XXXI NEWS FROM MINNA

          “Sir” cries Adams, “I assure you she is as innocent as myself.”         
          JOSEPH ANDREWS.

MRS. FOLYAT found the position of a grandmother entirely to her liking—the maximum of opportunity for beatific clucking with no responsibility. Annette had three children, Gertrude two, and Minna two, and Mrs. Folyat had already a large collection of their sayings for quotation in company, the most popular being an ode addressed by Annette’s second boy to Mr. Gladstone, who had visited our town several times when its allegiance to the Liberal cause began to waver.

Minna brought her two children to stay in Burdley Park. They came for a fortnight and stayed four months. They would have stayed longer but that Francis began to be anxious and, after a good deal of cogitation, shyly questioned Minna as to her husband’s doings.

“Basil is having a bad year,” said Minna. “We’re horribly poor sometimes. Rents in London are so dear.”

“Even so,” said Francis, “it seems hardly wise to leave him for so long.”

“We have rows.” Minna seemed to be quite cheerful about it. “Poor people always do have rows. They get so afraid, that they can’t enjoy anything else.”

“I was beginning to think that something serious might have happened.”

“Oh, no. I’m still Basil’s ‘darling wife’ when he writes to me, and he is my ‘devoted husband.’”

“Marriage,” said Francis, “is very difficult.”

“Of course it is, to anybody who isn’t an angel like you. . . . I’ll go back and try again.”

[Pg 310]

Francis sucked at his pipe thoughtfully.

“I oughtn’t to tell you this,” he said, “but Annette ran away once.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, after breakfast. She was back again in time to give Bennett his tea.”

 

Two days later Minna returned to London. The day after she had gone, Basil appeared with a drawn, miserable face. He asked Francis if he might speak to him, and Francis, quaking, led him into the study. Basil said he had been abroad. Minna had run away from him with the children.

“She came here,” said Francis. “For all we know, she was writing to you every day and hearing from you. She said she was hearing from you. . . . Only just before she went she spoke about your letters. She went back to London yesterday. You ought to be with her. . . . In my opinion you ought to have fetched her back months ago.”

Basil seemed to have a great deal to say, but he gulped it down and reached out for the railway guide.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose we must try again.”

“If you want money,” said Francis, “I would rather you came to me than were obliged to any one else.”

“It isn’t money. Thanks all the same.”

Francis felt his heart sink, but he let it pass. It seemed all the more imperative to him that Basil should hurry back to London. He bustled him out of the house and saw him to the station.

 

Three weeks passed during which no word came from Minna or Basil. Francis did not write to them, hoping that they were settling their differences—whatever they might be.

One morning when he was up early he took in the letters and found one from Minna addressed to Mary. He watched Mary read it at breakfast. Without looking up she thrust it back into its envelope, her hand trembling so that the paper rustled, and slipped it into her pocket.

[Pg 311]

“Who’s your letter from,” asked Mrs. Folyat. Francis held his breath.

“It’s from Fawcett’s, the music-publishers. They haven’t got the piece I wanted. Perhaps I didn’t give the name right.”

Francis breathed again.

Mary disappeared soon after breakfast. She went to Serge’s studio. He was out. She waited for him all day and had nothing to eat. She did not even light the gas but sat thinking, thinking on no thought. Serge found her in the dark.

“Why, Mary!” he said.

She held out Minna’s letter, and he sat and read it.

“Have you told anybody at home?”

“No. It’s too awful.”

“It isn’t awful at all. It’s very silly of them to be angry with each other.”

“But divorce. . . . It’s wicked.”

“Nonsense. It may be necessary. It often is. . . . She’ll want a good deal of sympathy.”

“She doesn’t deserve any.”

“How absurd you screwed-up people are! You don’t give sympathy because people deserve it, but because they need it.”

Mary pondered that for a moment or two. Then she asked:

“What did you say I was?”

“Screwed-up.”

Mary said nothing.

“We’d better burn this,” said Serge. “We shall have to be discreet. Letters nearly always convey wrong impressions.”

“Shall I write to Minna?”

“If you want to. Don’t give her your opinion. She won’t want it.”

“Who is to tell them at home?”

“I will, if you like.”

“That’s what I wanted you to do. . . . I felt that something was happening all the time Minna was here.”

“I’ll go home with you now.”

