The Things that matter. A novel

Chapter I

They had been married for four years and an autumn, and had not been unhappy. Many in the Httle world in which they moved felt envious of their happiness. Yet, in the dusk of a certain November afternoon, when they were sitting together in the firelight, and the glow of the coals shone upon her face, turning her auburn hair to the likeness of a halo, Eleanor startled her husband suddenly with this strange saying— "I've been thinking, Walter. It's an odd thing, isn't it, that you and I have never fallen in love with each other ? " Yes, truly it was a strange thing for a wife to say to her husband after four years of married life. For when husbands and wives have lived so long together, one E expects them to have chosen one of three alternatives: to love each other wholly, to dislike each other frankly, or to go their separate ways indifferent to each other.

Whichever the situation, they must accept it, one supposes, as a blessing or a burden, according to the case, and not troubling any longer to analyze their feebngs or account for them. But Eleanor analyzed, attacking the problem philo sophically, though as yet she had hardly pierced beneath the surface of it. Aud, indeed, it was a problem which even an older philosopher, fortified by cynicism, might have found it hard enough to solve. The merest stranger, if he could have peeped in upon them through the window, would have thought, just as their friends thought, that Nature had framed them to make each other's happiness. The husband, Walter Temple, was a painter. Not a struggling painter, put to hard shifts to pay his way and keep appearances respectable, but a painter who had succeeded early, who sold his pictures, and whose future seemed assured.

Not a painter who had won popularity by pandering to the sentimentality of the inartistic herd, but a painter favour ably regarded even by that new clique of critics who sneer at Mr. Orchardson's "anecdotes " and Mr. Leader's "tea-trays," and Mr. Marcus Stone's " chocolate boxes ; " who declare that Sir Frederick Leighton's works " do not exist," and puzzle an un educated public by their frequent references, to Monet and Manet, and Ingres, and Degas, and Puvis de Chavannes. Merely for the sake of his talent and distinction many women would have been glad to have him for a husband. Nor were his character and temperament of the kind that are supposed to wear ill in married life. If he had the artistic temperament, at least he was free from the more serious vices which that temperament so often carries with it — that is to say, he was seldom irritable or moody, and never rude of speech, and he did not, except on rare occasions, and with leave duly granted, turn night into day at the Savage or Hogarth, and it had never even occurred to his wife to be jealous of his models.

Finally, if he was not a handsome man, at least he was a man whom a woman could believe to be handsome when he smiled — the sort of man, in short, with whom women naturally expect other women to be in love. Of Eleanor, again, the truest description that can be given is that she was the sort of woman with whom men would naturally expect other men to be in love. Indeed, men being more prone to take the initiative in this regard than women, many men actually were — or thought themselves — in love with her, though she disdained flirta tion, and had never shown encouragement to any of them. Her features were regular and somewhat of the Grecian type, though the mouth was large enough to hint at a certain individuality of character. Her complexion was brighter and fresher than is usual with London girls.

Auburn hair waved in natural curls over her forehead, and her violet eyes were eloquent — the mirror of a grave and earnest mind. In figure she was a little — a very little — taller than the average ; and in bearing she was dignified and self-possessed, with the air of a woman who is quite sure of herself, and has no fear that she will ever make mistakes. The worst fault that her worst enemy could have found with her appearance was that she "looked too clever." She had, they might have said, a greater breadth of brow than is compatible with perfect beauty. But the wavy hair, dexterously arranged, obscured this fault, and when men heard her talk, they no longer considered it a fault. For Eleanor's voice was melodious and sympathetic, and she talked to men of the things in which men are interested, and not as the women talk whose thoughts dwell chiefly in the nursery or the bonnetshop.

Moreover, she understood the artistic temperament to a certain extent, having herself a share of it, and, so far as she understood it, she preferred it to all other temperaments. She wrote a little. A novel of hers had been described as a work of genius by the Daily Chronicle, so that her husband had reason to be proud of her. Altogether, her friends thought, she was an ideal artist's wife — especially an ideal wife for such an artist as Walter Temple. Such, as they seemed to the world and to each other, were the husband and wife ; and, at the moment when Eleanor suddenly broke silence, all the surroundings and circumstances were favourable to romance. They sat in the little room opening out of the studio where Walter had been working all the afternoon — a dainty little room after the Moorish style, with heavy curtains and luxurious divans and rich, sombre draperies.

