CHAPTER II ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED

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1

The fine weather ended. Early October had been warm, full of golden light, with clear, still evenings. Later the wind blustered, and it was cold. Sometimes Jane felt sick; that was the baby. But not often. She went about all right, and she was writing—journalism and a novel. She thought she would perhaps send it in for a prize novel competition in the spring, only she felt no certainty of pleasing the three judges, all so very dissimilar. Jane's work was a novel about a girl at school and college and thereafter. Perhaps it would be the first of a trilogy; perhaps it would not. The important thing was that it should be well reviewed. How did one work that? You could never tell. Some things were well reviewed, others weren't. Partly luck it was, thought Jane. Novels were better treated usually than they deserved. Verse about as well as it deserved, which, however, wasn't, as a rule, saying very much. Some kinds of book were unkindly used—anthologies of contemporary verse, for instance. Someone would unselfishly go to the trouble of collecting some of the recent poetical output which he or she personally preferred and binding it up in a pleasant portable volume, and you would think all that readers had to do was to read what they liked in it, if anything, and leave out the rest and be grateful. Instead, it would be slated by reviewers, and compared to the Royal Academy, and to a literary signpost pointing the wrong way, and other opprobrious things; as if an anthology could point to anything but the taste of the compiler, which of course could not be expected to agree with any one else's; tastes never do. The thing was, thought Jane, to hit the public taste with the right thing at the right moment. Another thing was to do better than Johnny. That should be possible, because Jane was better than Johnny; had always been. Only there was this baby, which made her feel ill before it came, and would need care and attention afterwards. It wasn't fair. If Johnny married and had a baby it wouldn't get in his way, only in its mamma's. It was a handicap, like your frock (however short it was) when you were climbing. You had got round that by taking it off and climbing in knickerbockers, but you couldn't get round a baby. And Jane wanted the baby too.

'I suppose I want everything,' said Jane.

Johnny wanted everything too. He got a lot. He got love. He was polygamous by nature, and usually had more than one girl on hand. That autumn he had two. One was Nancy Sharpe, the violinist. They were always about together. People who didn't know either of them well, thought they would get engaged. But neither of them wanted that. The other girl was a different kind: the lovely, painted, music-hall kind you don't meet. No one thought Johnny would marry her, of course. They merely passed the time for one another.

Jane wondered if the equivalent man would pass the time for her. She didn't think so. She thought she would get bored with never talking about anything interesting. And it must, she thought, be pretty beastly having to kiss people who used cheap scent and painted their lips. One would be afraid the red stuff would come off. In fact, it surely would. Didn't men mind—clean men, like Johnny? Men are so different, thought Jane. Johnny was the same at Oxford. He would flirt with girls in tea-shops. Jane had never wanted to flirt with the waiters in restaurants. Men were perhaps less critical; or perhaps they wanted different qualities in those with whom they flirted; or perhaps it was that their amatory instinct, when pronounced at all, was much stronger than women's, and flowed out on to any object at hand when they were in the mood. Also, they certainly grew up earlier. At Oxford and Cambridge girls weren't, for the most part, grown-up enough to be thinking about that kind of thing at all. It came on later, with most of them. But men of that age were, quite a lot of them, mature enough to flirt with the girls in Buol's.

Jane discussed it with Gideon one evening. Gideon said, 'Men usually have, as a rule, more sex feeling than women, that's all. Naturally. They need more, to carry them through all the business of making marriage proposals and keeping up homes, and so on. Women often have very little. That's why they're often better at friendship than men are. A woman can be a man's friend all their lives, but a man, in nine cases out of ten, will either get tired of it or want more. Women have a tremendous gift for friendship. Their friendships with other women are usually much more devoted and more faithful than a man's with other men. Most men, though of course not all, want sex in their lives at some time or other. Hundreds of women are quite happy without it. They're quite often nearly sexless. Very few men are that.'

Jane said, 'There are plenty of women like Clare, whom one can't think of apart from sex. No friendship would ever satisfy her. If she isn't a wife and mother she'll be starved. She'll marry, of course.'

'Yes,' Gideon agreed. 'There are plenty of women like that. And when a woman is like that, she's much more dependent on love and marriage than any man is, because she usually has fewer other things in her life. But there are women also like Katherine.'

