Which Way?, page 9
“You’re cold, Hugo?”
“No. Are you?”
“Not very.”
“I love you, Claudia. Do you mind?”
“N-no.”
“Are you fond of me at all? You are a little fond of me, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Please, please marry me, Claudia. Will you marry me, darling?”
“Yes, if you want.”
Her voice was almost a whisper, a very little voice, but hardly hesitant. She must give him what he asked, he was so dear a friend. She leant against him in his arms and they stood linked in their first kiss, her scarlet jacket showing up in the yellow moon, plain for any passer by to see. He held her close after they had kissed, and she stared over his shoulder, wonderingly up the dark field to the thin crescent and the stars, trying a little desperately to realise that she was engaged and belonged in a new mysterious way to Hugo. Now he wanted to kiss her again, but she didn’t much mind, and it was nice when he was stroking her hair.
“Darling, darling sweetheart,” he said. “I can’t believe it, it’s so wonderful. I’m so happy I want to write something gigantic and make you proud of me. You’re so beautiful.”
“I am proud of you, darling. I hope I will make you happy. You’re so good.”
“Beloved, I’m almost too happy. Are you happy? Are you?”
“Ever so happy, sweet. But I feel shy.”
“Do you love me a little? I love you so much, please say you love me.”
“I love you,” said Claudia gently, staring away at the moon.
2
For, thogh that wyves been ful holy thinges,
They moste take in pacience at night
Swich maner necessaries as been plesinges
To folk that hav y-wedded them with rings,
And leye a lyte hir holinesse asyde
As for the tyme; it may no bet betyde.
The Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer.
It was great fun talking about the engagement. Claudia had endless lovely girlish chats with her mother and Eileen. Everyone was pleased about it. Even Mr. and Mrs. Lester, having decided to make the best of her, discovered that she had some serious tastes and was certainly nice mannered and attentive. She would let their son lead his own life, they felt, and on her next visit to Gloucestershire they got quite fond of her pretty presence and her gaiety. Mr. Lester was even found to respond to mild teasing.
The engagement was as happy as such an exhaustingly busy period can be. Mr. and Mrs. Heseltine were pleasantly, easily sympathetic; Eileen and Hugo were becoming fast and intimate friends; Hugo was radiantly in love; and Claudia had no ghastly tremors and doubts. He was so gentle with her and yet so happy and assured; she loved his endless flow of high spirits and talk, and thought him the sweetest, most companionable person in the world. The evening before her wedding she found that her mother contemplated telling her various things of vaguely sinister import. But she was tired and nervy and wanted to go quickly to bed, to forget everything in dreamless sleep, to be fresh and looking her best in the morning. Besides it was all inevitable now; and anyway marriage was the usual lot of woman. So she stopped her mother by pretending that she knew everything already.
Claudia and Hugo had a fashionable London wedding. She wore a long, slim dress of white panne velvet with a sheath of white lilac and a light, frothy lace train. The bridesmaids wore a deep, warm tone of rose, and held before them bunches of shaded tulips. As Claudia and Hugo signed the register the voices of boys sang crystal clear and void of all emotion, “Love one another with a pure heart, fervently: see that ye love one another.” Eileen smiled at Tommy and thought that those were indeed the two requisites of love. “With a pure heart, fervently.” Not one without the other. Not either, but both. “See that ye love one an-oth-er. See that ye love one anoth-er.”
Claudia cried a good deal on her honeymoon. Hugo was very understanding and forbearing and kind. They had many tastes in common, and she did manage to enjoy a certain amount of the thing. Even honeymoons have their lovely interludes, and improve with time and patience as they proceed.
3
Délie elle-même à son tour
S’en va dans la nuit éternelle,
En oubliant qu’elle fut belle,
Et qu’elle a vécu pour l’amour.
Voltaire.
Literature of course is not the ideal trade for a husband. Instead of pushing him off to the office from half-past nine till six, the wife has him about the house all day. And his work does not end at six. He may want to write till bedtime and even after. His work made Hugo exceedingly inhospitable. Sometimes he felt sociable and liked to go out (though not of course to dances) and see friends, but he generally hated them to be asked to the house because of the erratic movements of his inspiration—with the exception, that is, of occasional editors and literary men. If he were the visitor he could leave when the spirit moved; he could not kick other visitors out when he wished.
“But darling, if I have them in a different room you needn’t see them,”
“Yes, but you know that always makes me want to see them!”
Claudia was quite good and cheerful about all this. After all, she had known beforehand that her young man was an author and had married him just the same! Her parents’ flat was generally at her disposal; they were seldom there and she had a latchkey still. She joined two clubs, a comfortable, commodious day one and an uncomfortable, crowded day and night one, and did much entertaining at these. She was given to hospitality; but she was not unduly extravagant, and in spite of a taste for gaiety and clothes she made money go a long way. She never accepted anything for the two of them without consulting his wishes first. Occasionally she went dancing without him, that he might not think he must either come or else deny her a pleasure (and also because she wanted to). But she deserted him so seldom that he could not feel she had a side of her life apart from him.
