PART II FIN-DE-SIÈCLE
1 ROME
THE threshold of the nineties. Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border. The nineties, we say, were gay, tired, fin-de-siècle, witty, dilettante, decadent, yellow, and Max Beerbohm was their prophet; or they were noisy, imperial, patriotic, militant, crude, and Kipling was their prophet. And, indeed, you may find attributes to differentiate any period from any other. What people said and wrote of the nineties at the time was that they were modern, which of course at the time they were; that they were hustling ... ( “In these days of hurry and rapid motion, when there is so little time to rest and reflect,” as people say in sermons and elsewhere, as if the greater rapidity of motion did not give one more time to rest and reflect, since one the sooner arrives at one’s destination); that they were noisy; that literary output was enormous; that (alternatively) the new writers were very good, or that the good writers had gone from among us. One knows the kind of thing; all discourses on contemporary periods have been full of it, from the earliest times even unto these last.
Rome was thirty-one. She was of middle height, a slight, pale, delicate young woman, with ironic blue-green eyes and mocking lips a little compressed at the corners, and a pointed kind of face, and fair, silky hair which she wore no longer short but swept gracefully up and back from her small head, defining its shape and showing the fine line from nape to crown. She was a woman of the world, a known diner-out, a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance, distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world, a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters and in persons. She knew her way about, as the phrase goes, and could be relied on to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste for fools, and in spite of the “dancing and destructive eye” (to use a phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of the life around her. People called her intensely modern—whatever that might mean. In 1890 it presumably meant that you would have been surprised to find her type in 1880. But as a matter of fact, you would not, had you been endowed with a little perspicacity, have been in the least surprised; you would have found it, had you looked, all down the ages (though always as a rare growth). In 1790, 1690, 1590, and back through every decade of every century, there have been Rome Gardens, fastidious, mondaine, urbane, lettered, critical, amused, sceptical, and what was called in 1890 fin-de-siècle. It is not a type which, so to speak, makes the world go round; it does not assist movements nor join in crusades; it coolly distrusts enthusiasm and eschews the heat and ardour of the day. It is to be found among both sexes equally, and is the stuff of which the urbane bachelor and spinster, rather than the spouse and parent, are made. For mating and producing (as a career, not as an occasional encounter) are apt to destroy the type, by forcing it to too continuous and ardent intercourse with life; that graceful and dilettante aloofness can scarcely survive such prolonged heat. To be cool, sceptical and passionate at one and the same time—it has been done, but it remains difficult. To love ardently such absurdities as infants, and yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of all life—this too has been done, but the best parents do not do it. Something has to go, as a sacrifice to the juggernaut life, which rebels against being regarded as merely absurd (and rightly, for, in truth, it is not merely absurd, and this is one of the things which should always be remembered about it).
The literary persons of the early nineties wanted Rome to join them in their pursuits.
Why so, Rome questioned. Money? Very certainly I have not enough, but I should not have appreciably more if I wrote and published essays or even books. Notoriety? It might well be of the wrong kind; and anyhow does it add to one’s pleasure? Miss Rome Garden, the author of those clever critical essays.... Or perhaps of those dull critical essays.... Either way, what did one gain? Why write? Why this craze for transmitting ideas by means of marks on paper? Why not, if one must transmit ideas, use the tongue, that unruly member given us for the purpose? Better still, why not retain the ideas for one’s own private edification, untransmitted? Writing. There was this about writing—or rather about publishing—it showed that someone had thought it worth while to pay for having one’s ideas printed. For printers were paid, and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet. Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never guess from meeting them that anyone would pay them for their ideas. On the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away; one was then known for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it.... In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others, without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter in their turn. Reading matter was not like dinners, concerning which there must be give and take.
Thus the do-nothing Miss Rome Garden to the eager literary young men and women about her, who all thought that literature was having a new birth and that they were its brilliant midwives, as, indeed, it is not unusual to think. And possibly it was the case. Literature has so many new births; it is a hardy annual. The younger literary people of 1890 had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day. “A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous still brooded over the land like giant trees. Such a brooding, indeed, has scarcely since been known, for in these later days we allow no trees to become giants. But in their shadow the rebellious young shoots sprang up, sharp and green and alive. The mid-Victorians were passing; the Edwardians were in the schoolroom or the nursery, the Georgians in the cradle or not yet anywhere; here was a clear decade in which the late Victorian stars might dance. It was a period of experiment; new forms were being tried, new ideas would have been aired were any ideas ever new; new franknesses, so called, were permitted, or anyhow practised—the mild beginnings of the returning tide which was to break against the reticence of fifty years.
