, in heavy fragments over either three days or four. I remember myself grouped with Marion, talking sitting on our bed in her room, talking standing in our dining-room, saying this thing or that. Twice we went for long walks. And we had a long evening alone together, with jaded nerves and hearts that fluctuated between a hard and dreary recognition of facts and, on my part at least, a strange unwonted tenderness. Because in some extraordinary way this crisis had destroyed our mutual apathy and made us feel one another again.
It was a duologue that had discrepant parts, that fell into lumps of talk that failed to join on to their predecessors, that began again at a different level, higher or lower, that assumed new aspects in the intervals and assimilated new considerations. We discussed the fact that we two were no longer lovers; never before had we faced that. It seems a strange thing to write, but, as I look back, I see clearly that those several days were the time when Marion and I were closest together, looked for the first and last time faithfully and steadfastly into each other’s soul. For those days only, there were no pretences, I made no concessions to her nor she to me; we concealed nothing, exaggerated nothing. We had done with pretending. We had it out plainly and soberly with each other. Mood followed mood and got its stark expression.
Of course there was quarrelling between us, bitter quarrelling, and we said things to one another – long pent-up things that bruised and crushed and cut. But over it all in my memory now is an effect of deliberate confrontation, and the figure of Marion stands up, pale, melancholy, tear-stained, injured, implacable and dignified.
‘You love her?’ she asked once, and jerked that doubt into my mind.
I struggled with tangled ideas and emotions. ‘I don’t know what love is. It’s all sorts of things – it’s made of a dozen strands twisted in a thousand ways.’
‘But you want her? You want her now – when you think of her?’
‘Yes,’ I reflected. ‘I want her – right enough.’
‘And me? Where do I come in?’
‘I suppose you come in here.’
‘Well, but what are you going to do?’
‘Do!’ I said with the exasperation of the situation growing upon me. ‘What do you want me to do?’
As I look back on all that time – across a gulf of fifteen active years – I find I see it with an understanding judgement. I see it as if it were the business of someone else – indeed of two other people – intimately known yet judged without passion. I see now that this shock, this sudden immense disillusionment, did in real fact bring out a mind and soul in Marion; that for the first time she emerged from habits, timidities, imitations, phrases and a certain narrow will-impulse, and became a personality.
Her ruling motive at first was, I think, an indignant and outraged pride. This situation must end. She asked me categorically to give up Effie, and I, full of fresh and glowing memories, absolutely refused.
‘It’s too late, Marion,’ I said. ‘It can’t be done like that.’
‘Then we can’t very well go on living together,’ she said. ‘Can we?’
‘Very well,’ I deliberated, ‘if you must have it so.’
‘Well, can we?’
‘Can you stay in this house? I mean – if I go away?’
‘I don’t know…. I don’t think I could.’
‘Then – what do you want?’
Slowly we worked our way from point to point, until at last the word ‘divorce’ was before us.
‘If we can’t live together we ought to be free,’ said Marion.
‘I don’t know anything of divorce,’ I said – ‘if you mean that. I don’t know how it is done. I shall have to ask somebody – or look it up…. Perhaps, after all, it is the thing to do. We may as well face it.’
We began to talk ourselves into a realization of what our divergent futures might be. I came back on the evening of that day with my questions answered by a solicitor.
‘We can’t as a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘get divorced as things are. Apparently, so far as the law goes you’ve got to stand this sort of thing. It’s silly – but that is the law. However, it’s easy to arrange a divorce. In addition to adultery there must be desertion or cruelty. To establish cruelty I should have to strike you, or something of that sort, before witnesses. That’s impossible – but it’s simple to desert you – legally. I have to go away from you; that’s all. I can go on sending you money – and you bring a suit, what is it? – for Restitution of Conjugal Rights. The Court orders me to return. I disobey. Then you can go on to divorce me. You get a Decree Nisi, 14 and once more the Court tries to make me come back. If we don’t make it up within six months and if you don’t behave scandalously – the Decree is made absolute. That’s the end of the fuss. That’s how one gets unmarried. It’s easier, you see, to marry than unmarry.’
