She waited.
"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "and I feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I've been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Business and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's attention or imagination wander—and it's so degrading. Hopelessly degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. I don't want to buy things. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It's exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened—on nothing! Nothing!"
"This is a mood," she whispered to his pause.
"It isn't a mood, it's a fact.... I've got nothing ahead, and I don't know how to get back. My life's no good to me any more. I've spent myself."
She looked at him with dismayed eyes. "But," she said, "this is a mood."
"No," he said, "no mood, but conviction. I know...."
He started. The car had stopped at their house, and Malcolm was opening the door of the car. They descended silently, and went upstairs in silence.
He came into her room presently and sat down by her fireside. She had gone to her dressing-table and unfastened a necklace; now with this winking and glittering in her hand she came and stood beside him.
"Rag," she said, "I don't know what to say. This isn't so much of a surprise.... I felt that somehow life was disappointing you, that I was disappointing you. I've felt it endless times, but more so lately. I haven't perhaps dared to let myself know just how much.... But isn't it what life is? Doesn't every wife disappoint her husband? We're none of us inexhaustible. After all, we've had a good time; isn't it a little ungrateful to forget?..."
"Look here, Rag," she said. "I don't know what to do. If I did know, I would do it.... What are we to do?"
"Think," he suggested.
"We've got to live as well as think."
"It's the immense troublesome futility of—everything," he said.
"Well—let us cease to be futile. Let us do. You say there is no grip for you in research, that you despise politics.... There's no end of trouble and suffering. Cannot we do social work, social reform, change the lives of others less fortunate than ourselves...."
"Who are we that we should tamper with the lives of others?"
"But one must do something."
He thought that over.
"No," he said "that's the universal blunder nowadays. One must do the right thing. And we don't know the right thing, Marjorie. That's the very heart of the trouble.... Does this life satisfy you? If it did would you always be so restless?..."
"But," she said, "think of the good things in life?"
"It's just the good, the exquisite things in life, that make me rebel against this life we are leading. It's because I've seen the streaks of gold that I know the rest for dirt. When I go cheating and scheming to my office, and come back to find you squandering yourself upon a horde of chattering, overdressed women, when I think that that is our substance and everyday and what we are, then it is I remember most the deep and beautiful things.... It is impossible, dear, it is intolerable that life was made beautiful for us—just for these vulgarities."
"Isn't there——" She hesitated. "Love—still?"
"But——Has it been love? Love is a thing that grows. But we took it—as people take flowers out of a garden, cut them off, put them in water.... How much of our daily life has been love? How much of it mere consequences of the love we've left behind us?... We've just cohabited and 'made love'—you and I—and thought of a thousand other things...."
He looked up at her. "Oh, I love a thousand things about you," he said. "But do I love you, Marjorie? Have I got you? Haven't I lost you—haven't we both lost something, the very heart of it all? Do you think that we were just cheated by instinct, that there wasn't something in it we felt and thought was there? And where is it now? Where is that brightness and wonder, Marjorie, and the pride and the immense unlimited hope?"
She was still for a moment, then knelt very swiftly before him and held out her arms.
"Oh Rag!" she said, with a face of tender beauty. He took her finger tips in his, dropped them and stood up above her.
"My dear," he cried, "my dear! why do you always want to turn love into—touches?... Stand up again. Stand up there, my dear; don't think I've ceased to love you, but stand up there and let me talk to you as one man to another. If we let this occasion slide to embraces...."
He stopped short.
She crouched before the fire at his feet. "Go on," she said, "go on."
"I feel now that all our lives now, Marjorie——We have come to a crisis. I feel that now——now is the time. Either we shall save ourselves now or we shall never save ourselves. It is as if something had gathered and accumulated and could wait no longer. If we do not seize this opportunity——Then our lives will go on as they have gone on, will become more and more a matter of small excitements and elaborate comforts and distraction...."
He stopped this halting speech and then broke out again.
"Oh! why should the life of every day conquer us? Why should generation after generation of men have these fine beginnings, these splendid dreams of youth, attempt so much, achieve so much and then, then become—this! Look at this room, this litter of little satisfactions! Look at your pretty books there, a hundred minds you have pecked at, bright things of the spirit that attracted you as jewels attract a jackdaw. Look at the glass and silver, and that silk from China! And we are in the full tide of our years, Marjorie. Now is the very crown and best of our lives. And this is what we do, we sample, we accumulate. For this we loved, for this we hoped. Do you remember when we were young—that life seemed so splendid—it was intolerable we should ever die?... The splendid dream! The intimations of greatness!... The miserable failure!"
He raised clenched fists. "I won't stand it, Marjorie. I won't endure it. Somehow, in some way, I will get out of this life—and you with me. I have been brooding upon this and brooding, but now I know...."
"But how?" asked Marjorie, with her bare arms about her knees, staring into the fire. "How?"
"We must get out of its constant interruptions, its incessant vivid, petty appeals...."
"We might go away—to Switzerland."
"We went to Switzerland. Didn't we agree—it was our second honeymoon. It isn't a honeymoon we need. No, we'll have to go further than that."
A sudden light broke upon Marjorie's mind. She realized he had a plan. She lifted a fire-lit face to him and looked at him with steady eyes and asked——
"Where?"
"Ever so much further."
"Where?"
"I don't know."
"You do. You've planned something."
"I don't know, Marjorie. At least—I haven't made up my mind. Where it is very lonely. Cold and remote. Away from all this——" His mind stopped short, and he ended with a cry: "Oh! God! how I want to get out of all this!"