William And Mary (1920)
Memories, like olives, are an acquired taste. William and Mary (I give
them the Christian names that were indeed theirs--the joint title by
which their friends always referred to them) were for some years an
interest in my life, and had a hold on my affection. But a time came
when, though I had known and liked them too well ever to forget them,
I gave them but a few thoughts now and then. How, being dead, could
they keep their place in the mind of a young man surrounded with large
and constantly renewed consignments of the living? As one grows older,
the charm of novelty wears off. One finds that there is no such thing
as novelty--or, at any rate, that one has lost the faculty for
perceiving it. One sees every newcomer not as something strange and
special, but as a ticketed specimen of this or that very familiar
genus. The world has ceased to be remarkable; and one tends to think
more and more often of the days when it was so very remarkable indeed.
I suppose that had I been thirty years older when first I knew him,
William would have seemed to me little worthier of attention than a
twopenny postage-stamp seems to-day. Yet, no: William really had some
oddities that would have caught even an oldster's eye. In himself he
was commonplace enough (as I, coeval though I was with him, soon saw).
But in details of surface he was unusual. In them he happened to be
rather ahead of his time. He was a socialist, for example. In 1890
there was only one other socialist in Oxford, and he not at all an
undergraduate, but a retired chimney-sweep, named Hines, who made
speeches, to which nobody, except perhaps William, listened, near the
Martyrs' Memorial. And William wore a flannel shirt, and rode a
bicycle--very strange habits in those days, and very horrible. He was
said to be (though he was short-sighted and wore glasses) a first-rate
`back' at football; but, as football was a thing frowned on by the
rowing men, and coldly ignored by the bloods, his talent for it did
not help him: he was one of the principal pariahs of our College; and
it was rather in a spirit of bravado, and to show how sure of myself I
was, that I began, in my second year, to cultivate his acquaintance.
We had little in common. I could not think Political Economy `the most
exciting thing in the world,' as he used to call it. Nor could I
without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris'
interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young
socialist that he was, thought `glorious.' He had begun to write an
Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of
verses. None of these pleased him, though to me they seemed very like
his master's. I can see him now, standing on his hearth-rug, holding
his MS. close to his short-sighted eyes, declaiming the verses and
trying, with many angular gestures of his left hand, to animate them--
a tall, broad, raw-boned fellow, with long brown hair flung back from
his forehead, and a very shabby suit of clothes. Because of his
clothes and his socialism, and his habit of offering beer to a guest,
I had at first supposed him quite poor; and I was surprised when he
told me that he had from his guardian (his parents being dead) an
allowance of œ350, and that when he came of age he would have an
income of œ400. `All out of dividends,' he would groan. I would hint
that Mr. Hines and similar zealots might disembarrass him of this
load, if he asked them nicely. `No,' he would say quite seriously, `I
can't do that,' and would read out passages from `Fabian Essays' to
show that in the present anarchical conditions only mischief could
result from sporadic dispersal of rent. `Ten, twelve years hence--' he
would muse more hopefully. `But by that time,' I would say, `you'll
probably be married, and your wife mightn't quite--', whereat he would
hotly repeat what he had said many times: that he would never marry.
Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I think its survival wasin
some part due to the machinations of Capital. Anyway, it was doomed.
Temporary civil contracts between men and women would be the rule
`ten, twelve years hence'; pending which time the lot of any man who
had civic sense must be celibacy, tempered perhaps with free love.
Long before that time was up, nevertheless, William married. One
afternoon in the spring of '95 I happened to meet him at a corner of
Cockspur Street. I wondered at the immense cordiality of his greeting;
for our friendship, such as it was, had waned in our two final years
at Oxford. `You look very flourishing, and,' I said, `you're wearing a
new suit!' `I'm married,' he replied, obviously without a twinge of
conscience. He told me he had been married just a month. He declared
that to be married was the most splendid thing in all the world; but
he weakened the force of this generalisation by adding that there
never was any one like his wife. `You must see her,' he said; and his
impatience to show her proudly off to some one was so evident, and so
touching, that I could but accept his invitation to go and stay with
them for two or three days--`why not next week?' They had taken and
furnished `a sort of cottage' in --shire, and this was their home. He
had `run up for the day, on business--journalism' and was now on his
way to Charing Cross. `I know you'll like my wife,' he said at
parting. She's--well, she's glorious.'
