A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

They alighted from the train at Notting Hill Station, and walked the few paces to the shop over which the Collins had rooms.

"Good night!"

"Oh, but you'll come up and have a drink with Jim. He might be able to put you on to something good; influence counts for an awful lot."

"I don't think I'll come up," indeterminedly.... The need of solitude became suddenly overwhelming: "No; if you'll excuse me; I'm tired; long day at the office."

"Good night, then; and I hope you'll arrange something nice for your holidays...."

Gareth sauntered moodily along the dull pavements, and past the blind shop-shutters of Ladbroke Grove. Holidays—and his mind sped back to a phrase in a letter, written some sixteen years ago: "Our holiday—Yes, but I shall always speak the word now according to its derivation: holy day. Holy days—for us, Kathleen."

Well, but what had gone wrong in the years, to have transformed the splendid impulsive creature of his mountain idyll, to the raw hectic woman of nerves who was now his housemate? Nerves—she was one nerve; worn to as thin an edge as the bending blade of an old and useless table-knife. Gareth could not tell how the gradual transformation had occurred. One morning he and Kathleen had had a sharp altercation about—what was it?—Yes, he had wanted to lie abed five minutes longer, and Kathleen had lost her temper; then as suddenly recovered it; and glancing round the untidy bedroom, her strewn brushes vying for place with his razor-strop on the mantelpiece where neither belonged, hearing the drizzle of rain on the window, and the cracked bell from the hall summoning them to a cold breakfast, she cried in a choking voice: "We're not a bit different from other people. I knew it. I warned you," and fled from the room. Then softly Gareth arose, and went to the bathroom, where already the paper was beginning to peel and flap from the damp walls. And there, sitting toothbrush in hand, on the edge of the tin enamelled bath, he strove to recollect the details of Kathleen's outbreak on her horror of certain trivial intimacies of wedlock, that by avoiding them he might yet retain a grip on the slippery substance of their dreams. Bathroom taps; his mind persistently dwelt on that one allusion: "To hear a man's bath-water running in the morning...." But that couldn't be all. The bathroom taps became to him an obsession, wholly responsible for the present state of disillusion between him and Kathleen. She had said it. And unable to cope with the actual trouble, he found relief in clinging to the one tangible grievance she might be nourishing ... he trickled the water very gently into the bath that morning, so that it was barely lukewarm when he stepped in. Gareth disliked lukewarm baths, and he was depressed at breakfast....

Well, after sixteen years, he knew that the bathroom taps had been as much—or as little—responsible as every other link in the dragging chain of habit.

He had learnt to fear Kathleen's intensity of feeling; her exaggeration of every trifle to a matter of life or death; to fear still more the overwhelming responsive leap of her, when he attempted any sudden tenderness. He feared her suffering of remembrance, knowing as he did that a moment lay in store for both when their inability to keep love between them was bound to be drawn from its sheath of pretence. Her one-time dread of seeing step by step that festering intimacy grow upon mystery, had now merged into a still greater dread of hearing the actuality spoken of in so many words. And he was sorry for her disappointment, with a sorrow that was bitterly helpless.

As for himself—Gareth was looking to-night with clear eyes at his cherished dream; and saw that he had dragged it too close, so that it was stained with thumbmarks. If only he could still have kept painless the memory of Alpenruh's glamour; if Kathleen had died directly after—he or Kathleen. She was less at fault than he; she had striven on their return from the land of enchantment to draw a charmed circle thrice around it, wherein to keep it detached and wonderful. It was he who had hung on; he who was responsible for the drab aftermath. Once in conquering vein he had swung past this very church on the hill, down the long slope to the house in North Kensington, to force Kathleen's consent to their marriage....