Marjorie took pen, ink, and paper. «DEAR GUY,» she began—(«We aren’t sentimental,» she had once remarked, with a mixture of contempt and secret envy, to a friend who had confided that she and her fiance never began with anything less than Darling.)—»I am longing for another of your letters. …» She went through the usual litany of longing. «It was father’s birthday yesterday; he is sixty-five. I cannot bear to think that some day you and I will be as old as that. Aunt Ellen sent him a Stilton cheese—a useful war-time present. How boring housekeeping is. By dint of thinking about cheeses my mind is rapidly turning into one—a Gruyere; where there isn’t cheese there are just holes, full of vacuum . . . ‘
She didn’t really mind housekeeping so much. She took it for granted, and did it just because it was there to be done. Guy, on the contrary, never took anything for granted; she made these demonstrations for his benefit.
«I read Keats’s letters, as you suggested, and thought them too beautiful . . .»
At the end of a page of rapture she paused and bit her pen. What was there to say next? It seemed absurd one should have to write letters about the books one had been reading. But there was nothing else to write about; nothing ever happened. After all, what had happened in her life? Her mother dying when she was sixteen; then the excitement of Guy coming to live with them; then the war, but that hadn’t meant much to her; then Guy falling in love, and their getting engaged. That was really all. She wished she could write about her feelings in an accurate, complicated way, like people in novels; but when she came to think about it, she didn’t seem to have any feelings to describe.
She looked at Guy’s last letter from France. «Sometimes,» he had written, «I am tortured by an intense physical desire for you. I can think of nothing but your beauty, your young, strong body. I hate that; I have to struggle to repress it. Do you forgive me? «It rather thrilled her that he should feel like that about her: he had always been so cold, so reserved, so much opposed to sentimentality—to the kisses and endearments she would, perhaps, secretly have liked. But he had seemed so right when he said, «We must love like rational beings, with our minds, not with our hands and lips.» All the same. . . .
She dipped her pen in the ink and began to write again. «I know the feelings you spoke of in your letter. Sometimes I long for you in the same way. I dreamt the other night I was holding you in my arms, and woke up hugging the pillow.» She looked at what she had written. It was too awful, too vulgar! She would have to scratch it out. But no, she would leave it in spite of everything, just to see what he would think about it. She finished the letter quickly, sealed and stamped it, and rang for the maid to take it to the post. When the servant had gone, she shut up her desk with a bang. Bang— the letter had gone, irrevocably.
She picked up a large book lying on the table and began to read. It was the first volume of the Decline and Fall. Guy had said she must read Gibbon; she wouldn’t be educated till she had read Gibbon. And so yesterday she had gone to her father in his library to get the book.
«Gibbon,» Mr. Petherton had said, «certainly, my dear. How delightful it is to look at these grand old books again. One always finds something new every time.»
Marjorie gave him to understand that she had never read it. She felt rather proud of her ignorance.
Mr. Petherton handed the first of eleven volumes to her. «A great book,» he murmured—»an essential book. It fills the gap between your classical history and your mediaeval stuff.»
«Your» classical history, Marjorie repeated to herself, «your «classical history indeed! Her father had an irritating way of taking it for granted that she knew everything, that classical history was as much hers as his. Only a day or two before he had turned to her at luncheon with, «Do you remember, dear child, whether it was Pomponazzi who denied the personal immortality of the soul, or else that queer fellow, Laurentius Valla? It’s gone out of my head for the moment.» Marjorie had quite lost her temper at the question—much to the innocent bewilderment of her poor father.
She had set to work with energy on the Gibbon; her bookmarker registered the fact that she had got through one hundred and twenty-three pages yesterday. Marjorie started reading. After two pages she stopped. She looked at the number of pages still remaining to be read—and this was only the first volume. She felt like a wasp sitting down to eat a vegetable marrow. Gibbon’s bulk was not perceptibly diminished by her first bite. It was too long. She shut the book and went out for a walk. Passing the Whites’ house, she saw her friend, Beatrice White that was, sitting on the lawn with her two babies. Beatrice hailed her, and she turned in.
«Pat a cake, pat a cake,» she said. At the age of ten months, baby John had already learnt the art of patting cakes. He slapped the outstretched hand offered him, and his face, round and smooth and pink like an enormous peach, beamed with pleasure.
«Isn’t he a darling!» Marjorie exclaimed. «You know, I’m sure he’s grown since last I saw him, which was on Tuesday.»
«He put on eleven ounces last week,» Beatrice affirmed.
«How wonderful! His hair’s coming on splendidly . . .»
It was Sunday the next day. Jacobsen appeared at breakfast in the neatest of black suits. He looked, Marjorie thought, more than ever like a cashier. She longed to tell him to hurry up or he’d miss the 8.53 for the second time this week and the manager would be annoyed. Marjorie herself was, rather consciously, not in Sunday best.
«What is the name of the Vicar? «Jacobsen inquired, as he helped himself to bacon.
«Trubshaw. Luke Trubshaw, I believe.»
«Does he preach well?»
«He didn’t when I used to hear him. But I don’t often go to church now, so I don’t know what he’s like these days.»
«Why don’t you go to church?» Jacobsen inquired, with a silkiness of tone which veiled the crude outlines of his leading question.
Marjorie was painfully conscious of blushing. She was filled with rage against Jacobsen. «Because,» she said firmly, «I don’t think it necessary to give expression to my religious feelings by making a lot of» — she hesitated a moment—» a lot of meaningless gestures with a crowd of other people.»
«You used to go,» said Jacobsen.
«When I was a child and hadn’t thought about these things.»
Jacobsen was silent, and concealed a smile in his coffee-cup. Really, he said to himself, there ought to be religious conscription for women—and for most men, too. It was grotesque the way these people thought they could stand by themselves—the fools, when there was the infinite authority of organized religion to support their ridiculous feebleness.
«Does Lambourne go to church?» he asked maliciously, and with an air of perfect naivete and good faith.
Marjorie coloured again, and a fresh wave of hatred surged up within her. Even as she had said the words she had wondered whether Jacobsen would notice that the phrase «meaningless gestures «didn’t ring very much like one of her own coinages. «Gesture «—that was one of Guy’s words, like «incredible,» «exacerbate,» «impinge,» «sinister.» Of course all her present views about religion had come from Guy. She looked Jacobsen straight in the face and replied:
«Yes, I think he goes to church pretty regularly. But I really don’t know: his religion has nothing to do with me.»
Jacobsen was lost in delight and admiration.
Punctually at twenty minutes to eleven he set out for church. From where she was sitting in the summer-house Marjorie watched him as he crossed the garden, incredibly absurd and incongruous in his black clothes among the blazing flowers and the young emerald of the trees. Now he was hidden behind the sweet-briar hedge, all except the hard black melon of his bowler hat, which she could see bobbing along between the topmost sprays.
She went on with her letter to Guy. «… What a strange man Mr. Jacobsen is. I suppose he is very clever, but I can’t get very much out of him. We had an argument about religion at breakfast this morning; I rather scored off him. He has now gone off to church all by himself; — I really couldn’t face the prospect of going with him—I hope he’ll enjoy old Mr. Trubshaw’s preaching! «
Jacobsen did enjoy Mr. Trubshaw’s preaching enormously. He always made a point, in whatever part of Christendom he happened to be, of attending divine service. He had the greatest admiration of churches as institutions. In their solidity and unchangeableness he saw one of the few hopes for humanity. Further, he derived great pleasure from comparing the Church as an institution—splendid, powerful, eternal — with the childish imbecility
