Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the lightest engines in the world.
I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It’s hard enough simply to get it put down in the remotest degree right. But this is a novel, not a treatise. Don’t imagine that I am coming presently to any sort of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings and hammerings now, I still question unanswering problems. All my life has been at bottom, seeking, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always with the thing seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil, in force, in danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearly understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundly and fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself; I don’t know—all I can tell is that it is something I have ever failed to find.
XI
But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on with the great adventure of my uncle’s career. I may perhaps tell what else remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set my private life behind me.
For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity, writing friendly but rather uninforming letters about small business things. The clumsy process of divorce completed itself.
She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her aunt and parents, taking a small farm near Lewes in Sussex. She put up glass, she put in heat for her father, happy man! and spoke of figs and peaches. The thing seemed to promise well throughout a spring and summer, but the Sussex winter after London was too much for the Ramboats. They got very muddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding, and that disheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in difficulties. I had to help her out of this, and then they returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at Streatham, and ran a business that was intimated on the firm’s stationery as “Robes.” The parents and aunt were stowed away in a cottage somewhere. After that the letters became infrequent. But in one I remember a postscript that had a little stab of our old intimacy: “Poor old Miggles is dead.”
Nearly eight years slipped by. I grew up. I grew in experience, in capacity, until I was fully a man, but with many new interests, living on a larger scale in a wider world than I could have dreamt of in my Marion days. Her letters become rare and insignificant. At last came a gap of silence that made me curious. For eighteen months or more I had nothing from Marion save her quarterly receipts through the bank. Then I damned at Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion.
“Dear Marion,” I said, “how goes it?”
She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again—“a Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern trade.” But she still wrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes) notepaper, from the Ponderevo and Smith address.
And that, except for a little difference of opinion about the continuance of alimony which gave me some passages of anger, and the use of my name by the firm, which also annoyed me, is the end of Marion’s history for me, and she vanishes out of this story. I do not know where she is or what she is doing. I do not know whether she is alive or dead. It seems to me utterly grotesque that two people who have stood so close to one another as she and I should be so separated, but so it is between us.