A tall screen hid the door and shut out the . draughts ; quaint lamps of stained glass and filigree-work hung by brass chains from the ceiling ; antique ornaments and weapons were fastened to the walls. The dusk was just beginning, but they had not troubled to turn on the gas, so that there was no light but that of the fire which shone on Eleanor's hair, and made a halo of it. To any one who could have looked in on them, it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world that they should have been sitting close together — her head nestling on his shoulder, and his hand playing with the loose locks of hair that kissed her neck. Instead of that they sat apart, at opposite sides of the little room, taking no particular notice of each other ; and Walter had just rolled up and lit a cigarette when Eleanor startled him with her strange saying — "I've been thinking, Walter.

It's an odd thing, isn't it, that you and I have never fallen in love with each other ? ' ' It was not only a strange but a foolish thing to say. She should have known that a man does not care to be analyzed in this way, even if he be a great artist, and therefore interested in the analysis of human conduct ; that the discomfort of being analyzed is hke the discomfort of being photographed, while the fear of an unflattering result is greater. Yet Eleanor was not speaking petulantly, or unkindly, or complainingly. Her grievance, if she had a grievance, was not, she felt, against Walter, but against the nature of things, and the hidden powers by which the nature of things is overruled and guided. It was unreasonable, she knew, for a woman to be angry with her husband, when he was a good husband, because she is not in love with him.

If there was blame, then she herself must share it. Therefore she spoke half philosophically, half playfully, and with only the very faintest undertone of regret or pathos in her accent. " It's an odd thing, Walter, isn't it, that you and I have never fallen in love with each other? " He did not answer. How should a man reply to such a question — sprung upon him suddenly — unless he either wishes to quarrel, or is prepared to say that he, for his part, is in love, has always been in love ? Perhaps Eleanor had hardly expected him to answer, for she continued, after the very slightest pause — " It isn't as if we ever quarrelled." "I hope we are never going to quarrel, Eleanor," he said. " And it isn't as if we didn't hke each other. We do like each other, Walter, don't we?" " Surely, surely, Eleanor, we have always been the best of friends."

He was wishing heartily that she would talk of something else — of the new picture that he was just beginning for the New Gallery, for instance, or even of the weather ; but he knew that it would hurt her if he said anything irrelevant to change the subject. Moreover the theme fasci nated Eleanor, and she would not leave it. "Yes, yes," she said, "that's the strangest part of it. We've always got on well, we've always liked each other since we were boy and girl together. Only we never fell in love as other people do. It was awfully good of you to marry me, Walter, when you weren't in " " Eleanor ! " This in a tone that seemed to warn her from a forbidden subject. "No, I know I oughtn't to say that. You asked me not to once before. Still, I was really very grateful to you. It was a very dreadful sort of hfe from which you saved me.

I could never have been happy in it ; and I quite thought we should have fallen in love with each other long before this. Only we never have. I wonder why it is?" And he too wondered — or, rather, he remembered how he used to wonder once — how he had thought they might create a passion by the act of counterfeiting it, and how he had gradually resigned himself to think that passion was not one of the things that Eleanor was born to under stand. But that was long ago, and now, when she paused as though to give him the opportunity of offering a suggestion, he could offer none. She continued as though a happy thought had struck her. " Perhaps it is just because we were boy and girl together that we've never done more than like each other very much. Perhaps love can't grow out of hking as I fancied.

But I think sometimes that if we'd been sprung upon each other suddenly, after we were grown up, we could hardly have failed to fall in love. I should have been so dazzled by your distinction ; and you — well, perhaps you would have thought me pretty." This was his chance of saying something amiable that might interrupt a conversation that embarrassed him. He clutched at it. "But I think that now. I have always thought that, dear," he protested. The interruption did not serve its pur pose. " Yes, yes, I know," she answered. " You think so as an artist, and I'm very glad you do. But then, perhaps, you might have thought so as a man. There's a difference you know, Walter — a tremendous differ ence." Of course he knew it, seeing that it was a difference that he himself had wished to bridge — a difference that he would have bridged, he told himself, if she had known how to help him.

