In six months’ time Miss Mary had married Mr Massy. There had been no
love-making, nobody had made any remark. But everybody was tense and callous
with expectation. When one day Mr Massy asked for Mary’s hand, Mr Lindley
started and trembled from the thin, abstract voice of the little man. Mr Massy
was very nervous, but so curiously absolute.
“I shall be very glad,” said the vicar, “but of course the
decision lies with Mary herself.” And his still feeble hand shook as he
moved a Bible on his desk.
The small man, keeping fixedly to his idea, padded out of the room to find Miss
Mary. He sat a long time by her, while she made some conversation, before he
had readiness to speak. She was afraid of what was coming, and sat stiff in
apprehension. She felt as if her body would rise and fling him aside. But her
spirit quivered and waited. Almost in expectation she waited, almost wanting
him. And then she knew he would speak.
“I have already asked Mr Lindley,” said the clergyman, while
suddenly she looked with aversion at his little knees, “if he would
consent to my proposal.” He was aware of his own disadvantage, but his
will was set.
She went cold as she sat, and impervious, almost as if she had become stone. He
waited a moment nervously. He would not persuade her. He himself never even
heard persuasion, but pursued his own course. He looked at her, sure of
himself, unsure of her, and said:
“Will you become my wife, Mary?”
Still her heart was hard and cold. She sat proudly.
“I should like to speak to mama first,” she said.
“Very well,” replied Mr Massy. And in a moment he padded away.
Mary went to her mother. She was cold and reserved.
“Mr Massy has asked me to marry him, mama,” she said. Mrs Lindley
went on staring at her book. She was cramped in her feeling.
“Well, and what did you say?”
They were both keeping calm and cold.
“I said I would speak to you before answering him.”
This was equivalent to a question. Mrs Lindley did not want to reply to it. She
shifted her heavy form irritably on the couch. Miss Mary sat calm and straight,
with closed mouth.
“Your father thinks it would not be a bad match,” said the mother,
as if casually.
Nothing more was said. Everybody remained cold and shut-off. Miss Mary did not
speak to Miss Louisa, the Reverend Ernest Lindley kept out of sight.
At evening Miss Mary accepted Mr Massy.
“Yes, I will marry you,” she said, with even a little movement of
tenderness towards him. He was embarrassed, but satisfied. She could see him
making some movement towards her, could feel the male in him, something cold
and triumphant, asserting itself. She sat rigid, and waited.
When Miss Louisa knew, she was silent with bitter anger against everybody, even
against Mary. She felt her faith wounded. Did the real things to her not matter
after all? She wanted to get away. She thought of Mr Massy. He had some curious
power, some unanswerable right. He was a will that they could not
controvert.—Suddenly a flush started in her. If he had come to her she
would have flipped him out of the room. He was never going to touch her.
And she was glad. She was glad that her blood would rise and exterminate the
little man, if he came too near to her, no matter how her judgment was
paralysed by him, no matter how he moved in abstract goodness. She thought she
was perverse to be glad, but glad she was. “I would just flip him out of
the room,” she said, and she derived great satisfaction from the open
statement. Nevertheless, perhaps she ought still to feel that Mary, on her
plane, was a higher being than herself. But then Mary was Mary, and she was
Louisa, and that also was inalterable.
Mary, in marrying him, tried to become a pure reason such as he was, without
feeling or impulse. She shut herself up, she shut herself rigid against the
agonies of shame and the terror of violation which came at first. She
would not feel, and she would not feel. She was a pure will
acquiescing to him. She elected a certain kind of fate. She would be good and
purely just, she would live in a higher freedom than she had ever known, she
would be free of mundane care, she was a pure will towards right. She had sold
herself, but she had a new freedom. She had got rid of her body. She had sold a
lower thing, her body, for a higher thing, her freedom from material things.
She considered that she paid for all she got from her husband. So, in a kind of
independence, she moved proud and free. She had paid with her body: that was
henceforward out of consideration. She was glad to be rid of it. She had bought
her position in the world—that henceforth was taken for granted. There
remained only the direction of her activity towards charity and high-minded
living.
She could scarcely bear other people to be present with her and her husband.
Her private life was her shame. But then, she could keep it hidden. She lived
almost isolated in the rectory of the tiny village miles from the railway. She
suffered as if it were an insult to her own flesh, seeing the repulsion which
some people felt for her husband, or the special manner they had of treating
him, as if he were a “case”. But most people were uneasy before
him, which restored her pride.
If she had let herself, she would have hated him, hated his padding round the
house, his thin voice devoid of human understanding, his bent little shoulders
and rather incomplete face that reminded her of an abortion. But rigorously she
kept to her position. She took care of him and was just to him. There was also
a deep craven fear of him, something slave-like.
There was not much fault to be found with his behaviour. He was scrupulously
just and kind according to his lights. But the male in him was cold and
self-complete, and utterly domineering. Weak, insufficient little thing as he
was, she had not expected this of him. It was something in the bargain she had
not understood. It made her hold her head, to keep still. She knew, vaguely,
that she was murdering herself. After all, her body was not quite so easy to
get rid of. And this manner of disposing of it—ah, sometimes she felt she
must rise and bring about death, lift her hand for utter denial of everything,
by a general destruction.
He was almost unaware of the conditions about him. He did not fuss in the
domestic way, she did as she liked in the house. Indeed, she was a great deal
free of him. He would sit obliterated for hours. He was kind, and almost
anxiously considerate. But when he considered he was right, his will was just
blindly male, like a cold machine. And on most points he was logically right,
or he had with him the right of the creed they both accepted. It was so. There
was nothing for her to go against.
Then she found herself with child, and felt for the first time horror, afraid
before God and man. This also she had to go through—it was the right.
When the child arrived, it was a bonny, healthy lad. Her heart hurt in her
body, as she took the baby between her hands. The flesh that was trampled and
silent in her must speak again in the boy. After all, she had to live—it
was not so simple after all. Nothing was finished completely. She looked and
looked at the baby, and almost hated it, and suffered an anguish of love for
it. She hated it because it made her live again in the flesh, when she
could not live in the flesh, she could not. She wanted to trample her
flesh down, down, extinct, to live in the mind. And now there was this child.
It was too cruel, too racking. For she must love the child. Her purpose was
broken in two again. She had to become amorphous, purposeless, without real
being. As a mother, she was a fragmentary, ignoble thing.
Mr Massy, blind to everything else in the way of human feeling, became obsessed
by the idea of his child. When it arrived, suddenly it filled the whole world
of feeling for him. It was his obsession, his terror was for its safety and
well-being. It was something new, as if he himself had been born a naked
infant, conscious of his own exposure, and full of apprehension. He who had
never been aware of anyone else, all his life, now was aware of nothing but the
child. Not that he ever played with it, or kissed it, or tended it. He did
nothing for it. But it dominated him, it filled, and at the same time emptied
his mind. The world was all baby for him.
This his wife must also bear, his question: “What is the reason that he
cries?”—his reminder, at the first sound: “Mary, that is the
child,”—his restlessness if the feeding-time were five minutes
past. She had bargained for this—now she must stand by her bargain.