‘And then – how do I live? What becomes of me?’
‘You’ll have an income. They call it alimony. From a third to a half of my present income – more if you like – I don’t mind – three hundred a year, say. You’ve got your old people to keep and you’ll need all that.’
‘And then – then you’ll be free?’
‘Both of us.’
‘And all this life you’ve hated—’
I looked up at her wrung and bitter face. ‘I haven’t hated it,’ I lied, my voice near breaking with the pain of it all. ‘Have you?’
§9
The perplexing thing about life is the irresoluble complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, we sounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh jangle of that shock. We were furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, callously selfish, generously self-sacrificing.
I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn’t hang together one with another, that contradicted one another, that were nevertheless all in their places profoundly true and sincere. I see them now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend the crumpled confusions of our complex moral landslip. Some I found irritating beyond measure. I answered her – sometimes quite abominably.
‘Of course,’ she would say again and again, ‘my life has been a failure.’
‘I’ve besieged you for three years,’ I would retort, ‘asking it not to be. You’ve done as you pleased. If I’ve turned away at last—’
Or again she would revive all the stresses before our marriage.
‘How you must hate me! I made you wait. Well, now – I suppose you have your revenge.’
‘Revenge!’ I echoed.
Then she would try over the aspects of our new separated lives.
‘I ought to earn my own living,’ she would insist. ‘I want to be quite independent. I’ve always hated London. Perhaps I shall try a poultry farm and bees. You won’t mind at first my being a burden. Afterwards —’
‘We’ve settled all that,’ I said.
‘I suppose you will hate me anyhow…’
There were times when she seemed to regard our separation with absolute complacency, when she would plan all sorts of freedoms and characteristic interests.
‘I shall go out a lot with Smithie,’ she said.
And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for, that I cannot even now quite forgive her.
‘Your aunt will rejoice at all this. She never cared for me…
Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie, full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the presence of the horrid villain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds. She had long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic close clingings. There were moments when only absolute speechlessness prevented her giving me a stupendous ‘talking to’ – I could see it in her eye. The wrong things she would have said! And I recall too, Mrs Ramboat’s slow awakening to something in the air, the growing expression of solicitude in her eye, only her well-trained fear of Marion keeping her from speech….
And at last through all this welter, like a thing fated and altogether beyond our control, parting came to Marion and me.
I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last it came to Marion that she was parting from me for ever. That overbore all other things, and turned our last hour to anguish. She forgot for a time the prospect of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride. For the first time in her life she really showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time perhaps they really came to her. She began to weep slow reluctant tears. I came into her room, and found her asprawl on the bed weeping.
‘I didn’t know,’ she cried. ‘Oh! I didn’t understand!
‘I’ve been a fool. All my life is a wreck!
‘I shall be alone!… Mutney! Mutney, don’t leave me! Oh! Mutney! I didn’t understand.’
I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in those last hours together that too late, the longed-for thing had happened and Marion had come alive. A new-born hunger for me lit her eyes.
‘Don’t leave me!’ she said, ‘don’t leave me!’ She clung to me; she kissed me with tear-salt lips….
I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against this impossible dawn. Yet it seems to me that it needed but a cry, but one word more to have united us again for all our lives. Could we have united again? Would that passage have enlightened us for ever, or should we have fallen back in a week or so into the old estrangement, the old temperamental opposition?
Of that there is now no telling. Our own resolve carried us on our predestined way. We behaved more and more like separating lovers, parting inexorably, but all the preparations we had set going worked on like a machine, and we made no attempt to stop them. My trunks and boxes went to the station. I packed my bag with Marion standing before me. We were like children who had hurt each other horribly in sheer stupidity, who didn’t know now how to remedy it. We belonged to each other immensely–immensely. The cab came to the little iron gate.
‘Good-bye!’ I said.
‘Good-bye.’
For a moment we embraced and kissed – incredibly without malice. We heard our servant in the passage going to open the door. For the last time we pressed ourselves to one another. We were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain. I tore myself from her.