But he did not say so. It seemed simpler to go on listening, ner vously rolling cigarettes the while. And Eleanor went on talking, attacking this terrible subject from yet another side. "I'm sure," she said, "that the people we know would be perfectly amazed if we were to go and tell them that we weren't in love." There was a grim humour in the idea of making a public declaration of such a sort that could not but appeal to Walter. A smile crossed his face as he repeated — "Very possibly they would. It would certainly be a somewhat singular thing to tell people, when so many other subjects of conversation are available." But Eleanor did not see the humour of her words. She was too much in earnest ; and she went on pouring out the thoughts that had long been gathering in her mind. Her eyes as she spoke looked straight into the fire, as though they sought pictures there, and her speech was in essence a soliloquy, though in form she still addressed her husband.

" Of course, of course. One wouldn't tell them really. Truths are things too sacred to be always told. But you know what I mean to say. I mean to say that there are so many reasons, obvious to all the world, why you and I ought to be in love. Con sider them." He had considered them — four years ago ; but it surprised him that she also had thought the matter out. " Look at yourself, for instance," she continued. "You're clever, you're suc cessful, you're distinguished. You're the sort of man whom men admire, and women like. You're kind and gentle and atten tive. More than that, you don't treat me hke a child, as so many husbands treat theh wives ; but you take me seriousty, make a companion of me, and don't pretend, as some husbands do, that your art — the chief thing in your life — is something that your wife must not expect to under stand.

In fact, you have all the qualities that, in the abstract, I must admire." Something in the tone of her voice, which sounded dreamy and far away from the world of actualities, seemed to make it superfluous either to acknowledge or deprecate her praise of him. Walter sat still, with his head thrown back on the divan, his eyes half closed, and listened. " And then, look at me. I beheve that I have most of the qualities that you admire in the abstract too." " All of them, Eleanor," he murmured softly. For the something that he sought in vain in her was something indefinable ; and it was impossible for him to tell her how he missed it. She hardly heard him, but swept on. " Some of them, at any rate, I know I have. To begin with — it's a little thing, perhaps, but still it counts — to begin with, I'm not ugly, and I do know how to dress well without looking like a fashion-plate, and I'm not one of the women who are content to be dowdy at home.

In the second place, I don't, like some artists' wives, do the things that jar upon an artist's taste. I know one artist's wife, for instance, who goes into her husband's studio and drapes the lamps with art muslins. Of course, one wouldn't expect an artist to be in love with a woman who brought art muslin into the studio." Walter smiled a little. The introduction of art muslin into the studio is not a habit admired in the abstract by any artist. It would have been cruel to tell her that some artists can bear with it in the concrete and be happy ; she would not believe him if he did. "And then I'm clever, Walter— clever enough to understand you." She thought so, having still to learn the truth that a man is nearly always more complex than a woman thinks, for the good reason that he has lived more, and does not talk so much.

" I understand you ; and when a man finds that he does not love his wife, the root of the trouble is mostly that she doesn't understand him." And this, too, she honestly believed. For how was Eleanor, with the httle experience of hfe that even a clever woman gets, to know that there are hmits to men's desire to be understood by women ; that most men desire women to understand them only in so so far as they explain themselves ; that to understand too much is almost as dangerous to happiness as not to understand at all? So she went on — " It must be terrible for an artist not to be understood ; and it so often happens. I know a woman — you know her, too — who, when her husband's genius was at last recognized, went about telling people that she was so glad, because now they would be able to send the boys to Eton instead of Haileybury.

Think of that ! Picture the humiliation of it ! A great artist's greatest triumph valued only because it will enable one to send the boys to Eton instead of Haileybury. I've never been like that. I've never thought of a work of art as a means to buy me pretty hats and frocks to wear, and furnish pretty rooms for me to sit in. No, I value the art because it is an art. I havo my own art, and, therefore, I can under stand. So you are able to talk about your art to me just as you talk about it to other men. You do talk about it to me ; you like to talk about it. You've often told me that my criticisms are helpful and suggestive. We always get on so well together ; we're the best companions in the world. And yet — and yet " There was a pause — perhaps a little break in her voice — before she said it — " And yet neither of us has ever fallen in love.