“I don’t,” said Mrs. Garden to Rome, “care about all these sex novels people have taken to writing now.”
But Rome rejected the phrase.
“Sex novels, mamma? What are they? Novels have always been about sex, or rather sexes. There’s nothing new in that; it’s the oldest story in the world. People must have a sex in this life; it’s inevitable. Novels must be about people; that’s inevitable too. So novels must be partly about sex, and they’re nearly always about two sexes, and usually largely about the relations of the two sexes to one another. They always have been....”
All the same, mamma did not care about these sex novels that people had taken to writing now. Problem novels, she called them, for reasons of her own. Rome thought sex no problem; the least problematic affair, perhaps, in this world. Of course there were problems connected with it, as with everything else, but in itself sex was no problem. Rather the contrary. “The Moonstone,” now—that was a problem novel.
“I don’t like indecency,” said mamma, in her delicate, clipped voice. “These modern writers will say anything. It’s ill-bred.”
Mamma could not be expected to know that these literary libertines of 1890 would be regarded as quaint Victorian prudes in 1920.
“As to that book Mr. Jayne gave you, I call it merely silly,” mamma murmured, with raised brows, and so settled “Dorian Gray.”
“Silly it is,” Rome agreed. “But here and there, though too seldom, it has a wit.”
But mamma was not listening. Her mamma-like mind was straying after Mr. Jayne....
2 MR. JAYNE
Mr. Jayne and Rome. Both brilliant, both elegant, both urbane, both so gracefully of the world worldly, yet both scholars too. Mr. Jayne wrote memoirs and enchanting historical and political essays. An amusing, yet erudite Oxford man, who had formerly been at the British Embassy at St. Petersburg. Hostesses desired him for their more sophisticated parties, because he had a wit, and knew Russia, which was at once more unusual and more fashionable then than now. It was at one of Vicky’s dinner parties that he and Rome had first met. If Vicky thought, how suitable, it was only what anyone in the world must think about these two. Afterwards they met continually and became friends. Rome thought him conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive and disarming and the most companionable man of her wide acquaintance. By June, 1890, they were in love; a state of mind unusual in both. They did not mention it, but in July he mentioned to her, what he mentioned to few people, that he had a Russian wife living with her parents, a revolutionary professor and his wife, in the country outside Moscow.
They were spending Sunday on the Thames, rowing up from Bourne End to Marlow. They spoke of this matter of Mr. Jayne’s wife after their lunch, which they ate on the bank, in the shade of willows.
“How delightful,” said Rome, taking a Gentleman’s Relish sandwich.
Delightful to have a wife in Russia; to have a reason, and such a reason, for visiting that interesting land. Delightful for Mr. Jayne to have waiting for him, among steppes and woods, a handsome Russian female and two fair Slav infants ... or perhaps they were English, these little Jaynes, with beautiful mouths and long, thrust-out chins.... Delightful, anyhow. The Russian country in the summer, all corn and oil and moujiks. Moscow in the autumn, all churches and revolutionaries and plots and secret police. And in the winter ... but one cannot think about Russia in the winter at all; it does not bear contemplation, and one does not visit it.... What a romance! Mr. Jayne was indeed fortunate.
So Miss Garden conveyed.
“I am not there very much,” said Mr. Jayne. “Only on and off. Olga prefers to live there, with her parents and our two children. She has many friends there, all very busy plotting. They are of the intelligentsia. Life is very interesting to her.”
“I can imagine that it must be.”
So cool and well-bred were Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne, that you never would have divined that the latter, eating sandwiches, was crying within his soul, “My dearest Rome. I dislike my wife. We make each other sick with ennui when we meet. We married in a moment’s mania. It is you I want. Don’t you know it? Won’t you let me tell you?” or that the former, sipping cider, was saying silently, “You have told me this at last because you know that we have fallen in love. Why not months ago? And what now?”
Nothing of this they showed, but lounged in the green shade, and drank and ate, Miss Garden clear-cut and cool, in a striped cotton boating-dress, with a conically-shaped straw hat tipped over her eyes, Mr. Jayne in flannels, long and slim, his palish face shaved smooth in the new fashion, so that you saw the lines of his clever mouth and long, thrust-out chin. Mr. Jayne’s eyes were deep-set and grey, and he wore pince-nez, and he was at this time thirty-six years old. At what age, Rome wondered, had he married Mrs. Jayne of the Russian intelligentsia?
