And such understanding of her as he acquired, came to him only much later, after they had lain becalmed in that Saragossa Sea that is charted between love and friendship: a sea of shameful doubts and deceits and desires, a seaweed sea of broken vows and harsh antagonisms, and one that is very difficult for the tortured voyager to traverse, in the journey back from love and forward to friendship, for there is no compass to point the sad direction....
It was in the nature of Magdalen that her love had in it nothing stationary. She couldn’t help but make everything she loved infinitely remote and desirable and unattainable. How sweet, thus, was the attainment! She had loved and been loved so often, yet she had no base knowledge of love. She was not wise in love, she had no caution. She never wanted to make use of love, she let love use her. And experience had robbed her of no pleasures, nor repetition tainted her tenderness: she was like a fruit-tree to which each ripening season is a fecund joy, whose fruit is sweet to your mouth yet serious in its sweetness, lest your easy looting provoke your levity. Magdalen had no politics.
She romanced, with grave unconsciousness. She loved Ivor, and so pursued him. She couldn’t love him otherwise, she must pursue even a pursuer. To attain and enjoy him with her full abundance she must first make him unattainable. Her mind must grow chaotic with helplessness at the “difficulty” of this man, who seemed to draw back when she advanced—indeed, she romanced seriously!—who seemed never to give himself utterly but ever to be holding back something frightfully essential. Yes, he was holding back something frightfully essential, it was evident—while she loved him, but how much! And she told him everything, she made no mystery of a love that seemed to Ivor exceedingly mysterious. There was no private corner nor secret shadow of her heart that she didn’t wantonly reveal to him. She simply didn’t care! She held him very tight and bewildered him with her love-making—to break off suddenly and swear a mighty oath that he was far beside the mark if he thought that she was repeating what she had sometime said to some previous lover: saying that she had a wonderful talent for love-speeches which hadn’t so far received due recognition, “or else, Ivor, you would be doing something adequate instead of lying there like an Eastern emperor listening to the words of your odalisque.”
“All my life,” she said, “I have had love-speeches on my lips and in my heart, and that’s why I’ve had lovers, for I couldn’t bear to keep them to myself. I simply had to tell them to some one, even if they turned out to be very ordinary, which they mostly did.... Yes, Ivor, it was exactly as I’m telling you. And if you ever put me into a book, which you probably will, for you will never meet another woman who knows so much about the things that are not in books, you will say that I was a kind of love-tailor, forever measuring and fitting men to the things in my heart; and just like any other tailor I sometimes made misfits, but I am very persevering, Ivor, and so it always came right in the end. But never before have I fitted my love-speeches to a man as I’m fitting them to you—and getting very little for my trouble, I might add. It has always been the other way about, Ivor, and I’m not sure that I like this new departure in tailoring. Oh, but you are so secret, my dear! Your brown eyes are so secret, don’t you know they are? And sometimes I wish your eyes were pools of water so that I could drown myself in them, and be done with loving you so much who love me so little.... Oh, Ivor, how base you and all men are! You suspect the fine phrases of love—yes, you do, Ivor! If a woman looks at you speechless with love, you believe she loves you. But if she puts her love to you in sentences, complete with commas, colons, and full-stops, if she gives you her love dressed in the purple and fine linen of her heart—you can’t help thinking her rather odd, can you, dear?...”
2
Of course this kind of thing didn’t go on every day; it sometimes didn’t happen for days at a time; and for the rest they were great friends. Their time together passed wonderfully in the merry practice of friendship. Magdalen fulfilled every condition of intimacy, wonderfully unasked. She opened the doors of her life and let him look in, while she trembled for fear he might find it altogether too bad. He wanted to know—everything! (He had never known anything before.) Friendship that held secrecy was a sorry thing, they both agreed. There is no secrecy between us, they said. There is restraint, but there is no secrecy—that is more or less what they said. Nor was there! She told him of enormities of inconstancy—to prove her constancy to him! “This talent for exploring makes such a mess of life,” she said. But now at last she had found a friend in love. They were plainly comrades, one to the other. “Playmates,” she insisted.
“The most wonderful thing about miracles is that they sometimes happen,” writes that magnificent Catholic, Mr. Chesterton; but one needn’t be a magnificent Catholic to believe him. Ivor believed him.... She had been a friend to very many people, she told him, but she herself had had no friend. Always to give, to give, to give, she said, and nothing ever given back—to me, waiting for the tender things! “I’ve tried so hard,” she said. But now Ivor had come, he was her first friend. “I’m virginal to friendship, anyway,” she told him gravely; and, thereupon, she emphasised her age, the phenomenal age of one-and-thirty. And, exercising his friendship, she found him a rare man. Anyway, she said he was, and gave her reasons for thinking so at considerable length. There are jealous men, she told him, to whom a woman cannot speak of her past life; there are foolish men who will love a woman foolishly no matter what she tells them of herself; there are absurd men who beg, beseech and implore to be told “everything,” and then make a scene about it; there are strong and silent men in whom a woman trustfully confides, and who use the confession against her at the first opportunity; and there are those rare men who love jealously yet intelligently, to whom a woman can tell everything and, in having told, forget everything—men who can understand without softness and be hard without rancour: men whose dignity is in their hearts and not on their lips, rare men to whom a woman cannot cheapen herself, for they will not have her cheap, they are not aware that she can be cheap—and so she is not, great as is the temptation to cheapness in a woman in love. Anyway, that is what Magdalen said, and she probably knew.
Of course his writing suffered by neglect. Every kind of work always does, in contact with accursed women like Magdalen, who enthral men by enslaving themselves; and who adorn a man’s life by destroying it. But, though his writing suffered by neglect, how much it gained in knowledge! For Magdalen was his real education. She knew so much, of the things that are not in books—“but will be,” she teased him. He learned about men by listening to her, and about himself not a little by loving her. She influenced him deeply; her way of speaking influenced not only his, but also his way of writing: so that when, years later, Rodney West read his best novel,[C] he rather grimly said that there were two people who could have written that book in that way and Ivor Marlay was only one of them. She polished him, and she smoothed down the sharp dogmatisms and conceits which had so far taken the place of conversation with him. Thus was Aunt Percy proved right in thinking that there were other women beside himself, he shouldn’t wonder! Aunt Percy would have liked Magdalen; he would have invited her to lunch at the Bath Club now and then, and as they sat down he would have asked her brusquely: “Well, and how’s that young man of mine? Bit above himself, I shouldn’t wonder.” Magdalen would have made Aunt Percy laugh.