CHAPTER IX

 

'What a blotch!' said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley.  Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke.  The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach.  The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows.  'Our poor view!  It oughtn't to be allowed.  It really oughtn't.

      'Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,' quoted her brother George.

      The other young man was more practically minded.  'If one could plant a battery here,' he suggested, 'and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place ...'

      'It would be a good thing,' said Mary emphatically.  'A really good thing.'

      Her approval filled the military young man with happiness.  He was desperately in love.  'Heavy howitzers,' he added, trying to improve on his suggestion.  But George interrupted him.

      'Who the devil is that?' he asked.

      The others looked round in the direction he was pointing.  A stranger was walking up the hill towards them.

      'No idea,' said Mary, looking at him.

      The stranger approached.  He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind - for he wore no hat.  He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey flannel trousers.  His tie was red; he walked without a stick.

      'Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,' said George.

      And indeed, the young man was coming straight towards them.  He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important business.

      'What an extraordinary face!' thought Mary, as he approached.  'But how ill he looks!  So thin, so pale.'  But his eyes forbade her to feel pity.  They were bright with power.

      He came to a halt in front of them drawing up his thin body very rigidly, as though he were on parade.  There was defiance in the attitude, and earnest defiance in the expression of his face.  He looked at them fixedly with his bright eyes, turning from one to the other.

      'Good afternoon,' he said.  It was costing him an enormous effort to speak.  But speak he must, just because of that insolent unawareness in their blank rich faces.

      Mary answered for the others.  'Good afternoon.'

      'I'm trespassing here,' said the stranger.  'Do you mind?'  The seriousness of his defiance deepened.  He looked at them sombrely.  The young men were examining him from the other side of the bars, from a long way off, from the vantage ground of another class.  They had noticed his clothes.  There was hostility and contempt in their eyes.  There was also a kind of fear.  'I'm a trespasser,' he repeated.  His voice was rather shrill, but musical.  His accent was of the country.

      'One of the local cads,' George had been thinking.

      'A trespasser.'  It would have been much easier, much pleasanter to sneak out unobserved.  That was why he had to affront them.

      There was a silence.  The military man turned away.  He dissociated himself from the whole unpleasant business.  It had nothing to do with him, after all.  The park belonged to Mary's father.  He was only a guest.  'I've gotta motta: Always merry and bright,' he hummed to himself, as he looked out over the black town in the valley.

      It was George who broke the silence.  'Do we mind?' he said, repeating the stranger's words.  His face had gone very red.

      'How absurd he looks!' thought Mary, as she glanced at him.  'Like a bull calf.  A blushing bull calf.'

      'Do we mind?'  Damned insolent little bounder!  George was working up a righteous indignation.  'I should just think we do mind.  And I'll trouble you to ...'

      Mary broke out into laughter.  'We don't mind at all,' she said.  'Not in the least.'

      Her brother's face became even redder.  'What do you mean, Mary?' he asked furiously.  ('Always merry and bright,' hummed the military man, more starrily detached than ever.)  'The place is private.'

      'But we don't mind a bit,' she said, not looking at her brother, but at the stranger.  'Not a bit, when people come and are frank about it, like you.'  She smiled at him; but the young man's face remained as proudly serious as ever.  Looking into those serious bright eyes, she too suddenly became serious.  It was no joke, she saw all at once, no joke.  Grave issues were involved, important issues.  But why grave and in what way important she did not know.  She was only obscurely and profoundly aware that it was no joke.  'Goodbye,' she said in an altered voice, and held out her hand.

      The stranger hesitated for a second, then took it.  'Goodbye,' he said.  'I'll get out of the park as quick as I can.'  And turning round, he walked rapidly away.

      'What the devil!' George began, turning angrily on his sister.

      'Oh, hold your tongue!' she answered impatiently.

      'Shaking hands with the fellow,' he went on protesting.

      'A bit of a pleb, wasn't he?' put in the military friend.

      She looked from one to the other without speaking and walked away.  What louts they were!  The two young men followed.

      'I wish to God Mary would learn how to behave herself properly,' said George, still fuming.

