Emily Bromfield,
—Boulevard Haussmann, Paris.
Will you consent to quiet Dakota divorce on ground of incompatibility. No danger publicity. You will not need leave Paris or take any trouble whatever. Please telegraph answer to—Dover Street, Piccadilly.
Marlowe.
He was so bent upon his plan that not until he had handed in the telegram did the other side of what he was doing come forcibly to him. With a sudden explosion there were flung to the surface of his mind from deep down where Emily was uneasily buried, a mass of memories, longings, hopes, remnants of tenderness and love, regrets, remorse. He had no definite impulse to recall the telegram but, as he went out into the thronged and choked Strand, he forgot where he was and let the crowd bump and thump and drift him into a doorway; and he stood there, not thinking, but feeling—forlorn, acutely sensitive of the loneliness and futility of life.
“I was just going to ask you to join me at luncheon,” said a man at his side—Blackwell, an old acquaintance. “But if you feel as you look, I prefer my own thoughts.”
“I was thinking of a paragraph I read in Figaro this morning,” said Marlowe. “It went on to say that the real tragedy of life is not the fall of splendid fortunes, nor the death of those who are beloved, nor any other of the obvious calamities, but the petty, inglorious endings of friendships and loves that have seemed eternal.”
When Marlowe went to his lodgings after luncheon, he found Emily’s answer: “Certainly, and I know I can trust you completely.”
He expected a note from her, but none came. He cabled for leave of absence and in the following week sailed for New York. He “established a residence” one morning at Petersville, an obscure county seat in a remote corner of South Dakota, engaged a lawyer for himself and another for Emily in the afternoon, and in the evening set out for New York. At the end of three months, spent in New York, he returned to his “residence”—a bedroom in Petersville. The case was called the afternoon of his arrival. Emily “put in an appearance” through her lawyer, and he submitted to the court a letter from her in which she authorised him to act for her, and declared that she would never return to her husband. After a trial which lasted a minute and three-quarters—consumed in reading Emily’s letter and in Marlowe’s testimony—the divorce was granted. The only publicity was the never-read record of the Petersville court.
Marlowe reappeared in London after an absence of three months and three weeks. When Victoria completed her tour of the provinces, they were married and went down to the South Coast for the honeymoon.
The climax of a series of thunderclaps in revelation of Victoria as an intimate personality came at breakfast the next morning. She was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and her voice had its same searching vibrations. But he could think of neither as he watched her “tackle”—the only word which seemed to him descriptive—three enormous mutton chops in rapid succession. He noted each time her long white teeth closed upon a mouthful of chop and potato; and as she chewed with now one cheek and now the other distended and with her glorious eyes bright like a feeding beast’s, he repeated to himself again and again: “My God, what have I done?”—not tragically, but with a keen sense of his own absurdity. He turned away from her and stood looking out across the channel toward France—toward Emily.