As this was the epithet he had erst applied to `Beowulf' and to
`Sigurd the Volsung' it raised no high hopes. And indeed, as I was
soon to find, he had again misused it. There was nothing glorious
about his bride. Some people might even have not thought her pretty. I
myself did not, in the flash of first sight. Neat, insignificant,
pleasing, was what she appeared to me, rather than pretty, and far
rather than glorious. In an age of fringes, her brow was severely
bare. She looked `practical.' But an instant later, when she smiled, I
saw that she was pretty, too. And presently I thought her delightful.
William had met me in a `governess cart,' and we went to see him
unharness the pony. He did this in a fumbling, experimental way,
confusing the reins with the traces, and profiting so little by his
wife's directions that she began to laugh. And her laugh was a lovely
thing; quite a small sound, but exquisitely clear and gay, coming in a
sequence of notes that neither rose nor fell, that were quite even; a
trill of notes, and then another, and another, as though she were
pulling repeatedly a little silver bell... As I describe it, perhaps
the sound may be imagined irritating. I can only say it was
enchanting.
I wished she would go on laughing; but she ceased, she darted forward
and (William standing obediently aside, and I helping unhelpfully)
unharnessed the pony herself, and led it into its small stable.
Decidedly, she was `practical,' but--I was prepared now to be lenient
to any quality she might have.
Had she been feckless, no doubt I should have forgiven her that, too;
but I might have enjoyed my visit less than I did, and might have been
less pleased to go often again. I had expected to `rough it' under
William's roof. But everything thereunder, within the limits of a
strict Arcadian simplicity, was well-ordered. I was touched, when I
went to my bedroom, by the precision with which the very small maid
had unpacked and disposed my things. And I wondered where my hostess
had got the lore she had so evidently imparted. Certainly not from
William. Perhaps (it only now strikes me) from a handbook. For Mary
was great at handbooks. She had handbooks about gardening, and others
about poultry, and one about `the stable,' and others on cognate
themes. From these she had filled up the gaps left in her education by
her father, who was a widower and either a doctor or a solicitor--I
forget which--in one of the smallest towns of an adjoining county. And
I daresay she may have had, somewhere hidden away, a manual for young
hostesses. If so, it must have been a good one. But to say this is to
belittle Mary's powers of intuition. It was they, sharpened by her
adoration of William, and by her intensity for everything around him,
that made her so efficient a housewife.
If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not
by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed
in. The `sort of cottage' had been vacant for many years--an
unpromising and ineligible object, a mile away from a village, and
three miles away from a railway station. The main part of it was an
actual cottage, of seventeenth-century workmanship; but a little
stuccoed wing had been added to each side of it, in 1850 or
thereabouts, by an eccentric old gentleman who at that time chose to
make it his home. He had added also the small stable, a dairy, and
other appanages. For these, and for garden, there was plenty of room,
as he had purchased and enclosed half an acre of the surrounding land
Those two stuccoed, very Victorian wings of his, each with a sash-
window above and a French window below, consorted queerly with the old
red brick and the latticed panes. And the long wooden veranda that he
had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn't want it to. The
wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right--at any
rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I
think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief
of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married
him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a
thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a thing she must coddle to
the utmost in a proper setting. She was a year older than he (though,
being so small and slight, she looked several years younger), and in
her devotion the maternal instinct played a great part. William, as I
have already conveyed to you, was not greatly gifted. Mary's instinct,
in this one matter, was at fault. But endearingly, rightly at fault.
And, as William was outwardly odd, wasn't it well that his home should
be so, too? On the inside, comfort was what Mary always aimed at for
him, and achieved.
