Rose and Rose

by E. V. Lucas

My first impulse was to hasten after the fugitives and try to bring them to reason. But reflection showed me that this was impracticable. I had no notion where they had gone or even when; probably not by train, but all the way in the motor, and there has never been such an ally of runaways as petrol. In the old days there was some chance, even though faint, of tracking and overtaking a pair of horses; but motor-cars vanish into thin air, leaving rainbow splashes in the roadway to mock the pursuer in every hue.

Then I wondered if Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew. For Rose to tell me at once was natural; but would not Ronnie wish to let a little time elapse before breaking the news? I guessed so. At any rate, it was not for me to be the bearer of such ill tidings. If it was for anyone to storm the citadel, that person was the wronged Eustace.

Eustace? Yes. And what of him? He had been told as well as I, I supposed. Rose had never done anything underhand or secretive in her life, and she would have made it a point of honour to let her husband know that she had cut the knot. At this moment he was probably sitting, stunned, in his library, or perhaps with his little Rose in her nursery, and most likely harbouring evil thoughts of me.

In my dismay and distress I put off dinner for an hour or so, and walked out into the rain to Mrs. O’Gorman’s. It seemed an occasion for the old Irish lady’s pitiless candour. The equally pitiless downpour would, I felt, help too. There are times when one welcomes a storm to fight one’s way through.

My thoughts were not idle as I stumbled against the torrents. No aspect of the case did they neglect. I can tell only of what I know, and I have no information as to Ronnie’s hold on Rose after his return and what steps preceded her decision to run off with him. But it is not difficult to realize, at any rate, the temptation. Here was the old friend of her happiest days once more—free and I don’t doubt more than rejoiced to see her again. He had been in strange countries, and probably had carried her image with him through all his wanderings and loneliness. He had never been articulately in love with her when they were youthful together; he had not proposed after that accident—I am sure she would have told me if he had, because she knew that I liked him. When she used to talk to me about her marriage and all those nice boys who were to gallop about the nursery, I had thought naturally of Ronnie as their father. One visualizes a figure on such occasions, and Ronnie sprang into being. But, as it happened, I was wrong. Rose had not thought of Ronnie like this: she had merely liked him, automatically so to speak, and when Eustace came along there was no earlier occupant of her heart to eject. Eustace found it all too easy.

But after her marriage so much had happened. And it must never be forgotten that Ronnie compelled interest, all unconsciously maybe, by the force of personality. He was quite ordinary in everything but personality, which in his case was physical more than spiritual. His ready smile, his white teeth, his gaiety, his good humour, his general friendliness and out-for-funnishness won him an easy way into the good graces of the world. He was popular almost universally. Rose, as I have said, had never to my knowledge, or even to my suspicion, been in love with him; nor he with her in any but a superficial degree, even if that; but there was always that intimate experience in Switzerland in the background; and each had since had too much time to think about the past and to speculate upon the might-have-been: Rose in the watches of the night taking stock of her marriage and its disenchantments, and Ronnie in a foreign land sick of a fever.

Both were older too—not so much older in years, but older through what had happened: the passage of time being often almost negligible in influence compared with certain experiences. A woman grows mature so swiftly: a three weeks’ honeymoon can do it, a night can do it; the birth of her first child always does it. It may be only in compartments, but maturity is there somewhere. And Rose’s child was five years of age. As for Ronnie, I suspect that such adventures among women as had fallen to him—and a handsome young officer in India has many admirers—had chiefly thrown his thoughts back, in comparison, to Rose. When he might have won her he had not; after, when he wished he had, she was another’s. I don’t say that he had brooded on this, but he probably recurred to it when least happy; and regret, like love, never stands still: it increases or it diminishes.

And her disenchantment, her starvation! Eustace’s frigid decorum, his supervision of the housekeeping books, his morbid interest in her minutest personal expenditure, his tendency to relapse into the tutor and shape her mind wholly by his, so that instead of the home containing a rising barrister and an impulsive, warm-hearted, generous woman it should contain merely a rising barrister and his female derivative—all this had surprised her and depressed her. Marriage, she had known—being a normal creature, full of the instinct of her sex, and not only the instinct but her sex’s capacity to endure—was necessarily a matter of adjustments. Any two persons agreeing to live together have to learn each other’s ways and make allowances: even two men and two women. How much more so then when the two persons suddenly thus beginning a new and intimate co-habitation are a man and a woman, natural enemies—or, at any rate, natural censors of each other, naturally jealous of each other, naturally misunderstanding each other! Perhaps the word enemies may stand.

In the case of her own marriage Rose quickly learned that the adjustments were all to be hers. The only change that Eustace made was to add a wife to his house: he kept the same habits: he played his golf at the Old Deer Park just as he had always done; he read the books from the London Library; he took her, regardless of her taste in music, to concerts. But he had never really loved; he had been attracted by Rose’s gaiety and vividness, even if he had neglected to cherish those qualities after they had passed into his keeping; he had known that rising barristers are usually furnished with wives, and that they do not rise the less because those wives are beautiful. He had known also that marriage is a natural state; that the duty of a good citizen is to have children; that wives can be more comfortable than housekeepers; and so on. I don’t say that he had put any of these thoughts into words: they were merely the outcome of common knowledge. Nor do I want to be unfair to him or to suggest that he was not proud and affectionate. I think that he was. But again I say that he had no imagination: he took things for granted, and directly a husband does that he is doomed.

Eustace’s refined and comfortable home in Wilton Place was never disgraced by anything so unseemly as passion or even eagerness. Returning from his chambers he had never upset furniture in his desire to get to her. When he brought flowers to her and she crushed them to her bosom in an ecstasy of enjoyment, a spasmodic return to nature, he warned her that she was in danger of breaking the stalks. He had brought the flowers though. That is the trouble: he was always nice and handsome and courteous. But there it stopped. Having no imagination, no instinctive knowledge of women, no sexual shorthand, he was unaware that nice men are negligible. What women want is not niceness but devotion, not courtesy but worship.