It's just " — she laughed, as she spoke, a hysterical little laugh — "it's just as if each of us was waiting for the other to begin." Then, after a pause, she laughed again — THE THINGS THAT MATTER. a more natural laugh this time — and added, " How ridiculous of me to talk to you like that ! You'll be thinking I'm hysterical. But I'm not ; and I won't do it again. And now I think I'll go and dress for dinner." s

Chapter II

"It's an odd thing, isn't it, that you and I have never fallen in love with each other?" The words had fallen on Walter Temple's ears with all the rapid shock of sharp surprise ; and the long monologue of which they were the prelude had surprised him even more. Three years before, it would have tortured him, seeming a faithful echo of his own disquiet. But three years before, the question had seemed to have no interest for Eleanor ; and now he was so used to the knowledge that his wife only liked him, and that he only hked his wife, that he had long ceased to see in the situation anything calling for remark. It was not a situation to talk about, but to make the best of. Nor was the best so bad. After all, they had been happy together — quietly and placidly if not actively and passionately C happy.

How many married couples of four years' standing could say more ? How many, indeed, could say as much ? Only a few of the most fortunate. That, though he did not precisely formulate it, was his hne of thought ; and, therefore, his wife's question — the question which he had not answered — had amazed him. But the amazement died away, and he did not torture himself with vain attempts to solve a problem which he had long since abandoned as insoluble. In fact, as the days passed, and Eleanor did not renew the subject, the matter almost faded from his mind. He had so ruany other things to think about. In particular, the great subject picture which he was preparing for the New Gallery absorbed him ; and he had no leisure to let violent emotions enter into and distract his private hfe. Emotion, he would have told himself, may be to the artist as the breath of life ; but there are, none the less, limits to his need of it.

What he wants is to remember emotion in tranquillity, and not to have fresh emotions constantly breaking in and inter fering with his work. Consequently, Walter remembered Eleanor's talk with him as little as he could ; and that was singularly little. "Artistic temperament, I suppose," he murmured to himself, when the recollection presented itself once or twice, an uninvited guest ; and, resting contented with the formula because he could not be troubled to prove the matter to the bottom, went back to his work and thought no more of it. But Eleanor's case was very different. What she had said to her husband was not said on the sudden impulse of the moment, though she had spoken abruptly, and without preface to prelude what was coming. Her speech was the outcome of thoughts that had troubled her brain for many months — thoughts that had, at the first, been httle more than idle fancies, but had grown, and grown, and grown, until at last they so possessed her that she could control herself no longer, but had been obliged to speak.

Morbid thoughts? Most people would probably have said so if they could have read them. But Eleanor had her answer ready. In imagination she pictured how she would vindicate herself against the charge. " You are horribly morbid, Eleanor," she fancied Walter saying to her, as she was sure he would if she ventured to talk to him again as she had talked on that November afternoon. And then she heard herself replying that what was really morbid was her previous placidity, and that now she was only struggling to be human — strugghng and almost beginning to succeed. But she was afraid to say again the things that she had said that day, so that this particular bit of dialogue was only rehearsed, not spoken. Yet though she was afraid to speak again, the same troubling thoughts agitated and pursued her.

" To know in one's mind — to be able to prove to one's self by every argument of logic — that one's husband is the one man in aU the world with whom, even if he were not one's husband, one ought to be in love ! To know that, and yet to feel in one's heart that one can do no more than admire him and like him very much — what a situation ! " So she put it to herself, and sometimes, in spite of her pain, found a grim irony in the situation, obhging her to smile. But, THE THINGS THA T MA TIER. 21 after the smile, tears always followed. For there was another question which she was driven irresistibly to ask herself. "If I can't love him, doesn't it prove that I am incapable of loving? Haven't I, perhaps, given myself so whoUy to this intellectual hfe that now no other life is possible for me, and I am a poor maimed human soul, for whom the best thing that hfe contains can never be ?

" The thought tortured her, and she wondered with a painful wonder. Sometimes she sat alone for hours, looking into her own soul, and searching its secret places, trying to drag its hidden things to light, or else letting her mind stray back over the past pages of her life, tracing, step by step, the stages by which she had grown to be the woman that she was, seeking in her past some clue to the explanation of her present. And what a different hfe the old life was, bathed in how different an atmosphere from the hfe that she was hving now ! It was four years and an autumn since it had ended, and she had driven away to the new life, pursued by rice and slippers, and good wishes and congratulations. Four years and an autumn since the old life had ended ! Yet it seemed to her that she could still remember every day of it — its humours and trivialities, as well as its facts of serious import — and as she sat there in her little boudoir opening from the studio, with her hands clasped behind her head and her eyes fixed upon the fire, it was as though a transformation-scene took place.

