The Honeymoon (26 page)

Barbara had written she wanted to discuss something important with her. Marian guessed it was something about John Chapman. While Marian and George were in Germany, Chapman had fixed his new attentions on Barbara. He proclaimed that he was in love with her. He wanted to set up a household with her, and have children. Chapman was sure her father, Ben Smith, would approve — after all, he hadn’t been married to her mother. When Barbara told Marian, she’d snorted with disgust. Barbara had been one of the
few people she’d confided in about her own relationship with Chapman, and she’d been appalled to hear that someone as strong and confident as Barbara had given in to him.

Barbara’s father, Ben Smith, was outraged too, by Chapman’s proposal; if she wanted to live in an unmarried state with a man, he said, she should go to America! It may be all right for a man to live this way, but not a woman. (He apparently didn’t mention his own relationship with Barbara’s mother.) Anyway, he said, Chapman was an irresponsible lout, just after her money. Barbara tore herself away from him, and he was devastated.

When Barbara arrived in Tenby, Marian noticed at once that she wasn’t her usual ebullient self. But she was so glad to have her there. Barbara loved George now, and he her, and to share her love of him with someone else warmed Marian’s heart.

They set out at once for the beach. Barbara settled herself with her easel and paints while she and George searched for specimens.

At noon, the inexhaustible George was still out on the far stretches of the sand hunting. Marian and Barbara walked along the shoreline, dipping their toes in the oncoming tide, watching the clear water spread over them. Barbara was silent and preoccupied. Marian said, “You must be very happy after Ruskin’s praise.”

Ruskin had seen Barbara’s painting of a cornfield after a storm and called her one of the preeminent female artists of the times.

“I’m happy about it,” Barbara said, without smiling.

“Dear heart, you’re troubled, aren’t you?” Marian said. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

Barbara didn’t answer but continued looking down, frowning. “I can’t give him up. I made my decision. And yet — I miss him. I — I love him. I keep wondering if I did the right thing. He kept describing you and George as an example of a love relationship without legal bonds —”

“An example!” cried Marian. “There is no parallel whatsoever between him and George. Whatsoever. That is insulting. George is a different man entirely. How dare he!” She stopped walking and turned to Barbara. “And by the way, he told
me
that George was a scoundrel and would surely leave me too.”

Barbara shook her head. “I know. But … I can’t help thinking … that I’ve given up something important…. He’s the only man I’ve ever met who believes as strongly in the things I believe in as I do, in the cause of women …”

“Important!” Marian said. “Oh, he is so awful.”

Barbara said, “He’s very worried about my health. He knows a great deal about women’s health. He says he trained as a doctor and he insists the act of love would be beneficial … for my ‘irregularities’ …”

“Perhaps,” Marian said grimly. “But not with him.”

Barbara went on. “But do you mind if I ask? The act of love, ‘the Master Passion,’ if you will, it completely terrifies me.” Her face was anguished.

“When there’s true love,” Marian said gently, “then it’s a very different thing.”

“You … and George …, is it as bad as I’ve heard?”

Marian clasped her hand and smiled. “No. It’s beautiful because he’s the kindest, most considerate of men.” She gazed fondly at George’s figure in the distance, swooping down over his specimens and sweeping them up into his net.

“Will you have children?” Barbara asked.

Marian felt the sorrow move over her. “We’ve discussed it. We don’t want to bring an illegitimate child into the world. And George is already taking care of Agnes’s children that aren’t even his, and given them his name. I’m helping him provide for them. We both feel strongly that we must do that.”

“That’s so good of you.”

“It isn’t good of me. I love him — and his sons.” She smiled, saying the names aloud, “Charley, Thornie, Bertie. I haven’t met them yet but I already love them because they’re his. He’s sent them away to school in Switzerland to get away from Bedford Place and all the chaos there. As for the others, I agree with him. You can’t let an innocent child suffer just because he was born by an accident that had nothing to do with him. And I’m thirty-six now anyway. There are ways to stop it, you know. Or you should know if you don’t.”

“I do know, I think. Do George’s children know about you?”

“Not yet. But we hope, one day.” She gripped Barbara’s arms. “Don’t punish yourself for giving up Chapman. He’s relentless, but he’s incapable of true love and commitment.”

“But I feel he did love me.
Does
love me.”

“I’m sure he
thinks
he does.”

They walked along together. In the distance, George looked up, saw them, and waved. Then he began striding toward them. They waited. “Look!” he cried, when he’d caught up with them. “I got an
Aeolis
too!”

For the remainder of her stay, Barbara continued her painting, quietly concentrating on her work. Marian could
feel her turning over the question of Chapman in her mind as she worked. But they didn’t discuss him anymore.