Claudia and Hugo were exceedingly confidential and interested in each other’s doings. The most trivial episodes provided thrilling matter to discuss. If sometimes the poor girl was completely widowed by his passion for work, she was thrilled by the results of the work after, and there were times when he slackened off his feverish activity and they dashed to the country, or wandered round London shops, or made sight-seeing expeditions, or had brief, radiant honeymoons abroad, very, very much happier than the first one. Hugo was sweet about being interested even in Claudia’s most domestic thrills, such as the housemaid’s fine, upstanding young man and the kitchen maid’s prize at the parish hall fancy dress dance. And much as he abhorred the entire Carstairs set, he was fond of Rosemary Crane and Co., and simply bosom friends with Eileen and Tommy.
Marriage, Claudia decided, was an exceedingly pleasant state. Your work was clear before you, your problems were settled, your life was full, your husband was a friend of the closest intimacy and, if you were lucky, as nice to run about and do things with as a girl. You had an infinity of private jokes, so that it was fun to meet again even after two or three hours’ absence.
Hugo, apart from abstraction and moroseness occasioned by his absorbing work, was completely radiant. It is sad to think of that ambitious stylist being involved in such a conversation as:
“Is the small thing a tired, sleepy one then? Did it think its little boy loved his pens and papers best?”
“Yes, howwid old pens and papers. Little boy thwow them away and come bye bye to please his Teddy bear.”
Perhaps these things should not have been written down in cold blood. After all, they were but occasional.
By the end of three years there was only one slight anxiety: the continued nonappearance of the baby desired by both.
Hugo seemed to get no older during those three years. His boyishness was very nice in some ways, but as Claudia acquired increased confidence, beauty, poise, he did not move to match. He had greater common sense over theories; far more clear, decisive views; but in everyday life she was much the more competent, and more than her fair share, particularly over money matters, was left to her judgment. Occasionally he would dig his toes in, as when he chose Kensington and rejected Mayfair. But it was idle to appeal to him about gas, electricity, precedence at dinner, first mortgages, insurance, the motor-car, or wine.
Claudia could not always forecast her husband’s reactions. Towards the end of their first year of marriage she heard of the sudden death in the street of an old flowerwoman she had sometimes dealt with. She perfectly remembered the old hag with her husky voice and breath that smelt of whisky. And now the papers had discovered on her death that she had once been Lou Delane, a queen of the music-hall stage, beloved in London, Paris and New York. It seemed very pitiful to Claudia to think of her ravaged beauty and her lost lovers and the rings that had gone to the pawnbroker long ago. And she hastened home to Hugo, wanting to hear him recite her lovely poems about death.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and
Fear no more the heat of the sun
And the furious winter’s rages,
and coming to more modern times:
Crimson and black on the sky, a waggon of clover
Slowly goes rumbling, over the white chalk road;
And I lie in the golden grass there, wondering why
So little a thing
As the jingle and ring of the harness,
The hot creak of leather,
The peace of the plodding,
Should suddenly, stabbingly make it
Dreadful to die.
Or perhaps
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing—a mile away by now it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow—
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
When she presented her case to Hugo he pointed out that all her sorrow and sympathy was entirely based on the fact that the deceased had not been an honest, decent working woman at all, but a tart. In this, apparently, lay the great pathos of the situation.
But Hugo could be very, very sympathetic. He was adorable about an illness of Eileen’s the year after, and even one of the kitchen cat’s the year after that.
4
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they have so much more to talk about.
The Children, Edith Wharton.
Claudia’s attention was apt to wander when Hugo held forth on politics over breakfast. But he was always very firm with her about it.
“Have you no patriotism, Claudia? One would think you didn’t care about your country at all.”
“But I’m a mass of patriotism. I’m all for the King, God bless him and my country, right or wrong. And I wish there were something like taking off their hats for women to do for the colours. And nothing on earth excites me like a military band. I never hear its rhythm and clash without a great surge of public school emotions. I want, if it could be done painlessly and without inconvenience, to die for a cause. Almost any cause!”
“Really!” cried Hugo with unutterable contempt. “Vamped up emotions like that aren’t real at all. Pass the butter.”
“They’re as real as anything else,” she maintained placidly. “Here’s the butter. After all, there all those emotions are, sleeping in almost everyone, ready to flare into life for a military band. Just as surely as some cinemas or plays work you up to think of love; as certain types of music make you think restlessly of the faun following the nymph that flees in panic and yet wants to be caught. Sacrifice and selflessness and similar slop are just as existent, as real, as desire and all the things that nowadays are regarded as particularly solid facts.”
“Oh yes. And they’re so useful if they fade with the music, cut off by the space widening between you and the band.”