The ground floor had all been made one room, into which you stepped
straight from the open air. Quite a long big room (or so it seemed,
from the lowness of the ceiling), and well-freshened in its antiquity,
with rush-mats here and there on the irregular red tiles, and very
white whitewash on the plaster between the rafters. This was the
dining-room, drawing-room, and general focus throughout the day, and
was called simply the Room. William had a `den' on the ground floor of
the left wing; and there, in the mornings, he used to write a great
deal. Mary had no special place of her own: her place was wherever her
duties needed her. William wrote reviews of books for the Daily --. He
did also creative work. The vein of poetry in him had worked itself
out--or rather, it expressed itself for him in Mary. For technical
purposes, the influence of Ibsen had superseded that of Morris. At the
time of my first visit, he was writing an extraordinarily gloomy play
about an extraordinarily unhappy marriage. In subsequent seasons
(Ibsen's disc having been somehow eclipsed for him by George
Gissing's) he was usually writing novels in which every one--or do I
exaggerate?--had made a disastrous match. I think Mary's belief in his
genius had made him less diffident than he was at Oxford. He was
always emerging from his den, with fresh pages of MS., into the Room.
`You don't mind?' he would say, waving his pages, and then would shout
`Mary!' She was always promptly forthcoming--sometimes from the
direction of the kitchen, in a white apron, sometimes from the garden,
in a blue one. She never looked at him while he read. To do so would
have been lacking in respect for his work. It was on this that she
must concentrate her whole mind, privileged auditor that she was. She
sat looking straight before her, with her lips slightly compressed,
and her hands folded on her lap. I used to wonder that there had been
that first moment when I did not think her pretty. Her eyes were of a
very light hazel, seeming all the lighter because her hair was of so
dark a brown; and they were beautifully set in a face of that `pinched
oval' kind which is rather rare in England. Mary as listener would
have atoned to me for any defects there may have been in dear old
William's work. Nevertheless, I sometimes wished this work had some
comic relief in it. Publishers, I believe, shared this wish; hence the
eternal absence of William's name from among their announcements. For
Mary's sake, and his, I should have liked him to be `successful.' But
at any rate he didn't need money. He didn't need, in addition to what
he had, what he made by his journalism. And as for success--well,
didn't Mary think him a genius? And wasn't he Mary's husband? The main
reason why I wished for light passages in what he read to us was that
they would have been cues for Mary's laugh. This was a thing always
new to me. I never tired of that little bell-like euphony; those funny
little lucid and level trills.
There was no stint of that charm when William was not reading to us.
Mary was in no awe of him, apart from his work, and in no awe at all
of me: she used to laugh at us both, for one thing and another--just
the same laugh as I had first heard when William tried to unharness
the pony. I cultivated in myself whatever amused her in me; I drew out
whatever amused her in William; I never let slip any of the things
that amused her in herself. `Chaff' is a great bond; and I should have
enjoyed our bouts of it even without Mary's own special obbligato. She
used to call me (for I was very urban in those days) the Gentleman
from London. I used to call her the Brave Little Woman. Whatever
either of us said or did could be twisted easily into relation to
those two titles; and our bouts, to which William listened with a
puzzled, benevolent smile, used to cease only because Mary regarded me
as a possible purveyor of what William, she was sure, wanted and
needed, down there in the country, alone with her: intellectual
conversation, after his work. She often, I think, invented duties in
garden or kitchen so that he should have this stimulus, or luxury,
without hindrance. But when William was alone with me it was about her
that he liked to talk, and that I myself liked to talk too. He was
very sound on the subject of Mary; and so was I. And if, when I was
alone with Mary, I seemed to be sounder than I was on the subject of
William's wonderfulness, who shall blame me?
