Tono-Bungay

She smiled at me. “Well,” she said, “we’re engaged – aren’t we?”

“That can’t go on for ever. Will you marry me next week?”

She looked me in the face. “We can’t,” she said.

“You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year.”

She was silent for a space. “Can’t we go on for a time as we are? We COULD marry on three hundred a year. But it means a very little house. There’s Smithie’s brother. They manage on two hundred and fifty, but that’s very little. She says they have a semi-detached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit of garden. And the wall to next-door is so thin they hear everything. When her baby cries – they rap. And people stand against the railings and talk… Can’t we wait? You’re doing so well.”

An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I answered her with immense restraint.

“If,” I said, “we could have a double-fronted, detached house – at Ealing, say – with a square patch of lawn in front and a garden behind – and – and a tiled bathroom.”

“That would be sixty pounds a year at least.”

“Which means five hundred a year… Yes, well, you see, I told my uncle I wanted that, and I’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“Five hundred pounds a year.”

“Five hundred pounds!”

I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.

“Yes,” I said, “really! and NOW what do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, a little flushed; “but be sensible! Do you really mean you’ve got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?”

“To marry on – yes.”

She scrutinised me a moment. “You’ve done this as a surprise!” she said, and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant, and that made me radiant, too.

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and laughed no longer bitterly.

She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.

She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment before. I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.

“Come!” I said, standing up; “let’s go towards the sunset, dear, and talk about it all. Do you know – this is a most beautiful world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes you into shining gold. No, not gold – into golden glass… Into something better that either glass or gold.”…

And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.

We furnished that double-fronted house from attic – it ran to an attic – to cellar, and created a garden.

“Do you know Pampas Grass?” said Marion. “I love Pampas Grass… if there is room.”

“You shall have Pampas Grass,” I declared. And there were moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when my whole being cried out to take her in my arms – now. But I refrained. On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons. She promised to marry me within two months’ time. Shyly, reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we “broke it off” again for the last time. We split upon procedure. I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, in white favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn’t any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a “row.” I don’t remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that dispute. I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle remonstrance: “But, George dear, you must have a cake – to send home.” I think we all reiterated things. I seem to remember a refrain of my own: “A marriage is too sacred a thing, too private a thing, for this display. Her father came in and stood behind me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard and stood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a sternly gratified prophetess. It didn’t occur to me then! How painful it was to Marion for these people to witness my rebellion.

“But, George,” said her father, “what sort of marriage do you want? You don’t want to go to one of those there registry offices?”

“That’s exactly what I’d like to do. Marriage is too private a thing – ”

“I shouldn’t feel married,” said Mrs. Ramboat.

“Look here, Marion,” I said; “we are going to be married at a registry office. I don’t believe in all these fripperies and superstitions, and I won’t submit to them. I’ve agreed to all sorts of things to please you.”

“What’s he agreed to?” said her father – unheeded.

“I can’t marry at a registry office,” said Marion, sallow-white.

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll marry nowhere else.”

“I can’t marry at a registry office.”

“Very well,” I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed me, but I was also exultant; “then we won’t marry at all.”

She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently her half-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the table, and her arm and the long droop of her shoulder.

III

The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my uncle, “Bad temper not coming to business,” and set off for Highgate and Ewart. He was actually at work – on a bust of Millie, and seemed very glad for any interruption.

“Ewart, you old Fool,” I said, “knock off and come for a day’s gossip. I’m rotten. There’s a sympathetic sort of lunacy about you. Let’s go to Staines and paddle up to Windsor.”

“Girl?” said Ewart, putting down a chisel.

“Yes.”

That was all I told him of my affair.

“I’ve got no money,” he remarked, to clear up ambiguity in my invitation.

We got a jar of shandy-gaff, some food, and, on Ewart’s suggestion, two Japanese sunshades in Staines; we demanded extra cushions at the boathouse and we spent an enormously soothing day in discourse and meditation, our boat moored in a shady place this side of Windsor. I seem to remember Ewart with a cushion forward, only his heels and sunshade and some black ends of hair showing, a voice and no more, against the shining, smoothly-streaming mirror of the trees and bushes.

“It’s not worth it,” was the burthen of the voice. “You’d better get yourself a Millie, Ponderevo, and then you wouldn’t feel so upset.”

“No,” I said decidedly, “that’s not my way.”

A thread of smoke ascended from Ewart for a while, like smoke from an altar.

“Everything’s a muddle, and you think it isn’t. Nobody knows where we are – because, as a matter of fact we aren’t anywhere. Are women property – or are they fellow-creatures? Or a sort of proprietary goddesses? They’re so obviously fellow-creatures. You believe in the goddess?”

“No,” I said, “that’s not my idea.”

“What is your idea?”

“Well”