However, they did not enter into this, but began to discuss the plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a well-known socialist writer, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a young man in India who was making some stir.
“We can still be friends,” thought Rome, on their way home. “Nothing need be changed between us. This Olga of his is his wife; I am his friend. It would be very bourgeois to be less his friend because he has a wife. That is a view of life I dislike; we are civilised people, Mr. Jayne and I.”
3 CIVILISED PEOPLE
And civilised they were, for the rest of the summer of 1890. In November Rome asked Mr. Jayne, who was having tea with her alone, whether he was visiting Russia shortly. He replied in the negative, for he was, he said, too busy working on his new book to get abroad.
“And further,” he added, in the same composed tone, “I prefer to remain in the same country with you. I can’t, you see, do without you at hand. You know how often I consult you, and talk things over with you.... And further still,” continued Mr. Jayne, quietly, “I love you.”
So saying, he rose and stood over her, bending down with his hands on her shoulders and his pale face close to hers.
“My dearest,” he said. “Let us stop pretending. Shall we stop pretending? Does our pretence do us or anyone else any good? I love you more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it ... dear heart....”
He drew her up from her chair and looked into her face, and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.
Five minutes later they talked it out, sitting with a space between them, for “While you hold me I can’t think,” Rome said. She passed her hand over her face, which felt hot and stung from the hard pressing of his mouth, and tried to assemble her thoughts, shaken by the first passion of her thirty-one agreeable and intelligent years.
“I’m not,” she said, “going to take you away from your wife. Not in any way. What we have must make no difference to what she has....”
It will be seen, therefore, that their conversation was as old as the world, and scarcely worth recording. It pursued the normal lines. That is to say, Mr. Jayne replied, “She has nothing of me that matters,” rather inaccurately classing under the head of what did not matter, his children, his name, and the right to his bed and board. As is the habit in these situations, Mr. Jayne meant that what mattered, and what Mrs. Jayne had not got, was his love, his passion, his spirit and his soul. These, he indicated, were Rome’s alone, as Rome’s were his.
What to do about it was the question. One must, said Rome, holding herself in, continue to be civilised. And what, enquired Mr. Jayne, is civilisation—this arbitrary civilisation of society’s making, that binds the spirit’s freedom in chains? It was all founded on social expediency, on primitive laws to protect inheritance, to safeguard property.... Had Rome read Professor Westermarck’s great work on the history of human marriage? Rome had. What of it? The point was, there was Mrs. Jayne in Russia, and Mr. and Mrs. Jayne’s two children. These were Mr. Jayne’s obligations, and nothing he and she did must come between him and them. That laid firmly down, she and Mr. Jayne could do what they liked; that was how Rome saw it. One must keep one’s contracts, and behave as persons of honour and breeding should behave.
“As I see it,” said Rome, “the fact that we love each other needn’t prevent our being friends. We are not babies....”
“Friends,” said Mr. Jayne, in agreement, doubt, scepticism, contempt, hope, or bitter derision, as the case might be.
And more they said, until they were interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Garden’s papa, the Dean, who had called in his brougham to see mamma, but, mamma being out at Vicky’s, he sat down between these two white, disturbed, hot-eyed and shaken persons and began to talk of Mr. Parnell and his disgrace.
Grandpapa opined that Mr. Parnell had no more place in public life.
Mr. Jayne replied that anyhow it appeared that he would be hounded out of it.
“Cant,” he said. “Truckling to nonconformist cant and humbug and Catholic bigotry. A man’s private affairs have nothing to do with his public life. It’s contemptible, the way the Nationalists have caved in to that old humbug, Gladstone.”
Grandpapa had always thought Gladstone a humbug (though not so old if it came to that; he himself was eighty-five and going strong), but with the rest of Mr. Jayne’s thesis he was in disagreement. Our political leaders must not be men of notoriously loose lives. The sanctity of the home must, at all costs, be upheld.
“O’Shea’s home,” said Mr. Jayne, “never had much of that. Neither O’Shea nor Mrs. O’Shea was great on it.”
“For that matter,” Rome joined in, crisp and bland, as if civilisation had not met its débâcle in the drawing-room but a half hour since, “for that matter, what homes have sanctity? Why do people think that sanctity is particularly to be found in homes, of all places? And can a bachelor’s or spinster’s home have it, or do the people in the home need to be married? What is it, this curious sanctity, that bishops write to the papers about, and that is, they say, being attacked all the time, and is so easily destroyed? In what homes is it to be found? I have often wondered.”