      The military young man made deprecating noises.  He was in love with her; but he had to admit that she was rather embarrassingly unconventional sometimes.  It was her only defect.

      'Shaking that bounder's hand!' George went on grumbling.

      That was their first meeting.  Mary then was twenty-two and Mark Rampion was a year younger.  He had finished his second year at Sheffield University and was back at Stanton for the summer vacation.  His mother lived in one of a row of cottages near the station.  She had a little pension - her husband had been a postman - and made a few extra shillings by sewing.  Mark was a scholarship boy.  His younger and less talented brothers were already at work.

      'A very remarkable young man,' the Rector insisted more than once in the course of his sketch of Mark Rampion's career, some few days later.

      The occasion was a church bazaar and charitable garden party at the Rectory.  Some of the Sunday School children had acted a little play in the open air.  The dramatist was Mark Rampion.

      'Quite unassisted,' the Rector assured the assembled gentry.  'And what's more, the lad can draw.  They're a little eccentric perhaps, his pictures, a little ... ah ...' he hesitated.

      'Weird,' suggested his daughter, with an upper middle-class smile, proud of her incomprehension.

      'But full of talent,' the Rector continued.  'The boy's a real cygnet of Tees,' he added with a self-conscious, almost guilty laugh.  He had a weakness for literary allusions.  The gentry smiled perfunctorily.

      The prodigy was introduced.  Mary recognized the trespasser.

      'I've met you before,' she said.

      'Poaching your view.'

      'You're welcome to it.'  The words made him smile, a little ironically it seemed to her.  She blushed, fearful lest she had said something that might have sounded rather patronizing.  'But I suppose you'd go on poaching whether you were welcome or not,' she added with a nervous little laugh.

      He said nothing, but nodded, still smiling.

      Mary's father stepped in with congratulations.  His praises went trampling over the delicate little play like a herd of elephants.  Mary writhed.  It was all wrong, hopelessly wrong.  She could feel that.  But the trouble, as she realized, was that she couldn't have said anything better herself.  The ironic smile still lingered about his lips.  'What fools he must think us all!' she said to herself.

      And now it was her mother's turn.  'Jolly good' was replaced by 'too charming'.  Which was just as bad, just as hopelessly beside the point.

        When Mrs Felpham asked him to tea, Rampion wanted to refuse the invitation -  but to refuse it without being boorish or offensive.  After all, she meant well enough, poor woman.  She was only rather ludicrous.  The village Maecenas, in petticoats, patronizing art to the extent of two cups of tea and a slice of plum cake.  The rôle was a comic one.  While he was hesitating, Mary joined in the invitation.

      'Do come,' she insisted.  And her eyes, her smile expressed a kind of rueful amusement and an apology.  She saw the absurdity of the situation.  'But I can't do anything about it,' she seemed to say.  'Nothing at all.   Except apologize.'

      'I should like to come very much,' he said, turning back to Mrs Felpham.

      The appointed day came.  His tie as red as ever, Rampion presented himself.  The men were out fishing; he was received by Mary and her mother.  Mrs Felpham tried to rise to the occasion.  The village Shakespeare, it was obvious, must be interested in the drama.

      'Don't you love Barrie's plays?' she asked.  'I'm so fond of them.'  She talked on; Rampion made no comment.  It was only later, when Mrs Felpham had given him up as a bad job and had commissioned Mary to show him round the garden, that he opened his lips.

      'I'm afraid your mother thought me very rude,' he said, as they walked along the smooth flagged paths between the roses.

      'Of course not,' Mary protested with an excessive heartiness.

      Rampion laughed.  'Thank you,' he said.  'But of course she did.  Because I was rude in order that I shouldn't be ruder.  Better say nothing than say what I thought about Barrie.'

      'Don't you like his plays?'

