“Well?” he questioned at last. Mary turned toward 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 forever.”
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 toward 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 southeast, toward 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 childlike enthusiasm.
“Think carefully,” he had warned her before they married. “You’re going to be
