“Good-bye, my dear father. I was your first disappointment, but in the end you and I recognised each other. That is permanent. It will be with me wherever I go, with you to the end of your life. You are of those who believe that understanding is not given to us. Your belief must be a bitter comfort to you. I believe that men are rapidly coming to an end of their material activity so that soon they will be forced to find understanding or perish. . . . Do you remember a night when you and I watched the rest acting an absurd play, and I said involuntarily, ‘Round the corner’? Modern life is theatrical. Everybody is playing a part, because they are without understanding. Life for modern men and women is for ever round the corner because they attempt to tackle their affairs with the minds of children, children who believe everything they are told and examine nothing. They play with everything. They can do nothing else. Unhappily, life is a serious business which yields its reward of joy only to simplicity, sincerity, and purity, or, if you like the old trinity better—faith, hope, and charity. The old beliefs are true—nearly all that you preach, I mean; but from repetition they have become stale and meaningless. They need restatement. . . . I am going back to the sea, not because I believe that the ‘great wide spaces of the earth’—what a lot of twaddle is talked about them!—have a monopoly of truth, but because I must move and keep moving. It is in the air. Perhaps I feel it before other men. The salvation of human life lies in movement, circulation. . . . More simply and less philosophically I am going because it amuses me to go. I like passing through the world saluting the few men of courage and good heart whom one can find, and, of such men, my dear father, I count you not the least.”
Francis kept this letter and through his hours of torment often read it. It let in air.
[XXXII
THE CUTTING OF A KNOT]
| Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, Oinhabitant of the earth. | ||
| ISAIAH, xxiv. 17. | ||
IT is one of the most disconcerting phenomena of existence that, when passionate love has answered its purpose, it simply disappears, leaving its instruments wedded by such truth as they have discovered in each other or divorced by the lies they have forged for each other’s delight. Very rarely, however, is the issue so simple. The bone-and-shadow business comes into play here also, and most people marry with very little passionate love and a great deal of careful imitation of it, so that most marriages are strangled in their birth with a very tangled web of lies.
It was so with Frederic and Jessie Folyat in their marriage, and they were never so nearly united as when jealousy came between them. Their marriage feast did coldly furnish forth the funeral of love, and over love’s dead body they quarrelled. They had scenes, hysterical skirmishes and almost as hysterical reconciliations. There was grim sport in it all, a sort of fascination in the stealthy prying and spying, each crouching and shrinking in readiness for the other’s spring, the snarling bravado with which each dared the other to come on, a little further, a little further, inviting to a caress, repelling with a scratching blow; and all smooth-seeming, veiled, polite, with polished airs and graceful manners and feigned interest and inquiry: a pooling of the common stock only to wrangle over the division of it again. The gambling fever was in it. At any moment all might be lost upon a throw, a little gain, a little loss, more gain, more gain, a little more and the other might be beggared, the game won. But neither dared let the game come to an end. When one was near ruin, grey-faced, anxiously glaring for the turn of the card, the other cheated and the game went on. It absorbed both. Neither could do without it. It was a drug. Their craving for it was agony; its satisfaction a seeming delight.
They were very skilful and cunning to let no trace of it appear on the surface of their lives. Frederic abandoned all pursuit of Annie Lipsett, he deserted the company of his flattering fools, for these things trespassed upon the field of his fevered sport. It was very rarely that they went of their own accord to seek purchasable pleasures. Visits they paid, when politeness and discretion compelled, and everybody found them charming. They could be good company and their talents were useful. They became popular and were much in request to organise entertainments, bazaars, jumble sales, and such functions.
In his business Frederic became more cunning, quicker-witted, and his reputation gained. His practice increased. His whole life was concentrated on his home and his office. He grew lean and alert, but he was always tired.
In the early days of his management of the Bradby-Folyat estate he had borrowed large sums of money. These debts he was able considerably to reduce, and very soon there were no arrears of interest outstanding. As he began to feel himself on more solid ground his habit of exaggeration lost much of its hold upon him, and men who had previously avoided him began to seek his company. Many who had dismissed him as a bore now came to see qualities in him, and, as he gained the acquaintance of a better class of men, the quality of the work that passed through his hands improved.