'Oh, Katherine. K isn't even dependent on friendship. She only wants her work. K isn't typical.'

'No; she isn't typical. She isn't a channel for the life force, like most of us. She's too independent; she won't let herself be used in that way.'

'Am I a channel for the life force?' thought Jane. 'I suppose so. Hence
Oliver and baby. Is Arthur? I suppose so. Hence his wanting to marry me.'

2

Jane told her family that she was going to marry Gideon. Lady Pinkerton said, 'It's extraordinary to me that you can think of it, Jane, after all that has happened. Surely, my child, the fact that it was the last thing Oliver would wish should have some weight with you. Whatever plane he may be on now, he must be disturbed by such news as this. Besides, dear child, it is far too soon. You should wait at least a year before taking such a step. And Arthur Gideon! Not only a Jew, Jane, and not only a man of such very unfortunate political principles, but one who has never attempted to conceal his spiteful hostility both to father's papers and my books. But perhaps, as I believe you agree with him in despising both of these, that may be an extra bond between you. Only you must see that it will make family life extremely awkward.'

Of course it would. But family lives nearly always are awkward, Jane thought; it is one of the things about them.

Lady Pinkerton added, having suddenly remembered it, 'Besides, my dear, he drinks; you told me so yourself.'

Jane said, if she had, she had lied, doubtless for some good reason now forgotten by her. He didn't drink, not in the excessive sense of that word obviously intended by Lady Pinkerton. Lady Pinkerton was unconvinced; she still was sure he drank in that sense.

She resumed, 'And Jewish babies! I wonder you can think of it, Jane. They may be a throw-back to a most degraded Russian-Jewish type. What brothers and sisters for the dear mite who is coming first! My dear, I do beg you to think this over long and seriously before committing yourself. You may live to repent it bitterly.'

Clare said, 'Jane! How can you—after …'

After Oliver, she meant. She would never say his name; perhaps one doesn't like to when one has killed a man.

Jane thought, 'Why didn't I leave Oliver to Clare? She'd have suited him much better. I was stupid; I thought I wanted him. I did want him. But not in the way I want Arthur now. One wants so many things.'

Lord Pinkerton said, 'You're making a big mistake, Babs. That fellow won't last. He's building on sand, as the Bible puts it—building on sand. I hear on good authority that the Fact can't go on many months longer, unless it changes its tone and methods considerably; it's got no chance of fighting its way as it is now. People don't want that kind of thing. They don't want anything the Gideon lot will give them. Gideon and his sort haven't got the goods. They're building on the sand of their own fancy, not on the rock of general human demand. I hear that that daily they talked of starting can't come off yet, either…. The chap's a bad investment, Babs…. And he despises me and my goods, you know. That'll be awkward.'

'Not you, daddy. The papers, he does. He rather likes you, though he doesn't approve of you…. He doesn't like mother, and she doesn't like him. But people often don't get on with their mothers-in-law.'

'It's an awkward alliance, my dear, a very awkward alliance. What will people say? Besides, he's a Jew.'

Jewish babies; he was thinking of them too.

Jane thought, bother the babies. Perhaps there wouldn't be any, and if there were, they'd only be a quarter Jew. Anyhow, it wasn't them she wanted; it was Arthur.

Arthur opened doors and windows. You got to the edge of your own thought, and then stepped out beyond into his thought. And his thought drove sharp and hard into space.

But more than this, Jane loved the way his hair grew, and the black line his eyebrows made across his forehead, and the way he stood, tall and lean and slouching, and his keen thin face and his long thin hands, and the way his mouth twisted up when he smiled, and his voice, and the whole of him. She wondered if he loved her like that—if he turned hot and cold when he saw her in the distance. She believed that he did love her like that. He had loved her, as she had loved him, all that time he had thought she was lying to every one about Oliver's death.

'It isn't what people do,' said Jane, 'that makes one love them or stop loving them.'

'Is this,' she thought, 'what Clare felt for Oliver? I didn't know it was like this, or I wouldn't have taken him from her. Poor old Clare.' Could one love Oliver like that? Any one, Jane supposed, could be loved like that, by the right person. And people like Clare loved more intensely than people like her; they felt more, and had fewer other occupations.

Jane hadn't known that she could feel so much about anything as she was feeling now about Gideon. It was interesting. She wondered how long it would last, at this pitch.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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