Had Mary been a mother, William's wonderfulness would have been less
greatly important. But he was her child as well as her lover. And I
think, though I do not know, she believed herself content that this
should always be, if so it were destined. It was not destined so. On
the first night of a visit I paid them in April, 1899, William, when
we were alone, told me news. I had been vaguely conscious, throughout
the evening, of some change; conscious that Mary had grown gayer, and
less gay--somehow different, somehow remote. William said that her
child would be born in September, if all went well. `She's immensely
happy,' he told me. I realised that she was indeed happier than
ever... `And of course it would be a wonderful thing, for both of us,'
he said presently, `to have a son--or a daughter.' I asked him which
he would rather it were, a son or a daughter. `Oh, either,' he
answered wearily. It was evident that he had misgivings and fears. I
tried to reason him out of them. He did not, I am thankful to say,
ever let Mary suspect them. She had no misgivings. But it was destined
that her child should live only for an hour, and that she should die
in bearing it.
I had stayed again at the cottage in July, for some days. At the end
of that month I had gone to France, as was my custom, and a week later
had written to Mary. It was William that answered this letter, telling
me of Mary's death and burial. I returned to England next day. William
and I wrote to each other several times. He had not left his home. He
stayed there, `trying,' as he said in a grotesque and heart-rending
phrase, `to finish a novel.' I saw him in the following January. He
wrote to me from the Charing Cross Hotel, asking me to lunch with him
there. After our first greetings, there was a silence. He wanted to
talk of--what he could not talk of. We stared helplessly at each
other, and then, in the English way, talked of things at large.
England was engaged in the Boer War. William was the sort of man whom
one would have expected to be violently Pro-Boer. I was surprised at
his fervour for the stronger side. He told me he had tried to enlist,
but had been rejected on account of his eyesight. But there was, he
said, a good chance of his being sent out, almost immediately, as one
of the Daily --'s special correspondents. `And then,' he exclaimed, `I
shall see something of it.' I had a presentiment that he would not
return, and a belief that he did not want to return. He did not
return. Special correspondents were not so carefully shepherded in
that war as they have since been. They were more at liberty to take
risks, on behalf of the journals to which they were accredited.
William was killed a few weeks after he had landed at Cape Town.
And there came, as I have said, a time when I did not think of William
and Mary often; and then a time when I did more often think of them.
And especially much did my mind hark back to them in the late autumn
of last year; for on the way to the place I was staying at I had
passed the little railway station whose name had always linked itself
for me with the names of those two friends. There were but four
intervening stations. It was not a difficult pilgrimage that I made
some days later--back towards the past, for that past's sake and
honour. I had thought I should not remember the way, the three miles
of way, from the station to the cottage; but I found myself
remembering it perfectly, without a glance at the finger-posts. Rain
had been falling heavily, driving the late leaves off the trees; and
everything looked rather sodden and misty, though the sun was now
shining. I had known this landscape only in spring, summer, early
autumn. Mary had held to a theory that at other seasons I could not be
acclimatised. But there were groups of trees that I knew, even without
their leaves; and farm-houses and small stone bridges that had not at
all changed. Only what mattered was changed. Only what mattered was
gone. Would what I had come to see be there still? In comparison with
what it had held, it was not much. But I wished to see it, melancholy
spectacle though it must be for me if it were extant, and worse than
melancholy if it held something new. I began to be sure it had been
demolished, built over. At the corner of the lane that had led to it,
I was almost minded to explore no further, to turn back. But I went
on, and suddenly I was at the four-barred iron gate, that I
remembered, between the laurels. It was rusty, and was fastened with a
rusty padlock, and beyond it there was grass where a winding `drive'
had been. From the lane the cottage never had been visible, even when
these laurels were lower and sparser than they were now. Was the
cottage still standing? Presently, I climbed over the gate, and walked
through the long grass, and--yes, there was Mary's cottage; still
there; William's and Mary's cottage. Trite enough, I have no doubt,
were the thoughts that possessed me as I stood gazing. There is
nothing new to be thought about the evanescence of human things; but
there is always much to be felt about it by one who encounters in his
maturity some such intimate instance and reminder as confronted me, in
that cold sunshine, across that small wilderness of long rank wet
grass and weeds.