      'Do I like them?  I?'  He stopped and looked at her.  The blood rushed up into her cheeks; what had she said?  'You can ask that here.'  He waved his hand at the flowers, the little pool with the fountain, the high terrace, with the stonecrops and the aubretias growing from between the stones, the grey, severe Georgian house beyond.  'But come down with me into Stanton and ask me there.  We're sitting on the hard reality down there, not with an air cushion between us and the facts.  You must have an assured five pounds a week at least, before you can begin to enjoy Barrie.  If you're sitting on the bare facts, he's an insult.'

      There was a silence.  They walked up and down among the roses - those roses which Mary was feeling that she ought to disclaim, to apologize for.  But a disclaimer, an apology would be an offence.  A big retriever puppy came frisking clumsily along the path towards them.  She called its name; the beast stood up on its hind legs and pawed at her.

      'I think I like animals better than people,' she said, as she protected herself from its ponderous playfulness.

      'Well, at least they're genuine, they don't live on air cushions like the sort of people you have to do with,' said Rampion, bringing out the obscure relevance of her remark to what had been said before.  Mary was amazed and delighted by the way he understood.

      'I'd like to know more of your sort of people,' she said; 'genuine people, people without air cushions.'

      'Well, don't imagine I'm going to do the Cook's guide for you,' he answered ironically.  'We're not a Zoo, you know; we're not natives in quaint costume, or anything of that sort.  If you want to go slumming, apply to the Rector.'

      She flushed very red.  'You know I wasn't meaning that,' she protested.

      'Are you sure?' he asked her.  'When one's rich, it's difficult not to mean that.  A person like you simply can't imagine what it is not to be rich.  Like a fish.  How can a fish imagine what life out of the water is like?'

      'But can't one discover, if one tries?'

      'There's a great gulf,' he answered.

      'It can be crossed.'

      'Yes, I suppose it can be crossed.'  But his tone was dubious.

      They walked and talked among the roses for a few minutes longer; then Rampion looked at his watch and said he must be going.

      'But you'll come again?'

      'Would there be much point in my coming again?' he asked.  'It's rather like interplanetary visiting, isn't it?'

      'I hadn't felt it like that,' she answered, and added, after a little pause, 'I suppose you find us all very stupid, don't you?'  She looked at him.  He had raised his eyebrows, he was about to protest.  She wouldn't allow him to be merely polite.  'Because, you know, we are stupid.  Terribly stupid.'  She laughed, rather ruefully.  With people of her own kind stupidity was rather a virtue than a defect.  To be too intelligent was to risk not being a gentleman.  Intelligence wasn't altogether safe.  Rampion had made her wonder whether there weren't better things than gentlemanly safety.  In his presence she didn't feel at all proud of being stupid.

      Rampion smiled at her.  He liked her frankness.  There was something genuine about her.  She hadn't been spoilt - not yet, at any rate.

      'I believe you're an agent provocateur,' he bantered, 'trying to tempt me to say rude and subversive things about my betters.  But as a matter of fact, my opinions aren't a bit rude.  You people aren't stupider than anyone else.  Not naturally stupider.  You're victims of your way of living.  It's put a shell round you and blinkers over your eyes.  By nature a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird.  But you must admit that its way of living doesn't exactly encourage intelligence.'

      They met again several times in the course of that summer.  Most often they walked together over the moors.  'Like a force of nature,' he thought as he watched her with bent head tunnelling her way through the damp wind.  A great physical force.  Such energy, such strength and health - it was magnificent.  Rampion himself had been a delicate child, constantly ailing.  He admired the physical qualities he did not himself possess.  Mary was a sort of berserker Diana of the moors.  He told her as much one day.  She liked the compliment.

      'Wass für ein Atavismus!  That was what my old German governess used to say about me.  She was right, I think.  I am a bit of an Atavismus.'

      Rampion laughed.  'It sounds ridiculous in German.   But it isn't at all absurd in itself.  An atavismus - that's what we all ought to be.  Atavismuses with all modern conveniences.  Intelligent primitives.  Big game with a soul.'

      It was a wet cold summer.  On the morning of the day fixed for their next meeting, Mary received a letter from him.  'Dear Miss Felpham,' she read, and this first sight of his handwriting gave her a strange pleasure.  'I've idiotically gone and caught a chill.  Will you be more forgiving than I am - for I can't tell you how inexpressibly disgusted and angry I am with myself - and excuse me for putting you off till today week?'