[Pg 312]

“I think the sooner the better. . . . Something awful might happen.”

 

Serge found his father in the greenhouse and went straight to the point. Francis was in his shirt-sleeves. He laid down his trowel and very slowly put on his coat.

“I knew something was happening, but I never thought it could be as bad as that.”

He sat down heavily and blinked through his spectacles.

“I seem,” he said, “I seem to have brought my children into the world to very little happiness. I suppose Minna ought never to have married a poor man. . . . It’s very queer, Serge, very queer. One reads of these things and the rights and wrongs of them appear to be very simple. They happen in one’s own family and the rights and wrongs don’t appear so simple. . . . If Minna were to come in now, I should be glad to see her. I should at least know that she was safe. . . .”

“The truth is,” said Serge, “that the rights and wrongs don’t matter. You either love people or you don’t. If you love them, you help them. If you don’t, some one else does.”

“I think,” said Francis, “I had better go to London. I always liked Basil. He always liked me. I might be able to make him see reason. . . . Minna says she is innocent. He ought to take her back.”

“My dear father, that isn’t reason. That is nonsense. . . . You’re thinking of what people will say. Public opinion doesn’t matter any more than my opinion or your opinion. If they have fallen so far apart as to wish to break the tie between them it will be quite impossible for them to live together without degradation——”

“You go so fast. I can’t follow you. I don’t see . . .”

“It is always degrading for a man and a woman to live together when they have no love for each other.”

“Dear me!” murmured Francis. “Dear me!” His face wore an expression of immense surprise. He went on muttering to himself in a puzzled way, and finally, with a sort of triumph, as though he had found the solution of his riddle:

[Pg 313]

“But if they are married?”

“My dear father, you must admit that love and marriage are two very different things. Love is divine, marriage is human.”

“But——”

“Marriage is not a divine ordinance. It is a respectable human institution contrived for the comfortable existence of society.”

“I am thinking of Minna’s children.”

“So am I.”

“She will lose them.”

“That is her affair. Anything is better for them than being brought up in a house with a man and a woman who hate each other.”

“I can’t admit that.”

“As a matter of principle, perhaps not; as a matter of practice, you will, just as you took over Frederic’s mess. . . .”

“How did that turn out?”

“Splendidly.”

Very slowly Francis turned that over in his mind and went back in memory to the day in Mrs. Entwistle’s cottage. It did not bring him any great elucidation, but it gave him a feeling of confidence in Serge, and, clinging to him, he said:

“What are we to do?”

“If you’ll agree to say nothing to my mother, to write nothing to Basil, and not to bother your head about the rights and wrongs of it, I’ll go to London and see Minna. If there’s a glimmer of hope I’ll do everything I can. If there isn’t, I’ll see Minna through. . . . I don’t think I shall come back. I can’t stay in this place much longer. It gobbles men up and doesn’t even have the decency to digest them properly. . . . It’s a machine and has no conscience about the past, no concern for the future. It darkens men’s minds so that they live hideously and their horrible sins are visited upon their children. No, I shan’t come back. I can’t. . . .”

“There is a great deal of wickedness in this place. It is God’s will,” said Francis.

[Pg 314]

“Men’s will. The will of men cheated and cozened by their own rapacity. . . . But that is neither here nor there. Will you agree to say nothing to my mother until you hear from me?”

“I’ll promise you that,” said Francis with a little compunction, for he saw how dark would be the days of waiting with such a secret tugging at his heart and his wife babbling of her children’s marriages. “How did you know? Did Mary tell you?”

“Yes, Mary told me. Mary has been rather a trump about it.”

“I shall be able to talk to Mary,” thought Francis, with a sigh of relief.

 

Serge spent the night packing and dismantling his studio. He destroyed a great many of his pictures, called up the porter and made him a present of his furniture and the clothes that were left after he had packed two bags.

In the morning he went to fetch Annie Lipsett. He found her just leaving, but made her go back with him to see the boy. Him he hugged and kissed, and then he gave Annie a cheque for fifty pounds for his education.

“And for God’s sake,” he said, “don’t make him a gentleman. Put him to a trade. If he’s any real good he’ll get out of it. If he’s only middling good he’ll stay there and marry and die respectable. If he’s bad—God help you; but he won’t be that.”

Annie said:

“You’re going.”

“Yes. I’m going.”