Incredibly woebegone and lonesome the house would have looked even to
one for whom it contained no memories; all the more because in its
utter dereliction it looked so durable. Some of the stucco had fallen
off the walls of the two wings; thick flakes of it lay on the
discoloured roof of the veranda, and thick flakes of it could be seen
lying in the grass below. Otherwise, there were few signs of actual
decay. The sash-window and the French window of each wing were
shuttered, and, from where I was standing, the cream-coloured paint of
those shutters behind the glass looked almost fresh. The latticed
windows between had all been boarded up from within. The house was not
to be let perish soon.
I did not want to go nearer to it; yet I did go nearer, step by step,
across the wilderness, right up to the edge of the veranda itself, and
within a yard of the front-door.
I stood looking at that door. I had never noticed it in the old days,
for then it had always stood open. But it asserted itself now, master
of the threshold.
It was a narrow door--narrow even for its height, which did not exceed
mine by more than two inches or so; a door that even when it was
freshly painted must have looked mean. How much meaner now, with its
paint all faded and mottled, cracked and blistered! It had no knocker,
not even a slit for letters. All that it had was a large-ish key-hole.
On this my eyes rested; and presently I moved to it, stooped down to
it, peered through it. I had a glimpse of--darkness impenetrable.
Strange it seemed to me, as I stood back, that there the Room was, the
remembered Room itself, separated from me by nothing but this
unremembered door...and a quarter of a century, yes. I saw it all, in
my mind's eye, just as it had been: the way the sunlight came into it
through this same doorway and through the lattices of these same four
windows; the way the little bit of a staircase came down into it, so
crookedly yet so confidently; and how uneven the tiled floor was, and
how low the rafters were, and how littered the whole place was with
books brought in from his den by William, and how bright with flowers
brought in by Mary from her garden. The rafters, the stairs, the
tiles, were still existing, changeless in despite of cobwebs and dust
and darkness, all quite changeless on the other side of the door, so
near to me. I wondered how I should feel if by some enchantment the
door slowly turned on its hinges, letting in light. I should not
enter, I felt, not even look, so much must I hate to see those inner
things lasting when all that had given to them a meaning was gone from
them, taken away from them, finally. And yet, why blame them for their
survival? And how know that nothing of the past ever came to them,
revisiting, hovering? Something--sometimes--perhaps? One knew so
little. How not be tender to what, as it seemed to me, perhaps the
dead loved?
So strong in me now was the wish to see again all those things, to
touch them and, as it were, commune with them, and so queerly may the
mind be wrought upon in a solitude among memories, that there were
moments when I almost expected that the door would obey my will. I was
recalled to a clearer sense of reality by something which I had not
before noticed. In the door-post to the right was a small knob of
rusty iron--mocking reminder that to gain admission to a house one
does not `will' the door: one rings the bell--unless it is rusty and
has quite obviously no one to answer it; in which case one goes away.
Yet I did not go away. The movement that I made, in despite of myself,
was towards the knob itself. But, I hesitated, suppose I did what I
half meant to do, and there were no sound. That would be ghastly. And
surely there would be no sound. And if sound there were, wouldn't that
be worse still? My hand drew back, wavered, suddenly closed on the
knob. I heard the scrape of the wire--and then, from somewhere within
the heart of the shut house, a tinkle.
It had been the weakest, the puniest of noises. It had been no more
than is a fledgling's first attempt at a twitter. But I was not
judging it by its volume. Deafening peals from steeples had meant less
to me than that one single note breaking the silence--in there. In
there, in the dark, the bell that had answered me was still quivering,
I supposed, on its wire. But there was no one to answer it, no
footstep to come hither from those recesses, making prints in the
dust. Well, I could answer it; and again my hand closed on the knob,
unhesitatingly this time, pulling further. That was my answer; and the
rejoinder to it was more than I had thought to hear--a whole quick
sequence of notes, faint but clear, playful, yet poignantly sad, like
a trill of laughter echoing out of the past, or even merely out of
this neighbouring darkness. It was so like something I had known, so
recognisable and, oh, recognising, that I was lost in wonder. And long
must I have remained standing at that door, for I heard the sound
often, often. I must have rung again and again, tenaciously,
vehemently, in my folly.
-THE END-
Max Beerbohm's essay: William And Mary (1920)
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