‘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 selfconfidence, 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 to-morrow. 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 to-morrow.’ 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 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 fried an egg when she married him.
Strangely enough that childlike, 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 obligeor 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? But 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 thought; 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
