(Poor dear, how weary she looked!)
He wondered how much more remained of this appalling night. It would have made so little difference if they had taken the day train and travelled first-class. Wasn't she indeed entitled to travel first-class? Pictures of the immense spaciousness, the softness, cleanliness and dignity of first-class compartments appeared in his mind....
He would have looked at his watch, but to get at it would mean disturbing the silent young man on his left.
Outside in the corridor there broke out a noisy dispute about a missing coupon, a dispute in that wonderful language that is known to the facetious as entente cordiale, between an Englishman and the conductor of the train....
§ 14
In Paris there was a dispute with an extortionate cabman, and the crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven was rough and bitterly cold. They were both ill. They reached home very dirty and weary, and among the pile of letters and papers on Trafford's desk was a big bundle of Science Note proofs, and two letters from Croydon and Pinner to alter the hours of his lectures for various plausible and irritating reasons.
The little passage looked very small and rather bare as the door shut behind them, and the worn places that had begun to be conspicuous during the last six months, and which they had forgotten during the Swiss holiday, reasserted themselves. The dining-room, after spacious rooms flooded with sunshine, betrayed how dark it was, and how small. Those Bokhara embroideries that had once shone so splendid, now, after Mrs. Lee's rich and unlimited harmonies, seemed skimpy and insufficient, mere loin-cloths for the artistic nakedness of the home. They felt, too, they were beginning to find out their post-impressionist picture. They had not remembered it as nearly so crude as it now appeared. The hole a flying coal had burnt in the unevenly faded dark-blue carpet looked larger than it had ever done before, and was indeed the only thing that didn't appear faded and shrunken.
§ 15
The atmosphere of the Lees' villa had disturbed Marjorie's feelings and ideas even more than it had Trafford's. She came back struggling to recover those high resolves that had seemed so secure when they had walked down to Les Avantes. There was a curiously tormenting memory of that vast, admirable nursery, and the princely procession of children that would not leave her mind. No effort of her reason could reconcile her to the inferiority of Margharita's equipment. She had a detestable craving for a uniform for May. But May was going....
But indeed she was not so sure that May was going.
She was no longer buoyantly well, she was full of indefinable apprehensions of weakness and failure. She struggled to control an insurgence of emotions that rose out of the deeps of her being. She had now, she knew, to take on her share of the burden, to become one of the Samurai, to show her love no longer as a demand but as a service. Yet from day to day she procrastinated under the shadow of apprehended things; she forebore to dismiss May, to buy that second-hand typewriter she needed, to take any irrevocable step towards the realization of the new way of living. She tried to think away her fears, but they would not leave her. She felt that Trafford watched her pale face with a furtive solicitude and wondered at her hesitations; she tried in vain to seem cheerful and careless in his presence, with an anxiety, with premonitions that grew daily.
There was no need to worry him unduly....
But soon the matter was beyond all doubting. One night she gathered her courage together suddenly and came down into his study in her dressing-gown with her hair about her shoulders. She opened the door and her heart failed her.
"Rag," she whispered.
"Yes," he said busily from his desk, without looking round.
"I want to speak to you," she answered, and came slowly, and stood beside him silently.
"Well, old Marjorie?" he said presently, drawing a little intricate pattern in the corner of his blotting paper, and wondering whether this was a matter of five pounds or ten.
"I meant so well," she said and caught herself back into silence again.
He started at the thought, at a depth and meaning in her voice, turned his chair about to look at her, and discovered she was weeping and choking noiselessly. He stood up close to her, moving very slowly and silently, his eyes full of this new surmise, and now without word or gesture from her he knew his thought was right. "My dear," he whispered.
She turned her face from him. "I meant so well," she sobbed. "My dear! I meant so well." Still with an averted face her arms came out to him in a desperate, unreasoning appeal for love. He took her and held her close to him. "Never mind, dear," he said. "Don't mind." Her passion now was unconstrained. "I thought—" he began, and left the thing unsaid.
"But your work," she said; "your research?"
"I must give up research," he said.
"Oh, my dearest!"
"I must give up research," he repeated. "I've been seeing it for days. Clearer and clearer. This dear, just settles things. Even—as we were coming home in the train—I was making up my mind. At Vevey I was talking to Solomonson."
"My dear," she whispered, clinging to him.
"I talked to Solomonson. He had ideas—a proposal."
"No," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I've left the thing too long."
He repeated. "I must give up research—for years. I ought to have done it long before."
"I had meant so well," she said. "I meant to work. I meant to deny myself...."
"I'm glad," he whispered. "Glad! Why should you weep?" It seemed nothing to him then, that so he should take a long farewell to the rare, sweet air of that wonderland his mind had loved so dearly. All he remembered was that Marjorie was very dear to him, very dear to him, and that all her being was now calling out for him and his strength. "I had thought anyhow of giving up research," he repeated. "This merely decides. It happens to decide. I love you, dear. I put my research at your feet. Gladly. This is the end, and I do not care, my dear, at all. I do not care at all—seeing I have you...."
He stood beside her for a moment, and then sat down again, sideways, upon his chair.
"It isn't you, my dear, or me," he said, "but life that beats us—that beautiful, irrational mother.... Life does not care for research or knowledge, but only for life. Oh! the world has to go on yet for tens of thousands of years before—before we are free for that. I've got to fight—as other men fight...."
He thought in silence for a time, oddly regardless of her. "But if it was not you," he said, staring at the fireplace with knitted brows, "if I did not love you.... Thank God, I love you, dear! Thank God, our children are love children! I want to live—to my finger-tips, but if I didn't love you—oh! love you! then I think now—I'd be glad—I'd be glad, I think, to cheat life of her victory."
"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and clung weeping to him, and caught at him and sat herself upon his knees, and put her arms about his head, and kissed him passionately with tear-salt lips, with her hair falling upon his face.
"My dear," she whispered....
§ 16
So soon as Trafford could spare an afternoon amidst his crowded engagements he went to talk to Solomonson, who was now back in London. "Solomonson," he said, "you were talking about rubber at Vevey."
"I remember," said Solomonson with a note of welcome.
"I've thought it over."