What had happened to them? What was the matter between himself and Marjorie that he couldn't even intimate his sense of their divergence? He would have liked to discuss the whole thing with his mother, but somehow that seemed disloyal to Marjorie....
One day they quarrelled.
He came in about six in the afternoon, jaded from the delivery of a suburban lecture, and the consequent tedium of suburban travel, and discovered Marjorie examining the effect of a new picture which had replaced the German print of sunlit waves over the dining-room mantelpiece. It was a painting in the post-impressionist manner, and it had arrived after the close of the exhibition in Weldon Street, at which Marjorie had bought it. She had bought it in obedience to a sudden impulse, and its imminence had long weighed upon her conscience. She had gone to the show with Sydney Flor and old Mrs. Flor, Sydney's mother, and a kind of excitement had come upon them at the idea of possessing this particular picture. Mrs. Flor had already bought three Herbins, and her daughter wanted to dissuade her from more. "But they're so delightful," said Mrs. Flor. "You're overrunning your allowance," said Sydney. Disputing the point, they made inquiries for the price, and learnt that this bright epigram in colour was going begging—was even offered at a reduction from the catalogue price. A reduced price always had a strong appeal nowadays to Marjorie's mind. "If you don't get it," she said abruptly, "I shall."
The transition from that attitude to ownership was amazingly rapid. Then nothing remained but to wait for the picture. She had dreaded a mistake, a blundering discord, but now with the thing hung she could see her quick eye had not betrayed her. It was a mass of reds, browns, purples, and vivid greens and greys; an effect of roof and brick house facing upon a Dutch canal, and it lit up the room and was echoed and reflected by all the rest of her courageous colour scheme, like a coal-fire amidst mahogany and metal. It justified itself to her completely, and she faced her husband with a certain confidence.
"Hullo!" he cried.
"A new picture," she said. "What do you think of it?"
"What is it?"
"A town or something—never mind. Look at the colour. It heartens everything."
Trafford looked at the painting with a reluctant admiration.
"It's brilliant—and impudent. He's an artist—whoever he is. He hits the thing. But—I say—how did you get it?"
"I bought it."
"Bought it! Good Lord! How much?"
"Oh! ten guineas," said Marjorie, with an affectation of ease; "it will be worth thirty in ten years' time."
Trafford's reply was to repeat: "Ten guineas!"
Their eyes met, and there was singularly little tenderness in their eyes.
"It was priced at thirteen," said Marjorie, ending a pause, and with a sinking heart.
Trafford had left her side. He walked to the window and sat down in a chair.
"I think this is too much," he said, and his voice had disagreeable notes in it she had never heard before. "I have just been earning two guineas at Croydon, of all places, administering comminuted science to fools—and here I find—this exploit! Ten guineas' worth of picture. To say we can't afford it is just to waste a mild expression. It's—mad extravagance. It's waste of money—it's—oh!—monstrous disloyalty. Disloyalty!" He stared resentful at the cheerful, unhesitating daubs of the picture for a moment. Its affected carelessness goaded him to fresh words. He spoke in a tone of absolute hostility. "I think this winds me up to something," he said. "You'll have to give up your cheque-book, Marjorie."
"Give up my cheque-book!"
He looked up at her and nodded. There was a warm flush in her cheeks, her lips panted apart, and tears of disappointment and vexation were shining beautifully in her eyes. She mingled the quality of an indignant woman with the distress and unreasonable resentment of a child.
"Because I've bought this picture?"
"Can we go on like this?" he asked, and felt how miserably he had bungled in opening this question that had been in his mind so long.
"But it's beautiful!" she said.
He disregarded that. He felt now that he had to go on with these long-premeditated expostulations. He was tired and dusty from his third-class carriage, his spirit was tired and dusty, and he said what he had to say without either breadth or power, an undignified statement of personal grievances, a mere complaint of the burthen of work that falls upon a man. That she missed the high aim in him, and all sense of the greatness they were losing had vanished from his thoughts. He had too heavy a share of the common burthen, and she pressed upon him unthinkingly; that was all he could say. He girded at her with a bitter and loveless truth; it was none the less cruel that in her heart she knew these things he said were true. But he went beyond justice—as every quarrelling human being does; he called the things she had bought and the harmonies she had created, "this litter and rubbish for which I am wasting my life." That stabbed into her pride acutely and deeply. She knew anyhow that it wasn't so simple and crude as that. It was not mere witlessness she contributed to their trouble. She tried to indicate her sense of that. But she had no power of ordered reasoning, she made futile interruptions, she was inexpressive of anything but emotion, she felt gagged against his flow of indignant, hostile words. They blistered her.
Suddenly she went to her little desk in the corner, unlocked it with trembling hands, snatched her cheque-book out of a heap of still unsettled bills, and having locked that anti-climax safe away again, turned upon him. "Here it is," she said, and stood poised for a moment. Then she flung down the little narrow grey cover—nearly empty, it was, of cheques, on the floor before him.
"Take it," she cried, "take it. I never asked you to give it me."
A memory of Orta and its reeds and sunshine and love rose like a luminous mist between them....
She ran weeping from the room.
He leapt to his feet as the door closed. "Marjorie!" he cried.
But she did not hear him....
§ 3
The disillusionment about marriage which had discovered Trafford a thwarted, overworked, and worried man, had revealed Marjorie with time on her hands, superabundant imaginative energy, and no clear intimation of any occupation. With them, as with thousands of young couples in London to-day, the breadwinner was overworked, and the spending partner's duty was chiefly the negative one of not spending. You cannot consume your energies merely in not spending money. Do what she could, Marjorie could not contrive to make house and child fill the waking hours. She was far too active and irritable a being to be beneficial company all day for genial, bubble-blowing little Margharita; she could play with that young lady and lead her into ecstasies of excitement and delight, and she could see with an almost instinctive certainty when anything was going wrong; but for the rest that little life reposed far more beneficially upon the passive acquiescence of May, her pink and wholesome nurse. And the household generally was in the hands of a trustworthy cook-general, who maintained a tolerable routine. Marjorie did not dare to have an idea about food or domestic arrangements; if she touched that routine so much as with her little finger it sent up the bills. She could knock off butcher and greengrocer and do every scrap of household work that she could touch, in a couple of hours a day. She tried to find some work to fill her leisure; she suggested to Trafford that she might help him by writing up his Science Notes from rough pencil memoranda, but when it became clear that the first step to her doing this would be the purchase of a Remington typewriter and a special low table to carry it, he became bluntly discouraging. She thought of literary work, and sat down one day to write a short story and earn guineas, and was surprised to find that she knew nothing of any sort of human being about whom she could invent a story. She tried a cheap subscription at Mudie's and novels, and they filled her with a thirst for events; she tried needlework, and found her best efforts aesthetically feeble and despicable, and that her mind prowled above the silks and colours like a hungry wolf.