Tono Bungay

It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone for this great doubting of mind was Marion.  I lay composing statements of my problem and imagined myself delivering them to her—­and she, goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine, simply-worded judgment.

“You see, it’s just to give one’s self over to the Capitalistic System,” I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; “it’s surrendering all one’s beliefs.  We may succeed, we may grow rich, but where would the satisfaction be?”

Then she would say, “No!  That wouldn’t be right.”

“But the alternative is to wait!”

Then suddenly she would become a goddess.  She would turn upon me frankly and nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out.  “No,” she would say, “we love one another.  Nothing ignoble shall ever touch us.  We love one another.  Why wait to tell each other that, dear?  What does it matter that we are poor and may keep poor?”

But indeed the conversation didn’t go at all in that direction.  At the sight of her my nocturnal eloquence became preposterous and all the moral values altered altogether.  I had waited for her outside the door of the Parsian-robe establishment in Kensington High Street and walked home with her thence.  I remember how she emerged into the warm evening light and that she wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not only beautiful but pretty.

“I like that hat,” I said by way of opening; and she smiled her rare delightful smile at me.

“I love you,” I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on the pavement.

She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled.  Then—­ “Be sensible!”

The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for conversation and we were some way westward before we spoke again.

“Look here,” I said; “I want you, Marion.  Don’t you understand?  I want you.”

“Now!” she cried warningly.

I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate lover, an immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam of positive hatred.  Such a gleam there was in me at the serene self-complacency of that “Now!” It vanished almost before I felt it.  I found no warning in it of the antagonisms latent between us.

“Marion,” I said, “this isn’t a trifling matter to me.  I love you; I would die to get you….  Don’t you care?”

“But what is the good?”

“You don’t care,” I cried.  “You don’t care a rap!”

“You know I care,” she answered.  “If I didn’t—­ If I didn’t like you very much, should I let you come and meet me—­ go about with you?”

“Well then,” I said, “promise to marry me!”

“If I do, what difference will it make?”

We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between us unawares.

“Marion,” I asked when we got together again, “I tell you I want you to marry me.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t marry—­in the street.”

“We could take our chance!”

“I wish you wouldn’t go on talking like this.  What is the good?”

She suddenly gave way to gloom.  “It’s no good marrying” she said.  “One’s only miserable.  I’ve seen other girls.  When one’s alone one has a little pocket-money anyhow, one can go about a little.  But think of being married and no money, and perhaps children—­you can’t be sure….”

She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type in jerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with discontented eyes towards the westward glow—­forgetful, it seemed, for a moment even of me.

“Look here, Marion,” I said abruptly, “what would you marry on?”

“What is the good?” she began.

“Would you marry on three hundred a year?”

She looked at me for a moment.  “That’s six pounds a week,” she said.  “One could manage on that, easily.  Smithie’s brother—­No, he only gets two hundred and fifty.  He married a typewriting girl.”

“Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?”

She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.

“If!” she said.

I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes.  “It’s a bargain,” I said.

She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant.  “It’s silly,” she remarked as she did so.  “It means really we’re—­” She paused.

“Yes?” said I.

“Engaged.  You’ll have to wait years.  What good can it do you?”

“Not so many years.”  I answered.

For a moment she brooded.

Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful, that has stuck in my memory for ever.

“I like you!” she said.  “I shall like to be engaged to you.”

And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured “dear!” It’s odd that in writing this down my memory passed over all that intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I’m Marion’s boyish lover taking great joy in such rare and little things.