She was very plucky and fought back her tears. Serge took her shoulders in his hands and said:

“You and I have had a queer sort of love, an impersonal sort of meeting in Heaven here on earth. I never understood before what it must feel like to be a seraph—just a head and wings. We’ve been so busy fighting our way up out of a slimy pit that we haven’t had time to think much about each other—only the boy.”

Annie’s tears flowed freely and she clung to his hand and said:

[Pg 315]

“You don’t know what you’ve been to me, but I can tell you now. It was so much to have you for my friend in that time when I had no one. I loved you. . . .”

“I know, I know.”

“But all that sort of love went away afterwards when I had the boy. It has been a great thing for him too. . . .”

“I’ve learned a lot from him.”

“That’s so wonderful about you. You seem to be always learning. And now you’re going. I used to dread your going, but now it doesn’t hurt me at all. . . . You will always have me to think gladly of you.”

“And I of you. . . . We’ve made the world richer by a friendship.”

“I want to say thank you,” she said, “but I can’t, not enough.”

“Of course you can’t. . . . Come along.”

 

In a few hours Serge was in the express for London. He had a portfolio of pictures and drawings, two bags, and one hundred and twenty pounds in notes. As the train passed out of the dingy murk and his eyes lighted on the green, undefiled country, he drew in great breaths and found it hard not to shout for joy in the new zest for adventure that had come to him.

“That seraph notion,” he thought, “I wonder where it comes from? That curious hunger for the state of childhood, the pretence that it is superior to adult life. . . . Surely it all comes from their incompetence in managing their affairs as men and women. They seem to lose their simplicity. I wonder why? . . . Old Lawrie must be right. Mind, body, spirit. You can’t poison the spirit. That’s God, and He’s beyond contamination. Body and mind are the instruments of the spirit. Poison the mind and the body suffers. . . . That’s right. Yes: old Lawrie’s right. Fear of love and fear of death; the mind hemmed in and losing its bright power of reflection, so that it shows only a distorted image of life. . . . No wonder they hate life when it looks like that. . . . It can’t go on for ever. The spirit must break through it all in time . . . in time.”

[Pg 316]

The train rushed along, and he began to think that perhaps the problem was being solved. When men had made it so easy to escape from their cities of captivity, would not their minds also be freed? Would there not be a gradual adjustment of mind to larger surroundings? Or were the minds of men so clothed with centuries of tyranny that swifter transportation also would be used as an instrument of slavery? . . .

“No,” he thought, “there is a deeper faith in men than they know. They endure heroically because they are sure that in the end their efforts will lead to deliverance.”

As an ironic comment upon his reflections the train ran into a real “old particular” London fog and was held up for half an hour outside the station. In that half-hour his thoughts ran swiftly. He had never been to London before, and he was moved by a boyish excitement at the prospect of entering it. That he found absurd. It would be hardly at all different from the place he had just left. That had held little for him: this could hold nothing at all. He had no ambition, and often ludicrously had learned the scorn a man can come by who prefers anything to his own advancement; often he had seen how profitable it was for a man to sacrifice his talent to his vanity, and how incredible to such a man that it could be possible to sacrifice vanity to talent. From all he had heard of London, the greatest city in the world, its subservience to ambitious men was as immense as its renown. In our town, Benskin and his school of little fishes had dubbed Serge “amateur” by way of killing him. He had liked the isolation that had followed, but now he thought that isolation could be of little use to a man, except he could spring from it to greater freedom and a purer joy in his work. “Amateur.” . . . Being interpreted, that means one who loves his work, as its contrary, “professional,” signifies one who works for gain. . . . These cities were professional. They rejected him, as they rejected all amateurs. . . . So be it. Serge felt no bitterness. He was a free man. He asked nothing: he had been given much, first of all the power to enjoy. . . . He chuckled to think that the only usefulness the suspicious world of professional [Pg 317]men would allow him lay—apparently—in succouring females in distress. Knight-errantry, once the loftiest of professions, was descended into the hands of the contemned amateurs.

“At bottom,” said Serge, “the difference between them and me is that I take women seriously and they don’t.”

 

His stay in London was shorter even than he had thought it would be. He visited Basil first, and found him working desperately, paintings, charcoal drawings, black-and-white, Christmas cards, book illustrations, designs for menus, chocolate boxes—all slipshod, formal, but just neatly and obviously charming. Through his teeth he asked Serge what the hell he had come for and went on working. Serge turned over a pile of drawings on the table by the window.

