New Grub Street (49 page)

He was trying to draw her nearer, but she kept at full arm's
length and looked irresponsive.

'Marian?'

She wished to answer, but a spirit of perversity held her
tongue.

'Marian, don't you love me? Or have I offended you by my way of
speaking?'

Persisting, she at length withdrew her hands. Jasper's face
expressed something like dismay.

'You have not offended me,' she said. 'But I am not sure that
you don't deceive yourself in thinking, for the moment, that I am
necessary to your happiness.'

The emotional current which had passed from her flesh to his
whilst their hands were linked, made him incapable of standing
aloof from her. He saw that her face and neck were warmer hued, and
her beauty became more desirable to him than ever yet.

'You are more to me than anything else in the compass of life!'
he exclaimed, again pressing forward. 'I think of nothing but
you—you yourself—my beautiful, gentle, thoughtful Marian!'

His arm captured her, and she did not resist. A sob, then a
strange little laugh, betrayed the passion that was at length
unfolded in her.

'You do love me, Marian?'

'I love you.'

And there followed the antiphony of ardour that finds its first
utterance—a subdued music, often interrupted, ever returning upon
the same rich note.

Marian closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the luxury of
the dream. It was her first complete escape from the world of
intellectual routine, her first taste of life. All the pedantry of
her daily toil slipped away like a cumbrous garment; she was clad
only in her womanhood. Once or twice a shudder of strange
self-consciousness went through her, and she felt guilty, immodest;
but upon that sensation followed a surge of passionate joy,
obliterating memory and forethought.

'How shall I see you?' Jasper asked at length. 'Where can we
meet?'

It was a difficulty. The season no longer allowed lingerings
under the open sky, but Marian could not go to his lodgings, and it
seemed impossible for him to visit her at her home.

'Will your father persist in unfriendliness to me?'

She was only just beginning to reflect on all that was involved
in this new relation.

'I have no hope that he will change,' she said sadly.

'He will refuse to countenance your marriage?'

'I shall disappoint him and grieve him bitterly. He has asked me
to use my money in starting a new review.'

'Which he is to edit?'

'Yes. Do you think there would be any hope of its success?'

Jasper shook his head.

'Your father is not the man for that, Marian. I don't say it
disrespectfully; I mean that he doesn't seem to me to have that
kind of aptitude. It would be a disastrous speculation.'

'I felt that. Of course I can't think of it now.'

She smiled, raising her face to his.

'Don't trouble,' said Jasper. 'Wait a little, till I have made
myself independent of Fadge and a few other men, and your father
shall see how heartily I wish to be of use to him. He will miss
your help, I'm afraid?'

'Yes. I shall feel it a cruelty when I have to leave him. He has
only just told me that his sight is beginning to fail. Oh, why
didn't his brother leave him a little money? It was such
unkindness! Surely he had a much better right than Amy, or than
myself either. But literature has been a curse to father all his
life. My uncle hated it, and I suppose that was why he left father
nothing.'

'But how am I to see you often? That's the first question. I
know what I shall do. I must take new lodgings, for the girls and
myself, all in the same house. We must have two sitting-rooms; then
you will come to my room without any difficulty. These astonishing
proprieties are so easily satisfied after all.'

'You will really do that?'

'Yes. I shall go and look for rooms to-morrow. Then when you
come you can always ask for Maud or Dora, you know. They will be
very glad of a change to more respectable quarters.'

'I won't stay to see them now, Jasper,' said Marian, her
thoughts turning to the girls.

'Very well. You are safe for another hour, but to make certain
you shall go at a quarter to five. Your mother won't be against
us?'

'Poor mother—no. But she won't dare to justify me before
father.'

'I feel as if I should play a mean part in leaving it to you to
tell your father. Marian, I will brave it out and go and see
him.'

'Oh, it would be better not to.'

'Then I will write to him—such a letter as he can't possibly
take in ill part.'

Marian pondered this proposal.

'You shall do that, Jasper, if you are willing. But not yet;
presently.'

'You don't wish him to know at once?'