“Whom God hath joined together,” replied grandpapa, readily. “That is the answer to your question, my dear child, is it not?”
“O God,” muttered Mr. Jayne, but probably rather as an ejaculation than as a sceptical comment on the authority behind matrimony.
Whichever it was, grandpapa did not care about the phrase, and looked at him sharply. He believed Mr. Jayne to be an unbeliever, and did not greatly care for the tone of his writings. However, they conversed intelligently for a while about the future of the Irish party before Mr. Jayne rose to go.
“Come into the hall,” his eyes said. But Rome did not go into the hall.
He was gone. Rome sat still in the shadow of the window. His steps echoed down the square.
“Do you see much of that young fellow, my dear?” grandpapa asked, in his old rumbling voice.
“Oh, yes,” said Rome, feeling exalted and light in the head, and as if she had drunk alcohol. “Oh, yes, grandpapa. We are great friends.”
“Do your parents like him, my child?”
“Oh, yes, grandpapa. Very much. Oh, I think everyone likes him. He is a great success, you know.”
She was talking foolishly and at random, straying about the room, taking up books, wishing grandpapa would go.
Grandpapa grunted. Rather queer goings on, he thought, for Rome to be entertaining young men by herself when her papa and mamma were out. What were unmarried young women coming to? If mamma had gone on like that thirty years ago.... But this, of course, was 1890—desperately modern. Grandpapa, though he not infrequently wrote to the Times, the Spectator and the Guardian, to say how modern the current year was (for, of course, current years always were and are), did not always remember it. The untrammelled (it seemed to him untrammelled) freedom of intercourse enjoyed by modern young men and women (especially young women) continually shocked him. Grandpapa had enjoyed much free and untrammelled intercourse in his own distant youth, during the Regency, but fifty years of Victorianism had since intervened, and he believed that intercourse should not now be free. He could not understand his granddaughter, Stanley, who was continually abusing what she called the conventional prudery of the age; what further liberties, in heaven’s name, did young women want? To do her justice, Rome did not join in this cry for further emancipation; Rome accepted the conventions, with an acquiescent, ironic smile. There they were: why make oneself hot with kicking over the traces? One accepted the social follies and codes....
( “On the contrary,” Maurice would say, “I refuse them.”
“It will make no difference to them either way,” said Rome.)
Rome, a good raconteuse and mimic, proceeded to entertain grandpapa with an account of a dinner party at which she had been taken in by that curious and noisy member of Parliament, Mr. Augustus Conybeare, whom grandpapa disliked exceedingly.
Then mamma and papa came home, and Rome went upstairs to dress for another dinner party. Thus do social life and the storm-tossed journey of the human soul run on concurrently, and neither makes way for the other.
4 ON THE PINCIO
Through that winter civilisation fought its losing battle with more primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr. Jayne.
“There is only one way in which we can meet and be together,” said Rome, “and that is as friends. There is no other relation possible in the circumstances. I will be party to no scandal, my best. If we can’t meet one another with self-control, then we mustn’t meet at all. What is the use of tilting at the laws of society? There they are, and thus it is....”
“You make a fetish of society,” said Mr. Jayne, with gloom. “For a woman of your brains, it is queer.”
“Perhaps,” said Rome.
Then, it becoming apparent that she and Mr. Jayne were not at present going to meet one another with self-control, Rome went for the winter to the city of that name, with her papa, whose spiritual home it, of course, now was. Mrs. Garden did not go, because she desired to be in at the birth of Stanley’s baby.
But civilisation had not reckoned sufficiently with the forces of emotion. These led Mr. Jayne, but a few weeks after Miss Garden had departed, to follow her to Italy, and, in fact, to Rome.