“Benskin would dote on you now. . . . How you must hate art to be able to do them so well!”

Basil grunted. “I hate everything.”

“You always were extreme.”

Basil laid down his pen.

“Did she send you?”

“No. She doesn’t know I’m in London. I came to you first because I thought your point of view might be helpful when I come to tackle her. I’ve got nothing to go upon except her letter to Mary, which wasn’t particularly illuminating.”

“It wouldn’t be. It’s just funny to her—just funny, do you hear? I’ve implored her, on my knees I’ve begged her just to help me to understand her, to give me some clue as to what it is that she really wants, to keep us from going to smash, and she just sat and listened to me with that slow grin of hers. . . . I frightened her, I think, the last time, and the grin faded from her face, but she became as hard as a stone. . . . She didn’t care. She didn’t care. And I think she wanted to break me. . . . She hasn’t done it. Do you hear? She hasn’t done it!”

“Did you weep?”

[Pg 318]

“I . . . I broke down.”

“Ah! Not a good way of convincing her of your capacity to give her what she wants.”

Basil strode angrily about the studio, waving his arms and shouting.

“It’s not a bit of good. It’s done now. . . . It’s all over. It’s finished.”

“It won’t be finished until you’ve done thinking about it. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of that.”

“I’m not going to discuss it with you.”

“I don’t want to. What are the facts? You’ve accused her of infidelity. Who’s the man?”

“Fry. . . . His wife’s divorcing him. That’s evidence enough, isn’t it?”

“I’m not concerned with the evidence. I only want to know whether it’s necessary that there should be a divorce.”

“She’s left me.”

“I might persuade her to return.”

“Could you?”

“I might. . . .”

“I’ll forgive her. . . . If she will come to me as a contrite woman. . . .”

“That’s slush. If you are going to spend your lives in quarrelling as to which is really the magnanimous party, I shan’t stir a finger. . . . Do you want her?”

“If she . . .”

“If you want her, there can be no conditions. . . .”

“But she . . .”

Serge saw that it was hopeless. Basil was clinging to his grievances, nursing them, cherishing them. They had become more precious to him than his own happiness, than his wife, than the well-being of his children. . . . Still there was hope that on Minna’s side there might be magnanimity and generosity enough to uproot the thick-set hedge with which Basil had surrounded himself.

 

Minna was in rooms in the Marylebone Road, near Madame Tussaud’s. She had a woman friend with her, a queer inanimate creature who looked as though she had stepped out of the waxworks—a model of Nell Gwynne. [Pg 319]Minna seemed quite happy. She was lying on a sofa eating Turkish delight and reading “Jane Eyre.” She dropped her book as Serge entered and her friend glided away.

“I am glad to see you,” she said. “It’s so dull. Isn’t it a beastly business?”

“I’ve just been to see Basil.”

“Is he still weeping?”

Serge ignored that question and asked her another.

“What’s the trouble between you two?”

“Basil says I’m——”

“I know that, but that’s only the outcome of the trouble.”

Minna was interested. She sat up on the sofa with her hands between her knees.

“How clever you are, Serge! No one else has ever thought of that. Everybody else is quarrelling as to whether I did or did not.”

“Did you?”

“No. That comes long after the mischief’s done. The trouble between Basil and me is simply this. Basil wants me to be a mother to him and I can’t. People are simply sickening about mothers. I’m a woman first and a mother afterwards. Being a mother grows out of being a woman. . . . Basil wants me to be a work of art in theory and a mother in practice. I simply couldn’t do it. . . . It’s my own fault. I knew Basil was like that before I married him. I had a sort of blind moment when I thought I could change him. You can’t change people. I can’t change myself. . . . I ought to have left him long ago, but Basil’s the sort of man you can’t leave. He clings. He plays on your nerves and makes you frightened. He looks at you with his big eyes and seems so helpless that you’re afraid to leave him, and you don’t like hurting him. He simply makes you be a mother to him and then takes advantage of it, and things go from bad to worse. . . . London seemed to frighten him, took away all his courage and his ambition. London’s too big for him. He wants to be at the top of the tree all at once, simply because he’s afraid of the climb. . . . We should have done better to stay at home.”

