1
On the morning of the day on which they were to dine at the Mont Agel—Virginia having said that she would risk it, muffled there and back in the car—Ivor in Upper Brook Street received a letter by hand. The letter was addressed in pencil, a pencilled scrawl, and Ivor fingered it with a smile. He had never before received a letter from Virginia—what occasion had there been, indeed! And what occasion was there now? for he had left Virginia at the mausoleum but the night before, indeed only a very few hours ago. Thoughtfully he weighed the letter in his hand, and it was a heavy letter. The Smith had brought it, Turner told him.
Yes, it was a long letter, several sheets scrawled over on both sides, in Virginia’s careless way. To read it he sat, in his dressing-gown, on a chair by the window. September was carrying on August’s tradition; it rained dispassionately.
“I’m writing to you, Ivor, because I can’t talk to you sometimes. I mean, dear, that I can’t talk of certain things without you getting very, very dark; and then, you see, I get frightened for us both, of what will happen—to you and me, Ivor, in those dark moments! You prowl about so, you know! And so I’m sitting up in bed now, just after you have left me, to write to you about a most important and tiresome matter—what the papers so rightly call ‘that much vexed question of divorce.’ Keep your eyebrows straight, Ivor! Don’t bring your eyebrows down into the darkness! Keep your eyebrows straight, my darling, and listen to Virginia. For although you are intelligent and I am not, I am very wise, Ivor. Sometimes. And this is what I know——”
“Breakfast on the table, sir,” Turner reminded him. Ivor looked up and stared at Turner for several seconds. “Yes, yes,” he said at last.
“Ever since we spoke of marrying, that first night in Paris, I’ve known somewhere deep down that I should sometime have to write this letter. But that doesn’t make it any easier, dear, for you can be very difficult. Ivor, I can’t marry you. I won’t. And I’ve known that all the time—and haven’t you known it too? I could have stopped you thinking of it right at the beginning, by saying that George wouldn’t dream of divorcing me or letting me divorce him, but I can’t tell little lies, Ivor, so I told you a big lie. I’ve been pretending, Ivor. Darling, tell me that you knew I was pretending, just so that we could be happy—and that it doesn’t now come as a shock to you? I told you, that night, that I didn’t think any woman would, or could marry you. I don’t know now.... Maybe there is such a woman. Maybe your mother, as you’ve described her to me, was such a woman. But I don’t think so, for she let your father quite lose himself in her, she changed him from a man into a lover, and he was so lost to the world that he might just as well have died ten years before he did. But you, Ivor, want things both ways, and that’s why I can’t marry you. We would choke each other. Don’t you see? I’m not strong enough and you simply aren’t casual enough—you aren’t casual at all! I’m not trying to make any music-hall comparisons between husbands and lovers, but there must be some capacity for casualness in a husband, else people would go mad. I don’t mean that I’d go mad with you—it’s you who would go mad. I love you. Too much, maybe—oh, yes, Ivor, too much! And I’ve never loved any one before, except George, and that was a defiant kind of thing: I’ve just let men touch me, because they so wanted to. I’m thinking of you in all this, much more than of myself. I know I’m not strong enough to marry you. You want to do things, you will not be happy unless you are doing things and writing things. You think you want to do things, anyway. And in your mind you are never really at rest, you are always striving about something, sometimes quite unimportant things. And you say to yourself that you will be able to strive tremendously when we are married, but I say you will not, and I’m very wise about some things. For, I tell you, I’m not strong enough inside to cope with your love and the burden of mine, I just sink under them and you sink with me—you are not casual enough, Ivor! You don’t push one back, ever! Why, among your many impatiences, haven’t you got that of sometimes pushing one away? And if we many we will sink, and you will never do the work you want to do—have you had a thought about it all this time, you who despise slackers so much? Just loving a woman—even me!—isn’t enough for you. You only think it is, dear. Dear Ivor, I can see you prowling about my life with a smile nailed on your face, wondering why it is that you can’t do or write anything ‘nowadays.’ Your father must have been a different man to you, I think, for he just damned everything and lost himself in love and Italy, quite lost to the world that had hoped such things from him. You are stronger than your father, and you want to master the world and mould it to your desire—and me too! and you almost have, but not quite. And that’s why our marrying can only make us unhappy in the end, for under your strength lies your father’s weakness of loving too completely—your ambitions are just added to you, poor Ivor, to make you unhappy! I am your mistress, and you are my lover. I am your woman and you are my man. Oh, Ivor, let’s go on like that, let’s go on as we’ve done, free to come and go, free to love and work—let me be free, Ivor, to keep your love for me by letting you be free—isn’t that how you once described the ‘patrician idea,’ dear? Well, it’s hitting you back now.... I get weak in your arms, and so I am writing this to you. I will not marry you, Ivor. And you will be glad, sometime. But I shall be sorry if you are angry now.”
Turner had lied about the breakfast, for it was not on the table; he had kept it warm, but that availed the breakfast not at all, for it was not eaten.
It had been arranged that Ivor should lunch at Belgrave Square that day; but he told Turner to ring up and say that he would be unable to lunch, but would call in the afternoon if he might. Not casual enough, he thought grimly.... He did not want to go to lunch, not because he was angry, but because he wanted to think. He wanted to do any amount of thinking. And he prowled about his flat all the morning, thinking.
September still rained.
One of the greatest mistakes Ivor ever made in his life was not to go to luncheon with Virginia that day, so that he could “think.” It was, in fact, the great mistake of his life. For a man of his impatient temper does not, at certain times, think. He broods. And how far that brooding can take a man from the reality of a thing! How venomously it colours a thing or a woman, so that they would be unrecognisable to a clear eye! What beastliness it unfolds, what lies it verifies, what disloyalties it makes bitterly reasonable!...