“Such a wonderful man!” Mrs. Betterton exclaimed before he was well out of earshot. “It must be wonderful for you to work with him.”
“He’s a very good editor,” said Walter.
“But I was thinking of his personality. How shall I say? The spiritual quality of the man.”
Walter nodded and said, “Yes,” rather vaguely. The spiritual quality of Burlap was just the thing he wasn’t very enthusiastic about.
“In an age like ours,” Mrs. Betterton continued, “he’s an oasis in the desert of stupid frivolity and cynicism.”
“Some of his ideas are first-rate,” Walter cautiously agreed.
He wondered how soon he could decently make his escape.
“There’s Walter,” said Lady Edward.
“Walter who?” asked Bidlake. Borne by the social currents, they had drifted together again.
“Your Walter.”
“Oh, mine.” He was not much interested, but he followed the direction of her glance. “What a weed!” he said. He disliked his children for growing up; growing, they pushed him backward, year after year, backward toward the gulf and the darkness. There was Walter; it was only yesterday he was born. And yet the fellow must be five and twenty, if he was a day.
“Poor Walter; he doesn’t look at all well.”
“Looks as though he had worms,” said Bidlake ferociously.
“How’s that deplorable affair of his going?” she asked.
Bidlake shrugged his shoulders. “As usual, I suppose.”
“I never met the woman.”
“I did. She’s awful.”
“What, vulgar?”
“No, no. I wish she were,” protested Bidlake. “She’s refined, terribly refined. And she speaks like this.” He spoke in a drawling falsetto that was meant to be an imitation of Marjorie’s voice. “Like a sweet little innocent girlie. And so serious, such a highbrow.” He interrupted the imitation with his own deep laugh. “Do you know what she said to me once? I may mention that she always talks to me about Art. Art with the capital A. She said [his voice went up again to the babyish falsetto]: ‘I think there’s a place for Fra Angelico and Rubens.’ ” He laughed again, homerically. “What an imbecile! And she has a nose that’s at least three inches too long.”
Marjorie had opened the box in which she kept her private papers. All Walter’s letters. She untied the ribbon and looked them over one by one. “Dear Mrs. Carling, I enclose under separate cover that volume of Keats’s Letters I mentioned today. Please do not trouble to return it. I have another copy, which I shall reread for the pleasure of accompanying you, even at a distance, through the same spiritual adventure.”
That was the first of them. She read it through and recaptured in memory something of the pleased surprise which that passage about the spiritual adventure had originally evoked in her. In conversation he had always seemed to shrink from the direct and personal approach, he was painfully shy. She hadn’t expected him to write like that. Later, when he had written to her often, she became accustomed to his peculiarities. She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face. All his love—all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent—was in his letters. The arrangement suited Marjorie perfectly. She would have liked to go on indefinitely making cultured and verbally burning love by post. She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination. A correspondence course of passion was, for her, the perfect and ideal relationship with a man. Better still were personal relationships with women; for women had all the good qualities of men at a distance, with the added advantage of being actually there. They could be in the room with you and yet demand no more than a man at the other end of a system of post offices. With his face-to-face shyness and his postal freedom and ardour, Walter had seemed in Marjorie’s eyes to combine the best points of both sexes. And then he was so deeply, so flatteringly interested in everything she did and thought and felt. Poor Marjorie was not much used to having people interested in her.
“Sphinx,” she read in the third of his letters. (He had called her that because of her enigmatic silences. Carling, for the same reason, had called her Turnip or Dumbbell.) “Sphinx, why do you hide yourself inside such a shell of silence? One would think you were ashamed of your goodness and sweetness and intelligence. But they pop their heads out all the same and in spite of you.”
The tears came into her eyes. He had been so kind to her, so tender and gentle. And now …
“Love,” she read dimly, through the tears, in the next letter, “love can transform physical into spiritual desire; it has the magic power to turn the body into pure soul. …”
Yes, he had had those desires too. Even he. All men had, she supposed. Rather dreadful. She shuddered, remembering Carling, remembering even Walter, with something of the same horror. Yes, even Walter, though he had been so gentle and considerate. Walter had understood what she felt. That made it all the more extraordinary that he should be behaving as he was behaving now. It was as though he had suddenly become somebody else, become a kind of wild animal, with the animal’s cruelty as well as the animal’s lusts.
“How can he be so cruel?” she wondered. “How can he, deliberately? Walter?” Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good. It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having “those” desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live together. She had loved even the weak and unadmirable manifestations of his considerateness; had loved him even when he let himself be overcharged by cabmen and porters, when
