[To Harold Nicolson]
It was delightful to be back in England after two and a half years. Two and a half years of India, of pomp and circumstance and being envied, of heat and homesickness and loneliness. How starved she had felt—starved of little intellectual coteries with their huge intellectual sensations—starved of new books and old pictures and music, of moss roses and primroses and bluebell woods, starved even into the selfishness of coming home, urged away by Robert, who did not know how to be selfish. Thinking of him made her feel very tender and very small. His iron public spirit, his inevitable devotion to duty, unconscious and instinctive and uncensorious, combined with a guilty sense that her youth and beauty had been uprooted by him, and put into a dusty distant soil. He was more convinced than any one of the importance of books and music and intellectual interests (he never read and did not know one note from another) because they were important to her and had therefore received a consecration they could never have had by merely being important to him. It was all so very simple—What she admired was beautiful; what she laughed at was funny; what she loved was divine—And she belonged to him—Robert. It was a miracle that found him every night on his knees in humble gratitude. She had, he thought, been so wonderfully good, walking on his red baize carpets as if they were fields of flowers, learning Sanscrit with passion and pretending, with what seemed to him complete success, and to them, absolute failure, that she liked Anglo-Indian women. When one by one his staff were incapacitated by love, he never complained. It made them of course useless, but how could they help falling in love with her? It would have been so unnatural if they had not. And when she told him—and to do her justice she knew that she was telling him the truth—that she was not worthy to do up his shoe laces—he would laugh and kiss her hand and send up a little internal prayer to God to be able to do something to deserve his wife.
No wonder he was always urging her to go home—haunted as he was by the feeling of having put her in a prison and, no wonder, not having his iron character, she had finally succumbed—as she so often succumbed to his unselfishness.
How she was loving England! The wet, heavy air—the sky curtained with clouds—the drenched leaves—the saturated flowers—the damp breathing earth—the distant lethargic sun. She could feel a pulse in the sopping soil and her heart beat with it.
Finding her friends too was such an adventure. What struck her most about them was that they seemed so stationary. There they were, just as she had left them, doing the same things, thinking the same things, saying the same things—fixed points with their lives revolving round them, seeming to have lost the capacity for independent motion.
She and Robert were not like that. Thank God, they were still pilgrims. After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India, because of India and, even more, because of Robert. Only she did not want to think about it now. Just to go on repeating to herself: "I'm at home. I'm in England."
And she was going to stay with St. John. How excited she would have been four years ago. How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps, how she had thrilled when he had said "dear" to her. She remembered the care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things, trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. How badly she had behaved. She could wonder now dispassionately whether he had ever been in love with her. On the whole, she thought, he never had. If she had not been married—it was a silly "if." The most he had said was "you make things very difficult," not a very satisfactory avowal when you came to think it over calmly. But she remembered how it had thrilled her at the time—what a blank cheque of possibilities it had seemed. She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked seriously to her—very gently, very tenderly, very gravely. She had thought he was going to say, "I don't want to be made unhappy," and, instead, he had said, "I don't want you to be unhappy." That had been a nasty one. How she had lashed him with her tongue! What inexhaustible reserves of icy acid she had brought forward.
She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could. How hurt had he been? She wondered. It was all such very ancient history. And yet he had gone on being fond of her. Fonder and fonder—men were so odd.
So many things had happened since then. She had been away and he had lost an uncle and inherited a property. And now she was going to stay with him. Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before. She had been very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an essential part of being fond of St. John—a rule of the game, so to speak. That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other people became subtly lovable. Somehow they seemed to creep under your wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate understanding. It was impossible not to make pets of St. John's defects. Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in towns got on his nerves.
"But if it tires my head," she would say, and he would explain very seriously what an intimate gesture it was.