As Marian helped George collect his specimens, the idea for a story began to take form in her mind. Again, she saw images from her childhood, of the Chilvers Coton church, and of the Reverend Gwyther, and she remembered all the stories she’d heard about him. There’d be a young curate — “Amos Barton,” she’d call him, with a sweet wife, “Milly.” The church is poor. The Reverend Amos invites a rich countess to live with them, hoping she’ll give money to it. But people think wrongly that she’s Amos’s mistress …

The window of their bedroom faced east. The early sun woke her. The room was flooded with white light, the curtain swaying softly in the morning breeze. She felt as if she were floating on the bed. From outside came the sound of the ineluctable back and forth of the waves, the cry of the gulls. George lay with his back to her, breathing steadily in his sleep, his thin, narrow shoulders naked, his dark hair on the pillow, his body warm with the pulse of his life. He liked to fall asleep as close to her as possible, then, in the night, he would turn away.

Looking at him, she thought, one day he wouldn’t be there, to warm her when she was cold, his flesh solid and moist next to her. Then her life would be at an end too. There was no eternity, not of love, nor of the body. She had nothing of her own, except him. No reason to live should he ever leave her. She edged toward him and kissed his shoulder.

He woke up, turned over, smiled lazily and drew her to him.

“Darling?” she whispered. “What do you think of this for a title for a story? ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton.’ ”

He rose up on his elbow. “That’s a capital title!”

She lay back. “I’m afraid.”

He sat up excitedly, his bony chest covered with wiry hairs, his arms thin but strong, trying to seize her enthusiasm before it faded. “Think of it this way,” he said. “It might be a failure, but it might also be a chef d’oeuvre!”

“A chef-d’oeuvre! I don’t think there’s much worry about that.”

“You
can’t
write a bad novel — you’ve got wit, description, philosophy. And those go a long way. Though you may lack the most important thing, drama. Try it as an experiment.”

Then they rose into the glorious white morning, and breakfasted. Soon they were heading down Bridge Street to the South Sands, with their nets and their bottles and the hamper.

That autumn, in London, she wrote the words
“Chapter I.”
Then,
“Shepperton Church was a very different-looking building five-and-twenty years ago …”
Mrs. Hackit and the town doctor, Mr. Pilgrim, and some neighbors, are having tea and complaining about the Reverend Amos.
“ ‘Rather a lowbred fellow, I think, Barton,’ said Mr. Pilgrim.”
“(
Reason to hate him: Reverend Amos had called in a new doctor who’d cured a patient of Mr. Pilgrim’s
.)”

In the late afternoon, when George came home, she said, “Can I read you something?”

“I’d be delighted.” He hung up his things and settled himself in the armchair.

“All right,” she began, and read him the scene of Mrs. Hackit in the farmhouse.

“Yes?” she asked, when she’d finished

“You’ve got the very things I was doubtful about. You can write dialogue. But what happens next?”

“His parish is poor. He invites this countess to live with his family. He has a sweet wife but she takes ill.” She tapered off, losing confidence.

She must have looked disappointed for he quickly interjected, “I no longer have any doubt about your ability to carry it out. Oh, Polly,” he said, “just keep going. Please! You have it in you.”

After a week, she’d come to the end of the story. Once again, she sat him down and read to him — her voice thin, her words rushed with nervousness — the scene of Milly’s death.
“Amos drew her towards him and pressed her head gently to him, while Milly beckoned Fred and Sophy …”

She looked up for his reaction. He was wiping tears from his eyes with his fist. She kept going.
“They watched her breathing becoming more and more difficult, until evening deepened into night, and until midnight was past. About half-past twelve she seemed to be trying to speak, and they leaned to catch her words
.

“ ‘Music — music — didn’t you hear it?’ ”

Her own eyes flooded with tears now. George kissed her. “I think your pathos is better than your fun,” he said.

And so it began. George wrote to his publisher, John Blackwood, in Edinburgh, enclosing a story written, he
said, by a very shy friend whom he couldn’t name. Would Blackwood be interested in publishing it in his magazine?

A few days later came Blackwood’s response. “Amos Barton”
“is unquestionably very pleasant reading,”
he wrote. However, he said, he’d have to see more of this unnamed writer’s stories before he published anything. And he did worry that there wasn’t enough action.

When George read Blackwood’s letter back to her, she collapsed in disappointment. George wrote again to Blackwood defending her story, and Blackwood relented.
“I have so high an opinion of this first Tale,”
he wrote,
“that I will waive my objections.”

When George showed Marian the letter, she jumped up and down and clapped her hands.

In January, there it was in the magazine, her own words, in the ineradicable medium of print. Without her name on the story, of course, as was usual. A secret. That was the way it was done. But it had begun.

A
ll because of him. Without him there would have been nothing. He cosseted her, comforted her, shielded her, warning Blackwood that his anonymous writer friend was
“unusually sensitive”
and of a
“shy, shrinking, and ambitious nature.”

“He is so easily discouraged,”
warned George. Yet more stories followed: “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” a love triangle set against the backdrop of Cheverel Manor, based on Arbury Hall; and “Janet’s Repentance,” about an alcoholic lawyer who dreadfully abuses his wife, in a town similar to Nuneaton. Blackwood collected them all in one volume under the title
Scenes of Clerical Life
.