“What do you want me to do, my sweet? Speak in Hyde Park? But seriously and leaving me out of it, is there much now that one man could do to help? Could another Pitt, for instance, do much to change things alone by his own powers? Short of a Pitt, what can one individual do?”
“I wonder. I believe one man who had real conviction and eloquence could do a tremendous amount by speaking all over the country, starting a movement, rousing people, inspiring them, waking them up. Oh, I would like to be that man! As it is, I don’t suppose this will make any difference to a soul, but I’ve got a tremendous lot I want to say in my novels. Serious stuff I mean. Well, you’ve seen précis of ideas tabloided in the famous note-book! Darling, do you think my tripe will suffer if I start writing it with a purpose? It ought really to be all art for art’s sake, oughtn’t it?”
Claudia took a second roll thoughtfully. “I don’t think I quite see the difference,” she said. “Art’s got to say something, hasn’t it? And if humanity or your country is a passion with you and stuff about it will come out, why should it be less the genuine inspiration of your creative whatnot than if you wrote about decadence, or disillusion, or God, or love, or peasants in Siberia?”
“Oh, but proselytising stuff? Always bad, don’t you think? At least it’s dangerous. You wrest everything round to your moral with elaborate machinery and the story becomes contrived instead of being inevitable.”
“Not if you keep a stern eye on your artistic conscience. ‘How shall they hear without a preacher?’ Preach, my sweet. Dash it, your books are read.”
Hugo laughed. “So far, Beautiful. But will they be when I get into my nice new pulpit?”
“New?” crooned Claudia, “My darling love, the world is your pulpit.”
“A high-minded fellow of Kensington,” Hugo began, “took up a most moral and cleansing tone. How does it go on?”
She suggested:
“His wife said, ‘It don’t hurt
To make pies in the dirt,’
So he …
Bother! I wanted to bring benzine into the rhyme because you could clean someone with it, but it won’t do.”
“Or do you think she said:
‘It don’t hurt
To sling muck with a squirt’?”
wondered Hugo. “Anyhow, I’m afraid it can’t be finished. At least not unless we weakly bring Kensington back into the last line. In which case he could bury or scrub her according to preference. Not very good, I’m afraid.”
“Returning to the country,” said Claudia, “I’m always sick with terror about some future war. And what I’m wondering is whether all that cant about its being harder for those left agonising behind, and they also serve who only stand and wait, has anything in it. Wouldn’t women be compensated then for being under-dogs in the world, unimportant, inferior animals? Wouldn’t they be lucky, lucky, lucky, to stay behind and escape the mud and the cold and the mud and the lice and the endless noise and the mud and danger and horror and death and pain and mud? Would I really give my soul to go too and face it all in action and drink of the cup you drank of? Or would I, if I were honest with myself, be thankful for once, at last, that I hadn’t been born a man?”
But he ignored the main issue. He said mockingly, lovingly, “Inferior animal, do you really want to be a man?”
There was a silence. She busied herself with coffee.
“What are you smiling at, Claudia?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“A penny for your thoughts.”
“All right. As long as you pay up. I was thinking, oh, that it used to be rather fun with Harry and Clive, and how much more fun it would have been if I’d been as old as I am now.”
“In fact what fun you could have now with another Harry or Clive?”
“Not to laugh at me,” said Claudia with dignity, and he held out his hand for hers and gave it a squeeze.
5
(Inscription pour une statue de l’Amour)
Qui que tu sois, voici ton maître;
Il l’est, le fut, ou le doit être.
Voltaire.
Hugo allowed Claudia to accept the Carstairs’ dance for them both, because all her friends would be there, because even he would enjoy the cabaret, because she had bought a new frock; but on condition that they dined quietly at home. When the evening came, genius was burning luminously. They dined together unchanged, he because he had worked till the gong went, she because she thought it would be vaguely matier to dress afterwards too.
“I wish I weren’t still in such a good vein,” grumbled Hugo. “It’s tired me out already so that I’d like to go straight to bed. But I think I shall have to sit up for hours finishing the section.”
“Oh darling! What about the dance?”
“I know, darling. I’m awfully sorry. I hadn’t forgotten. But I really can’t cope.”
“But Hugo, you promised! I did want you to come to this and you never do.”
“But you must be reasonable. Even if my writing isn’t our bread and butter it’s certainly the jam and the jelly and the marmalade.”
“But just this one evening, Hugo.”
“What can I do, Beautiful? I can’t help the fit taking me to-night. You know I’d be a fish out of water. You wouldn’t really want me at it.”
“It’s only just to arrive with me and dance one dance with me in my new dress, and I promise if you’ll just keep me in countenance for the first plunge I’ll float off on my own and you shall return in peace.”
“But it isn’t worth it to dress just to take you to the thing. And I shall meet people I know who’ll expect me to dance with them. And I’m tired with this rush of words to the pen already, and it’s all going round and round in my mind incessantly. Really, darling, you can go alone.”
