Mary drew her chair a little nearer to the fire, for the logs were burning low, and at this time of night it was hardly worth while to replenish them. Ralph was reading, but she had noticed for some time that his eyes instead of following the print were fixed rather above the page with an intensity of gloom that came to weigh upon her mind. She had not weakened in her resolve not to give way, for reflection had only made her more bitterly certain that, if she gave way, it would be to her own wish and not to his. But she had determined that there was no reason why he should suffer if her reticence were the cause of his suffering. Therefore, although she found it painful, she spoke:
‘You asked me if I had changed my mind about you, Ralph,’ she said. ‘I think there’s only one thing. When you asked me to marry you, I don’t think you meant it. That made me angry—for the moment. Before, you’d always spoken the truth.’
Ralph’s book slid down upon his knee and fell upon the floor. He rested his forehead on his hand and looked into the fire. He was trying to recall the exact words in which he had made his proposal to Mary.
‘I never said I loved you,’ he said at last.
She winced; but she respected him for saying what he did, for this, after all, was a fragment of the truth which she had vowed to live by.
And to me marriage without love doesn’t seem worth while,’ she said.
‘Well, Mary, I’m not going to press you,’ he said. ‘I see you don’t want to marry me. But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? What does one mean? I believe I care for you more genuinely than nine men out of ten care for the women they’re in love with. It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in love with is something colossal.’
‘I don’t believe a word of that, and what’s more you don’t either,’ she replied with anger. ‘However, we don’t agree; I only wanted you to understand.’ She shifted her position, as if she were about to go. An instinctive desire to prevent her from leaving the room made Ralph rise at this point and begin pacing up and down the nearly empty kitchen, checking his desire, each time he reached the door, to open it and step out into the garden. A moralist might have said that at this point his mind should have been full of self-reproach for the suffering he had caused. On the contrary, he was extremely angry, with the confused impotent anger of one who finds himself unreasonably but efficiently frustrated. He was trapped by the illogicality of human life. The obstacles in the way of his desire seemed to him purely artificial, and yet he could see no way of removing them. Mary’s words, the tone of her voice even, angered him, for she would not help him. She was part of the insanely jumbled muddle of a world which impedes the sensible life. He would have liked to slam the door or break the hind legs of a chair, for the obstacles had taken some such curiously substantial shape in his mind.
‘I doubt that one human being ever understands another,’ he said, stopping in his march and confronting Mary at a distance of a few feet.
‘Such damned liars as we all are, how can we? But we can try. If you don’t want to marry me, don’t; but the position you take up about love, and not seeing each other—isn’t that mere sentimentality? You think I’ve behaved very badly,’ he continued, as she did not speak. ‘Of course I behave badly; but you can’t judge people by what they do. You can’t go through life measuring right and wrong with a foot-rule. That’s what you’re always doing, Mary; that’s what you’re doing now.’
She saw herself in the Suffrage Office, delivering judgment, meting out right and wrong, and there seemed to her to be some justice in the charge, although it did not affect her main position.
‘I’m not angry with you,’ she said slowly. ‘I will go on seeing you, as I said I would.’
It was true that she had promised that much already, and it was difficult for him to say what more it was that he wanted—some intimacy, some help against the ghost of Katharine, perhaps, something that he knew he had no right to ask; and yet, as he sank into his chair and looked once more at the dying fire it seemed to him that he had been defeated, not so much by Mary as by life itself. He felt himself thrown back to the beginning of life again, where everything has yet to be won; but in extreme youth one has an ignorant hope. He was no longer certain that he would triumph.
CHAPTER XX
HAPPILY FOR MARY DATCHET she returned to the office to find that by some obscure Parliamentary manoeuvre the vote had once more slipped beyond the attainment of women. Mrs Seal was in a condition bordering upon frenzy. The duplicity of Ministers, the treachery of mankind, the insult to womanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of her life’s work, the feelings of her father’s daughter—all these topics were discussed in turn and the office was littered with newspaper cuttings branded with the blue, if ambiguous, marks of her displeasure. She confessed herself at fault in her estimate of human nature.
‘The simple elementary acts of justice,’ she said, waving her hand towards the window, and indicating the foot-passengers and omnibuses then passing down the far side of Russell Square, ‘are as far beyond them as they ever were. We can only look upon ourselves, Mary, as pioneers in a wilderness. We can only go on patiently putting the truth before them. It isn’t them,’ she continued, taking heart from her sight of the traffic, ‘it’s their leaders. It’s those gentlemen sitting in Parliament and drawing four hundred a year of the people’s money. If we had to put our case to the people, we should soon have justice done to us. I have always believed in the people, and I do so still. But—’ She shook her head and implied that she would give them one more chance, and if they didn’t take advantage of that she couldn’t answer for the consequences.
Mr Clacton’s attitude was more philosophical and better supported by statistics. He came into the room after Mrs Seal’s outburst and pointed out, with historical illustrations, that such reverses had happened in every political campaign of any importance. If anything, his spirits were improved by the disaster. The enemy, he said, had taken the offensive; and it was now up to the Society to outwit the enemy. He gave Mary to understand that he had taken the measure of their cunning, and had already bent his mind to the task which, so far as she could make out, depended solely upon him. It depended, so she came to think, when invited into his room for a private conference, upon a systematic revision of the card-index, upon the issue of certain new lemon-coloured leaflets, in which the facts were marshalled once more in a very striking way, and upon a large scale map of England dotted with little pins tufted with differently coloured plumes of hair according to their geographical position. Each district, under the new system, had its flag, its bottle of ink, its sheaf of documents tabulated and filed for reference in a drawer, so that by looking under M or S, as the case might be, you had all the facts with respect to the Suffrage organizations of that county at your fingers’ ends. This would require a great deal of work, of course.
‘We must try to consider ourselves rather in the light of a telephone exchange—for the exchange of ideas, Miss Datchet,’ he said; and taking pleasure in his image, he continued it. ‘We should consider ourselves the centre of an enormous system of wires, connecting us up with every district of the country. We must have our fingers upon the pulse of the community; we want to know what people all over England are thinking; we want to put them in the way of thinking rightly.’ The system, of course, was only roughly sketched so far—jotted down, in fact, during the Christmas holidays.