      He looked pale and thin, when she next saw him, and was still troubled by a cough.  When she enquired about his health, he cut her short almost with anger.  'I'm quite all right,' he said sharply, and changed the subject.

      'I've been re-reading Blake,' he said.  And he began to speak about the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

      'Blake was civilized,' he insisted, 'civilized.  Civilization is a harmony and completeness.  Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body - Blake managed to include and harmonize everything.  Barbarism is being lopsided.  You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body.  A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality.  Christianity made us barbarians of the soul, and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect.  Blake was the last civilized man.'

      He spoke of the Greeks and those naked sunburnt Etruscans in the sepulchral wall paintings.  'You've seen the originals?' he said.  'My word, I envy you.'

      Mary felt terribly ashamed.  She had seen the painted tombs at Tarquinia; but how little she remembered of them!  They had just been curious old works of art like all those other innumerable old works of art she had dutifully seen in company with her mother on their Italian journey the year before.  They had really been wasted on her.  Whereas if he could have afforded to go to Italy ...

      'They were civilized,' he was saying, 'they knew how to live harmoniously and completely, with their whole being.'  He spoke with a kind of passion, as though he were angry - with the world, with himself, perhaps.  'We're all barbarians,' he began; but was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing.  Mary waited for the paroxysm to subside.  She felt anxious and at the same time embarrassed and ashamed, as one feels when one has come upon a man off his guard and displaying a weakness which at ordinary times he is at pains to conceal.  She wondered whether she ought to say something sympathetic about the cough, or pretend that she hadn't noticed it.  He solved her problem by referring to it himself.

      'Talk of barbarism,' he said, when the fit was over.  He spoke in a tone of disgust, his smile was wry and angry.  'Have you ever heard anything more barbarous than that cough?  A cough like that wouldn't be allowed in a civilized society.'

      Mary proffered solicitude and advice.  He laughed impatiently.

      'My mother's very words,' he said.  'Word for word.  You women are all the same.  Clucking like hens after their chickens.'

      'But think how miserable you'd be if we didn't cluck!'

      A few days later - with some misgivings - he took her to see his mother.  The misgivings were groundless; Mary and Mrs Rampion seemed to find no difficulties in making spiritual contact.  Mrs Rampion was a woman of about fifty, still handsome and with an expression on her face of calm dignity and resignation.  Her speech was slow and quiet.  Only once did Mary see her manner change and that was when, Mark being out of the room preparing the tea, she began to talk about her son.

      'What do you think of him?' she asked, leaning forward towards her guest with a sudden brightening of the eyes.

      'What do I think?' Mary laughed. 'I'm not impertinent enough to set up as a judge of my betters.  But he's obviously somebody, somebody that matters.'

      Mrs Rampion nodded, smiling with pleasure.  'He's somebody,' she repeated.  'That's what I've always said.'  Her face became grave.  'If only he were stronger!  If I could only have afforded to bring him up better.  He was always delicate.  He ought to have been brought up more carefully than I could do.  No, not more carefully.  I was as careful as I could be.  More comfortably, more healthily.  But there, I couldn't afford it.'  She shook her head.  'There you are.'  She gave a little sigh and, leaning back in her chair, sat there in silence, with folded arms, looking at the floor.

      Mary made no comment; she did not know what to say.  Once more she felt ashamed, miserable and ashamed.

      'What did you think of my mother?' Rampion asked later, when he was escorting her home.

      'I liked her,' Mary answered.  'Very much indeed.  Even though she did make me feel so small and petty and bad.  Which is another way of saying that I admired her, and liked her because of my admiration.'

      Rampion nodded.  'She is admirable,' he said.  'She's courageous and strong and enduring.  But she's too resigned.'

      'But I thought that was one of the wonderful things about her.'

      'She has no right to be resigned,' he answered, frowning.  'No right.  When you've had a life like hers, you oughtn't to be resigned.  You ought to be rebellious.  It's this damned religion.  Did I tell you she was religious?'

