thoughts.
“Yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do it,” Mary said at last.
The casual and rather hurried way in which she spoke,
together with the fact that she was saying the exact opposite
of what he expected her to say, baffled him so
much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon her
arm and she withdrew it quietly.
“You couldn’t do it?” he asked.
“No, I couldn’t marry you,” she replied.
“You don’t care for me?”
She made no answer.
“Well, Mary,” he said, with a curious laugh, “I must be
an arrant fool, for I thought you did.” They walked for a
minute or two in silence, and suddenly he turned to her,
looked at her, and exclaimed: “I don’t believe you, Mary.
You’re not telling me the truth.”
“I’m too tired to argue, Ralph,” she replied, turning her
head away from him. “I ask you to believe what I say. I
can’t marry you; I don’t want to marry you.”
The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the
voice of one in some extremity of anguish that Ralph had
no course but to obey her. And as soon as the tone of her
voice had died out, and the surprise faded from his mind,
he found himself believing that she had spoken the truth,
for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed
a natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades
of despondency until he reached a bottom of absolute
gloom. Failure seemed to mark the whole of his life; he
had failed with Katharine, and now he had failed with
Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and
with it a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked
instantly. No good had ever come to him from Katharine;
his whole relationship with her had been made up of
dreams; and as he thought of the little substance there
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had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the
present catastrophe upon his dreams.
“Haven’t I always been thinking of Katharine while I
was with Mary? I might have loved Mary if it hadn’t been
for that idiocy of mine. She cared for me once, I’m certain
of that, but I tormented her so with my humors that
I let my chances slip, and now she won’t risk marrying
me. And this is what I’ve made of my life—nothing, nothing,
nothing.”
The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to
asseverate nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that
this silence was the silence of relief; his depression she
ascribed to the fact that he had seen Katharine and parted
from her, leaving her in the company of William Rodney.
She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that,
when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him—
that seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship
and its firm base upon indestructible qualities of
character crumbled, and her whole past seemed foolish,
herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shell of
an honest man. Oh, the past—so much made up of Ralph;
and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and
false and other than she had thought it. She tried to
recapture a saying she had made to help herself that
morning, as Ralph paid the bill for luncheon; but she
could see him paying the bill more vividly than she could
remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it;
how to see the truth is our great chance in this world.
“If you don’t want to marry me,” Ralph now began again,
without abruptness, with diffidence rather, “there is no
need why we should cease to see each other, is there? Or
would you rather that we should keep apart for the
present?”
“Keep apart? I don’t know—I must think about it.”
“Tell me one thing, Mary,” he resumed; “have I done
anything to make you change your mind about me?”
She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural
trust in him, revived by the deep and now melancholy
tones of his voice, and to tell him of her love, and of
what had changed it. But although it seemed likely that
she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty
that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his
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proposal, forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him
speak and to feel herself unable to reply, or constrained
in her replies, was so painful that she longed for the time
when she should be alone. A more pliant woman would
have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks
attached to it; but to one of Mary’s firm and resolute
temperament there was degradation in the idea of self-
abandonment; let the waves of emotion rise ever so high,
she could not shut her eyes to what she conceived to be
the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his
memory for words or deeds that might have made her
think badly of him. In his present mood instances came
but too quickly, and on top of them this culminating
proof of his baseness—that he had asked her to marry
him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish
and half-hearted.
“You needn’t answer,” he said grimly. “There are reasons
enough, I know. But must they kill our friendship,
Mary? Let me keep that, at least.”
“Oh,” she thought to herself, with a sudden rush of
anguish which threatened disaster to her self-respect,
“it has come to this—to this—when I could have given
him everything!”
“Yes, we can still be friends,” she said, with what firmness
she could muster.
“I shall want your friendship,” he said. He added, “If
you find it possible, let me see you as often as you can.
The oftener the better. I shall want your help.”
She promised this, and they went on to talk calmly of
things that had no reference to their feelings—a talk which,
in its constraint, was infinitely sad to both of them.
One more reference was made to the state of things
between them late that night, when Elizabeth had gone
to her room, and the two young men had stumbled off to
bed in such a state of sleep that they hardly felt the floor
beneath their feet after a day’s shooting.
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
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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
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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
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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 maneuver 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
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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-colored leaflets, in which
the facts were marshaled once more in a very striking
way, and upon a large scale map of England dotted with
little pins tufted with differently colored 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.