'We had better wait a little. You know,' she added laughing,
'that my legacy is only in name mine as yet. The will hasn't been
proved. And then the money will have to be realised.'

She informed him of the details; Jasper listened with his eyes
on the ground.

They were now sitting on chairs drawn close to each other. It
was with a sense of relief that Jasper had passed from dithyrambs
to conversation on practical points; Marian's excited sensitiveness
could not but observe this, and she kept watching the motions of
his countenance. At length he even let go her hand.

'You would prefer,' he said reflectively, 'that nothing should
be said to your father until that business is finished?'

'If you consent to it.'

'Oh, I have no doubt it's as well.'

Her little phrase of self-subjection, and its tremulous tone,
called for another answer than this. Jasper fell again into
thought, and clearly it was thought of practical things.

'I think I must go now, Jasper,' she said.

'Must you? Well, if you had rather.'

He rose, though she was still seated. Marian moved a few steps
away, but turned and approached him again.

'Do you really love me?' she asked, taking one of his hands and
folding it between her own.

'I do indeed love you, Marian. Are you still doubtful?'

'You're not sorry that I must go?'

'But I am, dearest. I wish we could sit here undisturbed all
through the evening.'

Her touch had the same effect as before. His blood warmed again,
and he pressed her to his side, stroking her hair and kissing her
forehead.

'Are you sorry I wear my hair short?' she asked, longing for
more praise than he had bestowed on her.

'Sorry? It is perfect. Everything else seems vulgar compared
with this way of yours. How strange you would look with plaits and
that kind of thing!'

'I am so glad it pleases you.'

'There is nothing in you that doesn't please me, my thoughtful
girl.'

'You called me that before. Do I seem so very thoughtful?'

'So grave, and sweetly reserved, and with eyes so full of
meaning.'

She quivered with delight, her face hidden against his
breast.

'I seem to be new-born, Jasper. Everything in the world is new
to me, and I am strange to myself. I have never known an hour of
happiness till now, and I can't believe yet that it has come to
me.'

She at length attired herself, and they left the house together,
of course not unobserved by the landlady. Jasper walked about half
the way to St Paul's Crescent. It was arranged that he should
address a letter for her to the care of his sisters; but in a day
or two the change of lodgings would be effected.

When they had parted, Marian looked back. But Jasper was walking
quickly away, his head bent, in profound meditation.

Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity
and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In
certain natures the extreme of self-pity is intolerable, and leads
to self-destruction; but there are less fortunate beings whom the
vehemence of their revolt against fate strengthens to endure in
suffering. These latter are rather imaginative than passionate; the
stages of their woe impress them as the acts of a drama, which they
cannot bring themselves to cut short, so various are the
possibilities of its dark motive. The intellectual man who kills
himself is most often brought to that decision by conviction of his
insignificance; self-pity merges in self-scorn, and the humiliated
soul is intolerant of existence. He who survives under like
conditions does so because misery magnifies him in his own
estimate.

It was by force of commiserating his own lot that Edwin Reardon
continued to live through the first month after his parting from
Amy. Once or twice a week, sometimes early in the evening,
sometimes at midnight or later, he haunted the street at Westbourne
Park where his wife was dwelling, and on each occasion he returned
to his garret with a fortified sense of the injustice to which he
was submitted, of revolt against the circumstances which had driven
him into outer darkness, of bitterness against his wife for saving
her own comfort rather than share his downfall. At times he was not
far from that state of sheer distraction which Mrs Edmund Yule
preferred to suppose that he had reached. An extraordinary
arrogance now and then possessed him; he stood amid his poor
surroundings with the sensations of an outraged exile, and laughed
aloud in furious contempt of all who censured or pitied him.

On hearing from Jasper Milvain that Amy had fallen ill, or at
all events was suffering in health from what she had gone through,
he felt a momentary pang which all but determined him to hasten to
her side. The reaction was a feeling of distinct pleasure that she
had her share of pain, and even a hope that her illness might
become grave; he pictured himself summoned to her sick chamber,
imagined her begging his forgiveness. But it was not merely, nor in
great part, a malicious satisfaction; he succeeded in believing
that Amy suffered because she still had a remnant of love for him.
As the days went by and he heard nothing, disappointment and
resentment occupied him. At length he ceased to haunt the
neighbourhood. His desires grew sullen; he became fixed in the
resolve to hold entirely apart and doggedly await the issue.