      'No; but I guessed it, when I saw her,' Mary answered.

      'She's a barbarian of the soul,' he went on.  'All soul and future.  No present, no past, no body, no intellect.  Only the soul and the future and in the meantime resignation.  Could anything be more barbarous?  She ought to rebel.'

      'I should leave her as she is,' said Mary.  'She'll be happier.  And you can rebel enough for two.'

      Rampion laughed.  'I'll rebel enough for millions,' he said.

      At the end of the summer, Rampion returned to Sheffield, and a little later the Felphams moved southwards to their London house.  It was Mary who wrote the first letter.  She had expected to hear from him; but he did not write.  Not that there was any good reason why he should.  But somehow she had expected that he would write; she was disappointed when he did not.  The weeks passed.  In the end she wrote to ask him the name of a book about which he had spoken in one of their conversations.  The pretext was flimsy; but it served.  He answered; she thanked him; the correspondence became an established fact.

      At Christmas Rampion came up to London; he had had some things accepted by the newspapers and was unprecedentedly rich - he had ten pounds to do what he liked with.  He did not let Mary know of his proximity till the day before his departure.

      'But why didn't you tell me before?' she asked reproachfully, when she heard how many days he had already been in London.

      'I didn't want to inflict myself on you,' he answered.

      'But you know I should have been delighted.'

      'You have your own friends.'  Rich friends, the ironical smile implied.

      'But aren't you one of my friends?' she asked, ignoring the implication.

      'Thank you for saying so.'

      'Thank you for being so,' she answered without affectation or coquetry.

      He was moved by the frankness of her avowal, the genuineness and simplicity of her sentiment.  He knew, of course, that she liked and admired him; but to know and to be told are different things.

      'I'm sorry, then, I didn't write to you before,' he said, and then regretted his words.  For they were hypocritical.  The real reason why he had kept away from her was not a fear of being badly received; it was pride.  He could not afford to take her out; he did not want to accept anything.

      They spent the afternoon together and were unreasonably, disproportionately happy.

      'If only you'd told me before,' she repeated when it was time for her to go.  'I wouldn't have made this tiresome engagement for the evening.'

      'You'll enjoy it,' he assured her with a return of that ironical tone in which all his references to her life as a member of the monied class were made.  The expression of happiness faded from his face.  He felt suddenly rather resentful at having been so happy in her company.  It was stupid to feel like that.  What was the point of being happy on opposite sides of the gulf?  'You'll enjoy it,' he repeated, more bitterly.  'Good food and wine, distinguished people, witty conversation, the theatre afterwards.  Isn't it the ideal evening?'  His tone was savagely contemptuous.

      She looked at him with sad, pained eyes, wondering why he should suddenly have started thus to lay waste retrospectively to their afternoon.  'I don't know why you talk like that,' she said.  'Do you know yourself?'

      The question reverberated in his mind long after they had parted.  'Do you know yourself?'  Of course he knew.  But he also knew that there was a gulf.

      They met again at Stanton in Easter week.  In the interval they had exchanged many letters, and Mary had received a proposal of marriage from the military friend who had wanted to obliterate Stanton with howitzers.  To the surprise and somewhat to the distress of her relations, she refused him.

      'He's such a nice boy,' her mother had insisted.

      'I know. But one simply can't take him seriously, can one?'

      'Why not?'

      'And then,' Mary continued, 'he doesn't really exist.  He isn't completely there.  Just a lump; nothing more.  One can't marry someone who isn't there.'  She thought of Rampion's violently living face; it seemed to burn, it seemed to be sharp and glowing.  'One can't marry a ghost, even when it's tangible and lumpy - particularly when it's lumpy.'  She burst out laughing.

      'I don't know what you're talking about,' said Mrs Felpham with dignity.

      'But I do,' Mary answered.  'I do.  And after all, that's what chiefly matters in the circumstances.'

      Walking with Rampion on the moors, she told him of the laying of this too, too solid military phantom.  He made no comment.  There was a long silence.  Mary felt disappointed and at the same time ashamed of her disappointment.  'I believe,' she said to herself, 'I believe I was trying to get him to propose to me.'

