He sat down in her arm-chair, and bowed his face on his hands.
Then abruptly he stood up and went out of the room.
§ 8
When in five minutes' time he came back into her room she was still upon her hearthrug before the fire, with her necklace in her hand, the red reflections of the flames glowing and winking in her jewels and in her eyes. He came and sat again in her chair.
"I have been ranting," he said. "I feel I've been—eloquent. You make me feel like an actor-manager, in a play by Capes.... You are the most difficult person for me to talk to in all the world—because you mean so much to me."
She moved impulsively and checked herself and crouched away from him. "I mustn't touch your hand," she whispered.
"I want to explain."
"You've got to explain."
"I've got quite a definite plan.... But a sort of terror seized me. It was like—shyness."
"I know. I knew you had a plan."
"You see.... I mean to go to Labrador."
He leant forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands extended, explanatory. He wanted intensely that she should understand and agree and his desire made him clumsy, now slow and awkward, now glibly and unsatisfyingly eloquent. But she comprehended his quality better than he knew. They were to go away to Labrador, this snowy desert of which she had scarcely heard, to camp in the very heart of the wilderness, two hundred miles or more from any human habitation——
"But how long?" she asked abruptly.
"The better part of a year."
"And we are to talk?"
"Yes," he said, "talk and think ourselves together—oh!—the old phrases carry it all—find God...."
"It is what I dreamt of, Rag, years ago."
"Will you come," he cried, "out of all this?"
She leant across the hearthrug, and seized and kissed his hand....
Then, with one of those swift changes of hers, she was in revolt. "But, Rag," she exclaimed, "this is dreaming. We are not free. There are the children! Rag! We cannot leave the children!"
"We can," he said. "We must."
"But, my dear!—our duty!"
"Is it a mother's duty always to keep with her children? They will be looked after, their lives are organized, there is my mother close at hand.... What is the good of having children at all—unless their world is to be better than our world?... What are we doing to save them from the same bathos as this—to which we have come? We give them food and health and pictures and lessons, that's all very well while they are just little children; but we've got no religion to give them, no aim, no sense of a general purpose. What is the good of bread and health—and no worship?... What can we say to them when they ask us why we brought them into the world?—We happened—you happened. What are we to tell them when they demand the purpose of all this training, all these lessons? When they ask what we are preparing them for? Just that you, too, may have children! Is that any answer? Marjorie, it's common-sense to try this over—to make this last supreme effort—just as it will be common-sense to separate if we can't get the puzzle solved together."
"Separate!"
"Separate. Why not? We can afford it. Of course, we shall separate."
"But Rag!—separate!"
He faced her protest squarely. "Life is not worth living," he said, "unless it has more to hold it together than ours has now. If we cannot escape together, then—I will go alone."...
§ 9
They parted that night resolved to go to Labrador together, with the broad outline of their subsequent journey already drawn. Each lay awake far into the small hours thinking of this purpose and of one another, with a strange sense of renewed association. Each woke to a morning of sunshine heavy-eyed. Each found that overnight decision remote and incredible. It was like something in a book or a play that had moved them very deeply. They came down to breakfast, and helped themselves after the wonted fashion of several years, Marjorie with a skilful eye to the large order of her household; the Times had one or two characteristic letters which interested them both; there was the usual picturesque irruption of the children and a distribution of early strawberries among them. Trafford had two notes in his correspondence which threw a new light upon the reconstruction of the Norton-Batsford company in which he was interested; he formed a definite conclusion upon the situation, and went quite normally to his study and the telephone to act upon that.
It was only as the morning wore on that it became real to him that he and Marjorie had decided to leave the world. Then, with the Norton-Batsford business settled, he sat at his desk and mused. His apathy passed. His imagination began to present first one picture and then another of his retreat. He walked along Oxford Street to his Club thinking—"soon we shall be out of all this." By the time he was at lunch in his Club, Labrador had become again the magic refuge it had seemed the day before. After lunch he went to work in the library, finding out books about Labrador, and looking up the details of the journey.
But his sense of futility and hopeless oppression had vanished. He walked along the corridor and down the great staircase, and without a trace of the despairful hostility of the previous day, passed Blenkins, talking grey bosh with infinite thoughtfulness. He nodded easily to Blenkins. He was going out of it all, as a man might do who discovers after years of weary incarceration that the walls of his cell are made of thin paper. The time when Blenkins seemed part of a prison-house of routine and invincible stupidity seemed ten ages ago.
In Pall Mall Trafford remarked Lady Grampians and the Countess of Claridge, two women of great influence, in a big green car, on the way no doubt to create or sustain or destroy; and it seemed to him that it was limitless ages since these poor old dears with their ridiculous hats and their ridiculous airs, their luncheons and dinners and dirty aggressive old minds, had sent tidal waves of competitive anxiety into his home....
He found himself jostling through the shopping crowd on the sunny side of Regent Street. He felt now that he looked over the swarming, preoccupied heads at distant things. He and Marjorie were going out of it all, going clean out of it all. They were going to escape from society and shopping, and petty engagements and incessant triviality—as a bird flies up out of weeds.
§ 10
But Marjorie fluctuated more than he did.
There were times when the expedition for which he was now preparing rapidly and methodically seemed to her the most adventurously-beautiful thing that had ever come to her, and times when it seemed the maddest and most hopeless of eccentricities. There were times when she had devastating premonitions of filth, hunger, strain and fatigue, damp and cold, when her whole being recoiled from the project, when she could even think of staying secure in London and letting him go alone. She developed complicated anxieties for the children; she found reasons for further inquiries, for delay. "Why not," she suggested, "wait a year?"
"No," he said, "I won't. I mean we are to do this, and do it now, and nothing but sheer physical inability to do it will prevent my carrying it out.... And you? Of course you are to come. I can't drag you shrieking all the way to Labrador; short of that I'm going to make you come with me."