So, one bright February morning, he called at the Gardens’ hotel pension in the Via Babuino, and found Rome and her papa about to set forth for a walk on the Pincio. Miss Garden, looking pale, fair and elegant in a long, fur-edged, high-shouldered cape coat and a tall, pointed, blue velvet hat beneath which her hair gleamed gold, received him as urbanely, as coolly, as detachedly as ever; she seemed to have got her emotions well under control in the month since they had parted. Mr. Jayne responded to her tone, and all the morning, as they strolled about with Mr. Garden, they were bland and cool and amusing; well-bred English visitors, turning interested and satirical eyes on the fashionable crowds about them, stopping now and then to exchange amenities with fellow-strollers, for Mr. Jayne knew Roman society well, and Mr. Garden had come armed with introductions from his co-religionists, though, indeed, he was little disposed for much society, wishing to spend such time as he did not devote to seeing Rome in studious research at the Vatican library. His daughter was a little afraid that the Eternal City might seriously disturb his faith, and that papa might fall under the undeniably fascinating influence of paganism, which makes so far finer and nobler a show in Rome than mediæval Christianity. And, indeed, with St. Peter’s papa was not pleased; he scarcely liked to say so, even to himself, but it did seem to him to be of a garish hugeness that smacked almost of vulgarity, and pained his fastidious taste. On the other hand, there were many old churches of a more pleasing style, and in these his soul found rest when disturbed by the massive splendours of classical Rome. No; papa would not become a pagan; he knew too much of pagan corruptions and cruelties for that. Corruptions and cruelties he admitted, of course, in the history of Christianity also; corruption and cruelty are, indeed, properties of the unfortunate and paradoxical human race; but papa was persuaded that only defective Christians (after all, Christians always are and have been defective) were corrupt and cruel, whereas the most completely pagan of pagans had been so, and paganism is, indeed, rather an incentive than a discouragement to vice. In fact, papa was, by this time, thoroughly biassed in this matter, and so was probably safe. Or, anyhow, so his daughter hoped. For it would, there was no denying it, be exceedingly awkward were papa to become a pagan, quite apart from the preliminary anguish with which his soul would be torn were he to be shaken from his present faith. Were there pagan places of worship in London? Probably papa would have to build a private chapel, and in it erect images of his new gods.... For pagans had never been happy without much worship; they had been the most religious of believers. Except, of course, the lax and broad-church pagans, and probably papa, if he got paganism at all, would get it strong.
So Rome was quite pleased that papa should be walking on the Pincio with her, getting a good view of the dome of St. Peter’s, which is the finest and most impressive part of that cathedral, rather than wandering about the Forum and peering into the new excavations, murmuring scraps of Latin as he peered.
In the warm, sunlit air, with the band playing Verdi and the gay crowds promenading, and the enchanted city spread all a-glitter beneath them, Rome was caught into a deep and intoxicated joy. The bitter, restless struggling of the last months gave way to peace; the happy peace that looks not ahead, but rejoices in the moment. The tall and gay companion strolling at her side, so fluent in several languages, so apt to catch a half-worded meaning, to smile at an unuttered jest, so informed, so polished, so of the world worldly ... take Mr. Jayne as merely that, and she had her friend and companion back again, which was deeply restful and vastly stimulating. And beneath that was her lover, whom she loved; beneath his urbane exterior his passion throbbed and leaped, and his deep need of her cried, and in her the answering need cried back.
5 IN THE CAMPAGNA
Together they walked in the Campagna, in the bright soft wash of the February sun. Mr. Jayne had been in Rome a week, and they had gone out to Tivoli together, without papa, who was reading in the Vatican library. They lunched at the restaurant by the waterfalls, then explored Hadrian’s Villa with the plan in Murray, and quarrelled about which were the different rooms. Failing to agree on this problem, they sat down in the Triclinium and looked at the view and discussed the more urgent problem of their lives.
“You must,” said Mr. Jayne, “come to me. It is the only right and reasonable way out. We’ll live in no half-way house, with secrecy and concealment. We should both hate that. But Olga will not divorce me; it’s no use thinking of that. In her view, and that of all her countrywomen, husbands are never faithful. The infidelity of a husband is no reason to a Russian woman for divorce. Unless she herself wants to marry another man, and that is likely enough, in Olga’s case, to happen. We are nothing to each other, she and I. Such love as we had—and it was never love—is dead long ago. We don’t even like each other.”
“Curious,” mused Rome, “not to foresee these developments at the outset, before taking the serious step of marriage. Marriage is an action too freely practised and too seldom adequately considered.”
“That is so,” Mr. Jayne agreed. “But, and however that may be, what is done is done. What we now have to consider, however inadequately, is the future. It is very plain that you and I must be together. Yes, yes, yes. Nothing else is plain, but that is. The one light in chaos.... My dearest love, you can’t be denying that. It is the only conceivable thing—the only thinkable way out.”
“Way out,” said Rome. “I think, rather, a way in.... Which way do we take—out or in?” Musingly she looked over the Campagna to blue hills, and Mr. Jayne, his eyes on her white profile, on the gleam of gold hair beneath her dark fur cap, and on her slender hands that clasped her knees, leant closer to her and replied, with neither hesitation nor doubt, “In.”
“Indeed,” said Miss Garden, “these questions can’t be decided in this rough and ready, impetuous manner. The mind must have its share in deciding these important matters, not merely the emotions and desires. Or else what is the good of education, or of having learnt to think clearly at all?”