      The days passed; Rampion was silent and gloomy.  When she asked him the reason, he talked unhappily about his future prospects.  At the end of the summer, he would have finished his university course; it would be time to think of a career.  The only career that seemed to be immediately open - for he could not afford to wait - was teaching.

      'Teaching,' he repeated with emphatic horror, 'teaching!  Does it surprise you that I should feel depressed?'  But his misery had other causes besides the prospect of having to teach.  'What she laugh at me, if I asked her?' he was wondering.  He didn't think she would.  But if she wasn't going to refuse, was it fair on his part to ask?  Was it fair to let her in for the kind of life she would have to lead with him?  Or perhaps she had money of her own; and in that case his own honour would be involved.

      'Do you see me as a pedagogue?' he asked aloud.  The pedagogue was his scapegoat.

      'But why should you be a pedagogue, when you can write and draw?  You can live on your wits.'

      'But can I?  At least pedagogy's safe.'

      'What do you want to be safe for?' she asked, almost contemptuously.

      Rampion laughed.  'You wouldn't ask if you'd had to live on a weekly wage, subject to a week's notice.  Nothing like money for promoting courage and self-confidence.'

      'Well then, to that extent money's a good thing.  Courage and self-confidence are virtues.'

      They walked on for a long time in silence.  'Well, well,' said Rampion at last, looking up at her, 'you've brought it on yourself.'  He made an attempt at laughter.  'Courage and self-confidence are virtues; you said so yourself.  I'm only trying to live up to your moral standards.  Courage and self-confidence!  I'm going to tell you that I love you.'  There was another long silence.  He waited; his heart was beating as though with fear.

      'Well?' he questioned at last.  Mary turned towards him and, taking his hand, lifted it to her lips.

      Before and after their marriage Rampion had many occasions of admiring those wealth-fostered virtues.  It was she who made him give up all thought of teaching and trust exclusively to his wits for a career.  She had confidence for both.

      'I'm not going to marry a schoolmaster,' she insisted.  And she didn't; she married a dramatist who had never had a play performed, except at the Stanton-in-Teesdale church bazaar, a painter who had never sold a picture.

      'We shall starve,' he prophesied.  The spectre of hunger haunted him; he had seen it too often to be able to ignore its existence.

      'Nonsense,' said Mary, strong in the knowledge that people didn't starve.  Nobody that she knew had ever been hungry.  'Nonsense.'  She had her way in the end.

      What made Rampion the more reluctant to take the unsafe course was the fact that it could only be taken at Mary's expense.

      'I can't live on you,' he said.  'I can't take your money.'

      'But you're not taking my money,' she insisted, 'you're simply an investment.  I'm putting up capital in the hope of getting a good return.  You shall live on me for a year or two, so that I may live on you for the rest of my life.  It's business; it's positively sharp practice.'

      He had to laugh.

      'And in any case,' she continued, 'you won't live very long on me.  Eight hundred pounds won't last for ever.'

      He agreed at last to borrow her eight hundred pounds at the current rate of interest.  He did it reluctantly, feeling that he was somehow betraying his own people.  To start life with eight hundred pounds - it was too easy, it was a shirking of difficulties, a taking of unfair advantages.  If it had not been for that sense of responsibility which he felt towards his own talents, he would have refused the money and either desperately risked the career of literature without a penny, or gone the safe and pedagogical way.  When at last he consented to take the money, he made it a condition that she should never accept anything from her relations.  Mary agreed.

      'Not that they'll be very anxious to give me anything.' she added with a laugh.

      She was right.  Her father's horror at the misalliance was as profound as she had expected.  Mary was in no danger, so far as he was concerned, of becoming rich.