At the end of each month he sent half the money he had received
from Carter, simply enclosing postal orders in an envelope
addressed to his wife. The first two remittances were in no way
acknowledged; the third brought a short note from Amy:

'As you continue to send these sums of money, I had perhaps
better let you know that I cannot use them for any purposes of my
own. Perhaps a sense of duty leads you to make this sacrifice, but
I am afraid it is more likely that you wish to remind me every
month that you are undergoing privations, and to pain me in this
way. What you have sent I have deposited in the Post Office
Savings' Bank in Willie's name, and I shall continue to do
so.—A.R.'

For a day or two Reardon persevered in an intention of not
replying, but the desire to utter his turbid feelings became in the
end too strong. He wrote:

'I regard it as quite natural that you should put the worst
interpretation on whatever I do. As for my privations, I think very
little of them; they are a trifle in comparison with the thought
that I am forsaken just because my pocket is empty. And I am far
indeed from thinking that you can be pained by whatever I may
undergo; that would suppose some generosity in your nature.'

This was no sooner posted than he would gladly have recalled it.
He knew that it was undignified, that it contained as many
falsehoods as lines, and he was ashamed of himself for having
written so. But he could not pen a letter of retractation, and
there remained with him a new cause of exasperated
wretchedness.

Excepting the people with whom he came in contact at the
hospital, he had no society but that of Biffen. The realist visited
him once a week, and this friendship grew closer than it had been
in the time of Reardon's prosperity. Biffen was a man of so much
natural delicacy, that there was a pleasure in imparting to him the
details of private sorrow; though profoundly sympathetic, he did
his best to oppose Reardon's harsher judgments of Amy, and herein
he gave his friend a satisfaction which might not be avowed.

'I really do not see,' he exclaimed, as they sat in the garret
one night of midsummer, 'how your wife could have acted otherwise.
Of course I am quite unable to judge the attitude of her mind, but
I think, I can't help thinking, from what I knew of her, that there
has been strictly a misunderstanding between you.

It was a hard and miserable thing that she should have to leave
you for a time, and you couldn't face the necessity in a just
spirit. Don't you think there's some truth in this way of looking
at it?'

'As a woman, it was her part to soften the hateful necessity;
she made it worse.'

'I'm not sure that you don't demand too much of her. Unhappily,
I know little or nothing of delicately-bred women, but I have a
suspicion that one oughtn't to expect heroism in them, any more
than in the women of the lower classes. I think of women as
creatures to be protected. Is a man justified in asking them to be
stronger than himself?'

'Of course,' replied Reardon, 'there's no use in demanding more
than a character is capable of. But I believed her of finer stuff.
My bitterness comes of the disappointment.'

'I suppose there were faults of temper on both sides, and you
saw at last only each other's weaknesses.'

'I saw the truth, which had always been disguised from me.'
Biffen persisted in looking doubtful, and in secret Reardon thanked
him for it.

As the realist progressed with his novel, 'Mr Bailey, Grocer,'
he read the chapters to Reardon, not only for his own satisfaction,
but in great part because he hoped that this example of
productivity might in the end encourage the listener to resume his
own literary tasks. Reardon found much to criticise in his friend's
work; it was noteworthy that he objected and condemned with much
less hesitation than in his better days, for sensitive reticence is
one of the virtues wont to be assailed by suffering, at all events
in the weaker natures. Biffen purposely urged these discussions as
far as possible, and doubtless they benefited Reardon for the time;
but the defeated novelist could not be induced to undertake another
practical illustration of his own views. Occasionally he had an
impulse to plan a story, but an hour's turning it over in his mind
sufficed to disgust him. His ideas seemed barren, vapid; it would
have been impossible for him to write half a dozen pages, and the
mere thought of a whole book overcame him with the dread of
insurmountable difficulties, immeasurable toil.