But when at last that talk came it was altogether different from any of those I had invented.
She wrote to me when she came down into Surrey and I walked over to Martens the next afternoon. I found her in her own sitting-room, a beautiful characteristic apartment with tall French windows hung with blue curtains, a large writing-desk and a great litter of books. The room gave upon a broad sunlit terrace with a balustrading of yellowish stone, on which there stood great oleanders. Beyond was a flower garden and then the dark shadows of cypresses. She was standing as I came in to her, as though she had seen me coming across the lawns and had been awaiting my entrance. "I thought you might come to-day," she said, and told the manservant to deny her to other callers. Again she produced that queer effect of being at once altogether the same and altogether different from the Mary I had known. "Justin," she said, "is in Paris. He comes back on Friday." I saw then that the change lay in her bearing, that for the easy confidence of the girl she had now the deliberate dignity and control of a married woman--a very splendidly and spaciously married woman. Her manner had been purged of impulse. Since we had met she had stood, the mistress of great houses, and had dealt with thousands of people.
"You walked over to me?"
"I walked," I said. "It is nearly a straight path. You know it?"
"You came over the heather beyond our pine wood," she confirmed. And then I think we talked some polite unrealities about Surrey scenery and the weather. It was so formal that by a common impulse we let the topic suddenly die. We stood through a pause, a hesitation. Were we indeed to go on at that altitude of cold civility? She turned to the window as if the view was to serve again.
"Sit down," she said and dropped into a chair against the light, looking away from me across the wide green space of afternoon sunshine. I sat down on a little sofa, at a loss also.
"And so," she said, turning her face to me suddenly, "you come back into my life." And I was amazed to see that the brightness of her eyes was tears. "We've lived--five years."
"You," I said clumsily, "have done all sorts of things. I hear of you--patronizing young artists--organizing experiments in village education."
"Yes," she said, "I've done all sorts of things. One has to. Forced, unreal things for the most part. You I expect have done--all sorts of things also.... But yours have been real things...."
"All things," I remarked sententiously, "are real. And all of them a little unreal. South Africa has been wonderful. And now it is all over one doubts if it really happened. Like that incredulous mood after a storm of passion."
"You've come back for good?"
"For good. I want to do things in England."
"Politics?"
"If I can get into that."
Again a pause. There came the characteristic moment of deliberation that I remembered so well.
"I never meant you," she said, "to go away.... You could have written. You never answered the notes I sent."
"I was frantic," I said, "with loss and jealousy. I wanted to forget."
"And you forgot?"
"I did my best."
"I did my best," said Mary. "And now---- Have you forgotten?"
"Nothing."
"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together. But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was nothing--not worth having. You--you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man--and how little else...."
She paused.
"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with you.... I don't know--if you remember everything...."
She looked me in the eyes for a moment.
"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation. "But you know, Stephen, that night---- I meant to explain. And afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected them to go, even the things one has planned to say. I suppose--I treated you--disgustingly."
I protested.
"Yes," she said. "I treated you as I did--and I thought you would stand it. I _knew_, I knew then as well as you do now that male to my female you wouldn't stand it, but somehow--I thought there were other things. Things that could override that...."
"Not," I said, "for a boy of one-and-twenty."
"But in a man of twenty-six?"
I weighed the question. "Things are different," I said, and then, "Yes. Anyhow now--if I may come back penitent,--to a friendship."
We looked at one another gravely. Faintly in our ears sounded the music of past and distant things. We pretended to hear nothing of that, tried honestly to hear nothing of it. I had not remembered how steadfast and quiet her face could be. "Yes," she said, "a friendship."
"I've always had you in my mind, Stephen," she said. "When I saw I couldn't marry you, it seemed to me I had better marry and be free of any further hope. I thought we could get over that. 'Let's get it over,' I thought. Now--at any rate--we have got over that." Her eyes verified her words a little doubtfully. "And we can talk and you can tell me of your life, and the things you want to do that make life worth living. Oh! life has been _stupid_ without you, Stephen, large and expensive and aimless....Tell me of your politics. They say--Justin told me--you think of parliament?"
"I want to do that. I have been thinking---- In fact I am going to stand." I found myself hesitating on the verge of phrases in the quality of a review article. It was too unreal for her presence. And yet it was this she seemed to want from me. "This," I said, "is a phase of great opportunities. The war has stirred the Empire to a sense of itself, to a sense of what it might be. Of course this Tariff Reform row is a squalid nuisance; it may kill out all the fine spirit again before anything is done. Everything will become a haggle, a chaffering of figures.... All the more reason why we should try and save things from the commercial traveller. If the Empire is anything at all, it is something infinitely more than a combination in restraint of trade...."
"Yes," she said. "And you want to take that line. The high line."
"If one does not take the high line," I said, "what does one go into politics for?"
"Stephen," she smiled, "you haven't lost a sort of simplicity---- People go into politics because it looks important, because other people go into politics, because they can get titles and a sense of influence and--other things. And then there are quarrels, old grudges to serve."
"These are roughnesses of the surface."
"Old Stephen!" she cried with the note of a mother. "They will worry you in politics."
I laughed. "Perhaps I'm not altogether so simple."
"Oh! you'll get through. You have a way of going on. But I shall have to watch over you. I see I shall have to watch over you. Tell me of the things you mean to do. Where are you standing?"
I began to tell her a little disjointedly of the probabilities of my Yorkshire constituency....
§ 6
I have a vivid vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house, down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always loved. I wanted passionately to be as she desired, the friend she demanded, that intimate brother and confederate, but all my heart cried out for her, cried out for her altogether.
I would be her friend, I repeated to myself, I would be her friend. I would talk to her often, plan with her, work with her. I could put my meanings into her life and she should throw her beauty over mine. I began already to dream of the talk of to-morrow's meeting....
§ 7
And now let me go on to tell at once the thing that changed life for both of us altogether, that turned us out of the courses that seemed set for us, our spacious, successful and divergent ways, she to the tragedy of her death and I from all the prospects of the public career that lay before me to the work that now, toilsomely, inadequately and blunderingly enough, I do. It was to pierce and slash away the appearances of life for me, it was to open my way to infinite disillusionment, and unsuspected truths. Within a few weeks of our second meeting Mary and I were passionately in love with one another; we had indeed become lovers. The arrested attractions of our former love released again, drew us inevitably to that. We tried to seem outwardly only friends, with this hot glow between us. Our tormented secret was half discovered and half betrayed itself. There followed a tragi-comedy of hesitations and disunited struggle. Within four months the crisis of our two lives was past....
It is not within my purpose to tell you, my son, of the particular events, the particular comings and goings, the chance words, the chance meetings, the fatal momentary misunderstandings that occurred between us. I want to tell of something more general than that. This misadventure is in our strain. It is our inheritance. It is a possibility in the inheritance of all honest and emotional men and women. There are no doubt people altogether cynical and adventurous to whom these passions and desires are at once controllable and permissible indulgences without any radiation of consequences, a secret and detachable part of life, and there may be people of convictions so strong and simple that these disturbances are eliminated, but we Strattons are of a quality neither so low nor so high, we stoop and rise, we are not convinced about our standards, and for many generations to come, with us and with such people as the Christians, and indeed with most of our sort of people, we shall be equally desirous of free and intimate friendship and prone to blaze into passion and disaster at that proximity.