[Pg 320]

“That wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“No, I suppose not. I am I and Basil is Basil and that’s the whole story, and it’s just like a man of that sort to turn round and try to kill you when you won’t let him cling to you any longer.”

Minna’s voice became venomous.

“Grievances again!” thought Serge, and he saw then how impossible was his position. He could not tell Minna of Basil’s willingness to take her back upon conditions. Either of them or both must surrender their grievances if anything were to be done. That seemed to be extremely improbable.

“You will not go back, then?”

“I’m quite willing to go back, if Basil——”

More conditions! Oh, the folly of insistence upon rights! . . . Serge dropped the subject, accepted the inevitable and asked:

“Then it is to go on?”

“That rests with Basil.”

“If he does not withdraw the petition I suppose you will not defend.”

“I shall defend my honour if I have to spend my last penny on it. I’m not going to have mud thrown at me and say ‘Thank you’ for it. I don’t trust Basil. He’s a vindictive little beast. He’s sure to say our marriage was happy. . . . Besides, I must think of the children.”

“I wish you would.”

“I do. Their mother’s honour is precious to them.”

“Personally,” said Serge, “I would sell my honour for twopence.”

“Oh! you! . . . But then you don’t care what anybody thinks of you.”

“Not a straw.”

“Then it isn’t any good talking to you. You really are an immoral man. . . . If Basil goes for me, I shall go for him. You’d hold up the other cheek, I know, but then you’re not human. I told my children once to think before they struck, and Benny said, ‘I do think, and then I strike. . . .’ I’m like that too. I’m not going to listen to you. I’m not going back to Basil, I’m not going [Pg 321]to lie down and let him weep over my sins in public. He’s a little beast and everybody shall know that he’s a little beast. . . .”

Minna had worked herself up into a state of anger. She was hot and red in the face with it, and looked coarse and unpleasant.

Serge said to himself:

“No wonder knight-errantry is dead, since women have taken upon themselves to be as stupidly selfish as men.”

He made one last effort, and suggested that she should take the more sensible course and leave it to Basil unopposed to set the cumbrous machinery of the law in motion, if only for the sake of her father and mother. To that Minna only replied with a brilliant but spiteful caricature of Mrs. Folyat’s state of mind as slowly she digested the unpalatable truth that all marriages were not made in Heaven.

 

Serge wrote to Francis that night and told him that there was no hope, since both Minna and Basil were resolute to part. All that could be looked for was that they would injure each other as little as possible in the process. So far as he could see, the pain of uprooting was over. The pair were absolutely divorced. Unhappily, they seemed determined to call down on each other the disapprobation of the world, in their frenziedly childish desire to hurt each other. . . . Serge begged Francis to make his mother take a reasonable, human view of it, since Minna would need friendliness and assistance, and suggested that he should come to an arrangement with Basil’s family for the maintenance of the children.

His letter ended thus:

“Good-bye, my dear father. I was your first disappointment, but in the end you and I recognised each other. That is permanent. It will be with me wherever I go, with you to the end of your life. You are of those who believe that understanding is not given to us. Your belief must be a bitter comfort to you. I believe that men are rapidly coming to an end of their material activity [Pg 322]so that soon they will be forced to find understanding or perish. . . . Do you remember a night when you and I watched the rest acting an absurd play, and I said involuntarily, ‘Round the corner’? Modern life is theatrical. Everybody is playing a part, because they are without understanding. Life for modern men and women is for ever round the corner because they attempt to tackle their affairs with the minds of children, children who believe everything they are told and examine nothing. They play with everything. They can do nothing else. Unhappily, life is a serious business which yields its reward of joy only to simplicity, sincerity, and purity, or, if you like the old trinity better—faith, hope, and charity. The old beliefs are true—nearly all that you preach, I mean; but from repetition they have become stale and meaningless. They need restatement. . . . I am going back to the sea, not because I believe that the ‘great wide spaces of the earth’—what a lot of twaddle is talked about them!—have a monopoly of truth, but because I must move and keep moving. It is in the air. Perhaps I feel it before other men. The salvation of human life lies in movement, circulation. . . . More simply and less philosophically I am going because it amuses me to go. I like passing through the world saluting the few men of courage and good heart whom one can find, and, of such men, my dear father, I count you not the least.”

Francis kept this letter and through his hours of torment often read it. It let in air.