      They were married in August and immediately went abroad.  They took the train as far as Dijon and from there began to walk south-east, towards Italy.  Rampion had never been out of England before.  The strangeness of France was symbolical to him of the new life he had just begun, the new liberty he had acquired.  And Mary herself was no less symbolically novel than the country through which they travelled.  She had not only self-confidence, but a recklessness which was altogether strange and extraordinary in his eyes.  Little incidents impressed him.  There was that occasion, for example, when she left her spare pair of shoes behind in the farm where they had spent the night.  It was only late in the afternoon that she discovered her loss.  Rampion suggested that they should walk back and reclaim them.  She would not hear of it.

      'They're gone,' she said.  'It's no use bothering.  Let the boots bury their boots.'  He got quite angry with her.  'Remember you're not rich any more,' he insisted.  'You can't afford to throw away a good pair of shoes.  We shan't be able to buy a new pair till we get home.'  They had taken a small sum with them for their journey and had vowed that in no circumstances would they spend more.  'Not till we get home,' he repeated.

      'I know, I know,' she answered impatiently.  'I shall learn to walk barefoot.'

      And she did.

      'I was born to be a tramp,' she declared one evening when they were lying on hay in a barn.  'I can't tell you how I enjoy not being respectable.  It's the Atavismus coming out.  You bother too much, Mark.  Consider the lilies of the field.'

      'And yet,' Rampion meditated, 'Jesus was a poor man.  Tomorrow's bread and boots must have mattered a great deal in his family.  How was it that he could talk about the future like a millionaire?'

      'Because he was one of nature's dukes,' she answered.  'That's why.  He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king.  Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they're terribly preoccupied about tomorrow.  Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down.  None of your titled financiers or soap boilers.  A genuine aristocrat.  And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius.  He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and tomorrow.'  She was silent for a little and then added, as an afterthought: 'And what's more, he wasn't respectable.  He didn't care about appearances.  They have their reward.  But I don't mind if we do look like scarecrows.'

      'You've paid yourself a nice lot of compliments,' said Rampion.  But he meditated her words and her spontaneous, natural, untroubled way of living.  He envied her her Atavismus.

      It was not merely tramping that Mary liked.  She got almost as much enjoyment out of the more prosaic settled life they led, when they returned to England.  'Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon,' was what Rampion called her, when he saw her cooking the dinner; she did it with such child-like enthusiasm.

      'Think carefully,' he had warned her before they married.  'You're going to be poor.  Really poor; not poor on a thousand a year like your impecunious friends.  There'll be no servants.  You'll have to cook and mend and do housework.  You won't find it pleasant.'

      Mary only laughed.  'You'll be the one who won't find it pleasant,' she answered, 'at any rate until I've learnt to cook.'

      She had never so much as friend an egg when she married him.

      Strangely enough that child-like, Marie-Antoinette-ish enthusiasm for doing things - for cooking on a real range, using a real carpet sweeper, a real sewing machine - survived the first novel and exciting months.  She went on enjoying herself.

      'I could never go back to being a perfect lady,' she used to say.  'It would bore me to death.  Goodness knows, housework and managing and looking after the children can be boring and exasperating enough.  But being quite out of touch with all the ordinary facts of existence, living in a different planet from the world of daily, physical reality - that's much worse.'

      Rampion was of the same opinion.  He refused to make art and thought excuses for living a life of abstraction.  In the intervals of painting and writing he helped Mary with the housework.

      'You don't expect flowers to grow in nice clean vacuums.'  That was his argument.  'They need mould and clay and dung.  So does art.'

      For Rampion, there was also a kind of moral compulsion to live the life of the poor.  Even when he was making quite a reasonable income, they kept only one maid and continued to do a great part of the housework themselves.  It was a case, with him, of noblesse oblige - or rather roture oblige.  To live like the rich, in a comfortable abstraction from material cares would be, he felt, a kind of betrayal of his class, his own people.  If he sat still and paid servants to work for him, he would somehow be insulting his mother's memory, he would be posthumously telling her that he was too good to lead the life she had led.

      There were occasions when he hated this moral compulsion, because he felt that it was compelling him to do foolish and ridiculous things; and hating, he would try to rebel against it.  How absurdly shocked he had been, for example, by Mary's habit of lying in bed of a morning.  When she felt lazy, she didn't get up; and there was an end of it.  The first time it happened, Rampion was really distressed.