‘Go away,’ I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed me down.
I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cabman.
I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it started jumped up, craned out and looked at the door.
It was wide open, but she had disappeared….
I wonder – I suppose she ran upstairs.
§10
So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie who was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform, a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk over the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense of relief when at last the stresses of separation were over, but now I found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the profoundest persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk and sombre Marion were so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to hold myself to my own plans, to remember that I must keep faith with Effie, with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no guarantees, but flung herself into my hands.
We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of deepening gold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always, very close, glancing up ever and again at my face.
Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no joyful reunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy. Extraordinarily she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time together did she say an adverse word of Marion….
She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me with the same instinctive skill that some women will show with the trouble of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and handmaid; she forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of it all Marion remained, stupid and tearful and infinitely distressful, so that I was almost intolerably unhappy for her – for her and the dead body of my married love.
It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into these remote parts, these rarely visited uplands and lonely tarns of memory, and it seems to me still a strange country. I had thought I might be going to some sensuous paradise with Effie, but desire which fills the universe before its satisfaction, vanishes utterly – like the going of daylight – with achievement. All the facts and forms of life remain darkling and cold. It was an upland of melancholy questionings, a region from which I saw all the world at new angles and in new aspects; I had outflanked passion and romance.
I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time in my life, at least so it seems to me now in this retrospect, I looked at my existence as a whole.
Since this was nothing, what was I doing? What was I for?
I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay – the business I had taken up to secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our ultimate separation – and snatching odd weekends and nights for Orpington, 15 and all the while I struggled with these obstinate interrogations. I used to fall into musing in the trains. I became even a little inaccurate and forgetful about business things. I have the clearest memory of myself sitting thoughtful in the evening sunlight on a grassy hillside that looked towards Sevenoaks and commanded a wide sweep of country, and that I was thinking out my destiny. I could almost write my thoughts down now, I believe, as they came to me that afternoon. Effie, restless little Cockney that she was, rustled and struggled in a hedgerow below, gathering flowers, discovering flowers she had never seen before. I had, I remember, a letter from Marion in my pocket. I had even made some tentatives for return, for a reconciliation; Heaven knows now how I had put it! but her cold, ill-written letter repelled me. I perceived I could never face that old inconclusive dullness of life again, that stagnant disappointment. That, anyhow, wasn’t possible. But what was possible? I could see no way of honour or fine living before me at all.
‘What am I to do with life?’ that was the question that besieged me.
I wondered if all the world was even as I, urged to this by one motive and to that by another, creatures of chance and impulse and unmeaning traditions. Had I indeed to abide by what I had said and done and chosen? Was there nothing for me in honour but to provide for Effie, go back penitent to Marion and keep to my trade in rubbish – or find some fresh one – and so work out the residue of my days? I didn’t accept that for a moment. But what else was I to do? I wondered if my case was the case of many men, whether in former ages men had been so guideless, so uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life. In the Middle Ages, in the old Catholic days, one went to a priest, and he said with all the finality of natural law, this you are and this you must do. I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I should have accepted that ruling without question….
I remember very distinctly how Effie came and sat beside me on a little box that was before the casement window of our room.
‘Gloomkins,’ said she.
I smiled and remained head on hand, looking out of the window forgetful of her.
‘Did you love your wife so well?’ she whispered softly.
‘Oh!’ I cried, recalled again; ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand these things. Life is a thing that hurts, my dear! It hurts without logic or reason. I’ve blundered! I didn’t understand. Anyhow – there is no need to go hurting you, is there?’
And I turned about and drew her to me, and kissed her ear…
Yes, I had a very bad time – I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I read restlessly and discursively. I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and things in it, had followed them self-forgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself grouped, with a system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do – and no desire, it seemed, left in me.
There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life appeared before me in bleak, relentless light, a series of ignorances, crude blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologians call a ‘conviction of sin’. I sought salvation – not perhaps in the formulae a Methodist preacher would recognize – but salvation nevertheless.
