Tono Bungay

The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike.  Nothing is simple.  Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil.  As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock.  We were furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, callously selfish, generously self-sacrificing.

I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn’t hang together one with another, that contradicted one another, that were, nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and sincere.  I see them now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend the crumpled confusions of our complex moral landslide.  Some I found irritating beyond measure.  I answered her—­sometimes quite abominably.

“Of course,” she would say again and again, “my life has been a failure.”

“I’ve besieged you for three years,” I would retort “asking it not to be.  You’ve done as you pleased.  If I’ve turned away at last—­”

Or again she would revive all the stresses before our marriage.

“How you must hate me!  I made you wait.  Well now—­I suppose you have your revenge.”

“REVENGE!” I echoed.

Then she would try over the aspects of our new separated lives.

“I ought to earn my own living,” she would insist.

“I want to be quite independent.  I’ve always hated London.  Perhaps I shall try a poultry farm and bees.  You won’t mind at first my being a burden.  Afterwards—­”

“We’ve settled all that,” I said.

“I suppose you will hate me anyhow…”

There were times when she seemed to regard our separation with absolute complacency, when she would plan all sorts of freedoms and characteristic interests.

“I shall go out a lot with Smithie,” she said.

And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for. that I cannot even now quite forgive her.

“Your aunt will rejoice at all this.  She never cared for me…”

Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie, full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the presence of the horrid villain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds.  She had long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic close clingings.  There were moments when only absolute speechlessness prevented her giving me a stupendous “talking-to”—­I could see it in her eye.  The wrong things she would have said!  And I recall, too, Mrs. Ramboat’s slow awakening to something in, the air, the growing expression of solicitude in her eye, only her well-trained fear of Marion keeping her from speech.

And at last through all this welter, like a thing fated and altogether beyond our control, parting came to Marion and me.

I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone.  For at the last it came to Marion that she was parting from me for ever.  That overbore all other things, had turned our last hour to anguish.  She forgot for a time the prospect of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride.  For the first time in her life she really showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps, they really came to her.  She began to weep slow, reluctant tears.  I came into her room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.

“I didn’t know,” she cried.  “Oh!  I didn’t understand!”

“I’ve been a fool.  All my life is a wreck!

“I shall be alone  Mutney, don’t leave me!  Oh!  Mutney!  I didn’t understand.”

I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in those last hours together that at last, too late, the longed-for thing had happened and Marion had come alive.  A new-born hunger for me lit her eyes.

“Don’t leave me!” she said, “don’t leave me!” She clung to me; she kissed me with tear-salt lips.

I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against this impossible dawn.  Yet it seems to me that there were moments when it needed but a cry, but one word to have united us again for all our lives.  Could we have united again?  Would that passage have enlightened us for ever or should we have fallen back in a week or so into the old estrangement, the old temperamental opposition?

Of that there is now no telling.  Our own resolve carried us on our predestined way.  We behaved more and more like separating lovers, parting inexorably, but all the preparations we had set going worked on like a machine, and we made no attempt to stop them.  My trunks and boxes went to the station.  I packed my bag with Marion standing before me.  We were like children who had hurt each other horribly in sheer stupidity, who didn’t know now how to remedy it.  We belonged to each other immensely—­immensely.  The cab came to the little iron gate.

“Good-bye!” I said.

“Good-bye.”

For a moment we held one another in each other’s arms and kissed—­incredibly without malice.  We heard our little servant in the passage going to open the door.  For the last time we pressed ourselves to one another.  We were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain.  I tore myself from her.

“Go away,” I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed me down.

I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cab man.

I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it started jumped up, craned out and looked at the door.

It was wide open, but she had disappeared….

I wonder—­I suppose she ran upstairs.