“Very little,” said Mr. Jayne. “However, in this case the more clearly one thinks the more plain the way to take becomes. It is confused and muddled thinking that would lead us to conform to convention and give one another up, merely because of a social code.”
“The social code,” said Miss Garden, “though as a rule I prefer to observe it, is in this case neither here nor there. I have ruled that out; cleared the field, so to speak, for the essentials. Now, what are the essentials? Your wife, whom you have undertaken to live with ...”
“By mutual agreement, we have given that up long since,” said Mr. Jayne, not for the first time.
“... and your children, whom you have brought into the world and are responsible for.”
“They are their mother’s. She lets me see nothing of them. She is determined to bring them up as Russian patriots.”
“Still, they are half yours, and it is a question whether you should not claim your share. In fact, I think it is certain that you should. If you broke off completely from your wife and lived with me, your right in them would be gone.... Then, of course, there is the ethical point as to your contract, the vows you made to your wife on marriage, which positively exclude similar relations with anyone else while she remains your wife.”
“I ought never to have made them. I was a fool. The wrong is in the vows, not in their breach.”
“Granted that they were wrong, that does not settle the further point of whether, having been made, with every circumstance of deliberation, they should not be kept.”
“O God,” said Mr. Jayne. “You talk, my dearest, like a pedant, a prig, or a book of logic. Don’t you care, Rome?”
“You know,” said Miss Garden, “that I do.... No, don’t touch me. I must think it out. I am a pedant and a prig, if you like, and I must think it out, not only feel. But now I will think of the other side. Oh, yes, I know there is another side. We love one another, and we can neither of us be happy, or fully ourselves, without being together. Without one another we shall be incomplete, unhappy and perhaps (not certainly) morally and mentally stunted and warped. Indeed, I see that as clearly as you can. Further, our being together may, as you say, not hurt your wife; she may not care in the least. As to that, I simply don’t know. How could I? She may even let you still have a share in your children. Russian points of view are so different from ours. But one should be certain of that before taking any steps. Then there are still points on the other side, that we have to think of. Any children we might have would be illegitimate. That would be hard on them.”
“In point of fact,” said Mr. Jayne, “it is largely illusory, that hardship. And in this case they (if they should ever exist) needn’t even know. You would take my name. Who is to go on remembering that I have a Russian wife? Very few people in England even know it. We should soon live down any talk there might be.”
“And then,” went on Rome, ticking off another point on her fingers, “there are my papa and mamma, whom we should hurt very badly. In their eyes what we are discussing isn’t a thing to be discussed at all; it is a deadly sin, and there’s an end of it. They are very fond of me, and they would be terribly unhappy. That too is a point to be considered.”
“Perhaps. But not to be given much weight to. It’s damnable to have to hurt the people we love—but, after all, we can’t let our parents rule our lives. We’re living in the eighteen nineties; we’re not mid-Victorians. And we have to make up our own minds what to do with our lives. We can’t be tied up by anyone else’s views, either those of our relations or of society in general. We have to make our own judgments and choices, all along. And parents shouldn’t be hurt by their children’s choices, even if they do think them wrong; they should live and let live. All this judging for other people, and being hurt, is poisonous. It’s a relic of the patriarchal system—or the matriarchal.”
Miss Garden smiled.
“Possibly. I should say, rather, that it was incidental to parental affection, and always will be. Anyhow, there it is.... They don’t, of course, even believe that divorce is right, let alone adultery.” Her cool, thoughtful enunciation of the last word gave it its uttermost value. Miss Garden never slurred or shirked either words or facts.
“But that,” she added, “doesn’t, of course, dispose of our lives. That’s only one point out of many. The question is, what is, now and ultimately, the right and best thing for me and you to do. You’ve decided. Well, I haven’t—yet. Give me a week, Francis. I promise I won’t take more.”
“You are so beautiful,” said Mr. Jayne, changing the subject and speaking inaccurately, and lifted her hands to his face. “You are so beautiful. There is no one like you. You are like the golden sickle moon riding over the world. You hold my life in your two hands. Be kind to it, Rome. I love you, I love you, I love you. If we deny our love we shall be blaspheming. Love like ours transcends all barriers, and well you know it. Take your week, if you must, only decide rightly at the end of it, my heart’s glory. The fine thing we shall make of life together, you and I, the fine, precious, lovely thing. It’s been so poor and common—full of bickerings and jars and commonness and discontents....
O Rome!...”