The httle room and its furniture — its hangings, its lamp, its pictures, and its ornaments — aU faded from her vision, and instead of them she saw only the narrow streets, and the old-fashioned red-brick houses of the httle provincial town where the years of her childhood had been spent. Barnstaple — that is the name of the place to which her imaginings had carried her. It is a town that hes asleep — has lain asleep for centuries — in the north of Devon. A pretty town, prettily placed, with tall wooded hills behind it, dotted with country seats, and a river sweeping past it, through broadening meadows, to the sand-hills and the sea. There are ten thousand people in Barn staple, and they have hved there all their too seldom, they say he is an atheist, and if at the Yeomanry Ball he dances more than three times with his neighbour's wife, they say that he is in the habit of meeting her secretly in Rawleigh Lane.

These are their merits. Their faults, if they have any, are a certain narrowness of view, a certain inability to see things in their true proportion, and to perceive that the things that happen at Barnstaple are not the things of the most real importance to the world. Such were the people in whose midst Eleanor grew up. She owed it to her father that she did not grow up to be hke them. For her mother had died when she was a little child, and she and her father lived alone together in a small white house on Pilton Bridge. She was Eleanor Daunt in those days, and her father was known to the neighbour hood as Dr. Daunt, though he had a right to the more high-sounding title of Emeritus Professor. He had professed literature and logic at one of the minor Scottish Uni versities, and, at the end of a full and active life, had come to Barnstaple, to spend his closing days in peace.

His doctor had told too seldom, they say he is an atheist, and if at the Yeomanry Ball he dances more than three times with his neighbour's wife, they say that he is in the habit of meeting her secretly in Rawleigh Lane. These are their merits. Their faults, if they have any, are a certain narrowness of view, a certain inability to see things in their true proportion, and to perceive that the things that happen at Barnstaple are not the things of the most real importance to the world. Such were the people in whose midst Eleanor grew up. She owed it to her father that she did not grow up to be hke them. For her mother had died when she was a little child, and she and her father lived alone together in a small white house on Pilton Bridge. She was Eleanor Daunt in those days, and her father was known to the neighbour hood as Dr. Daunt, though he had a right to the more high-sounding title of Emeritus Professor.

He had professed literature and logic at one of the minor Scottish Uni versities, and, at the end of a full and active life, had come to Barnstaple, to spend his closing days in peace. His doctor had told him that quiet would be good for him, and as he owned the httle house at Pilton Bridge, and found a difficulty in letting it, he came to hve in it instead. Their life, on the whole, Eleanor remembered, had been rather a lonely life. Emeritus Professor Daunt had not been popular in Barnstaple. It was hardly to be expected that he would be, for he made no effort to conciliate the local prejudices. For one thing, he rented no pew in the parish church, and, as the phrase went, " neglected his rehgious opportunities." That, at the outset, was a grave social disqualification. Not quite so grave, per haps, as if he had gone to chapel, but still very grave indeed.

Moreover, Dr. Daunt was not sufficiently respectful of the opinions of people who had hved in Barnstaple a great deal longer than he had; and was as full of the pride of intellect at sixty-five, as some men are at twenty-two. That is to say, he was impatient of stupidity, and apt to be overbearing in its presence. Nothing rejoiced him better than to expose the local sophisms, and to brush the local idols from theh pedestals. He did not mean, perhaps, to be unkind, but he behaved very much as if he did. There was the case, for instance, of old Mr. Masterton, of Crescent HiU, who was supposed to know more about astronomy than other people, because his telescope was the largest that had ever been seen in Barnstaple. "I have yet to learn," said Dr. Daunt, " that a man's knowledge of the heavenly bodies is necessarily conditioned by the diameter of the lens through which he looks at them."

And afterwards he proceeded to engage Mr. Masterton in conversation upon the transit of Venus, and so gave offence, because Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings were the only departments of astronomy in which Mr. Masterton had specialized. That was bad enough, but even worse was the professor's sacrilegious handling of the curate — the Rev. Paul Devine. Mr. Devine had preached a sermon in which he had denounced the doctrine of evolution in no measured terms, on the strength of certain information picked up from the footnotes of the " Speaker's Com mentary " on the Book of Genesis. Two days afterwards Dr. Daunt questioned Mr. Devine on comparative embryology before a whole roomful of people, and when it was quite clear that Mr. Devine did not even know what comparative embryology was, he led him apart from the others, and tapped him in a fatherly way upon the chest, and whispered confidentially — " Young man, if you will take an old man's advice, you will preach less and read more."