      'But you can't stay in bed all the morning,' he protested.

      'Why not?'

      'Why not?  Because you can't.'

      'But I can,' said Mary calmly.  'And I do.'

      It shocked him.  Unreasonably, as he perceived when he tried to analyse his feelings.  But all the same, he was shocked.  He was shocked because he had always got up early himself, because all his people had had to get up early.  It shocked him that one should lie in bed while other people were up and working.  To get up late was somehow to add insult to injury.  And yet, obviously, getting up early oneself, unnecessarily, did nothing to help those who had to get up early.  Getting up, when one wasn't compelled to get up, was just a tribute of respect, like taking off one's hat in a church.  And at the same time it was an act of propitiation, a sacrificial appeasement of the conscience.

      'One oughtn't to feel like that,' he reflected.  'Imagine a Greek feeling like that!'

      It was unimaginable.  And yet the fact remained that, however much he might disapprove of the feeling, he did in fact feel like that.

      'Mary's healthier than I am,' he though; and he remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals.  ''They do not sweat and whine about their condition.  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.'  Mary was like that and it was good.  To be a perfect animal and a perfect human - that was the ideal.  All the same, he was shocked when she didn't get up in the morning.  He tried not to be; but he was shocked.  Rebelling, he would sometimes lie in bed himself till noon, on principle.  It was a duty not to be a barbarian of the conscience.  But it was a very long time before he could genuinely enjoy his laziness.

      Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him.  During those first months of their marriage he was often, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her.  Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly.  The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.

      'You're such an absurd old puritan,' she told him.

      The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded.  By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he was half a puritan.  His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being.  Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice.  The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself.  Theoretically, he approved of Mary's easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification.  And yet, whenever, in those early days, she began to talk in her calm matter-of-fact way of what he had only heard of, portentously, as fornication and adultery, he felt a shock, not in his reason (for that, after a moment's reflection, approved), but in some deeper layer of his being.  And the same part of him obscurely suffered from her great and wholeheartedly expressed capacity for pleasure and amusement, from her easy laughter, her excellent appetite, her unaffected sensuality.  It took him a long time to unlearn the puritanism of his childhood.  There were moments when his love for his mother turned almost to hatred.

      'She had no right to bring me up like that,' he said.  'Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree.  No right.'

      And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary.  He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery.  Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.

      'Living comes to you too easily,' he tried to explain.  'You live by instinct.  You know what to do quite naturally, like an insect when it comes out of the pupa.  It's too simple, too simple.'  He shook his head.  'You haven't earned your knowledge, you've never realized the alternatives.'

      'In other words,' said Mary, 'I'm a fool.'

      'No, a woman.'

      'Which is your polite way of saying the same thing.  But I'd like to know,' she went on with an irrelevance that was only apparent, 'where you'd be without me.  I'd like to know what you'd be doing if you'd never met me.'  She moved from stage to stage of an emotionally coherent argument.

      'I'd be where I am and be doing exactly what I'm doing now.'  He didn't mean it, of course; for he knew, better than anyone, how much he owed to her, how much he had learnt from her example and precept.  But it amused him to annoy her.

      'You know that's not true,' Mary was indignant.

      'It is true.'

      'It's a lie.  And to prove it,' she added, 'I've a very good mind to go away with the children and leave you for a few months to stew in your own juice.  I'd like to see how you get on without me.'

      'I should get on perfectly well,' he assured her with exasperating calmness.

      Mary flushed; she was beginning to be genuinely annoyed.  'Very well then,' she answered, 'I'll really go.  This time I really will.'  She had made the threat before; they quarrelled a good deal, for both were quick-tempered.

      'Do,' said Rampion.  'But remember that two can play at that going-away game.  When you go away from me, I go away from you.'

      'We'll see how you get on without me,' she continued menacingly.

      'And you?' he asked.

      'What about me?'

      'Do you imagine that you can get on any better without me than I can get on without you?'

      They looked at one another for a little time in silence and then, simultaneously, burst out laughing.