"There perhaps--yes. But they'd have to abide by the women's decisions."
I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with this idea.
"Ewart," I said, "this is like Doll's Island.
"Suppose," I reflected, "an unsuccessful man laid siege to a balcony and wouldn't let his rival come near it?"
"Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one does organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it--make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... And people obey etiquette sooner than laws..."
"H'm," I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world of a young man. "How about children?" I asked; "in the City? Girls are all very well. But boys, for example--grow up."
"Ah!" said Ewart. "Yes. I forgot. They mustn't grow up inside.... They'd turn out the boys when they were seven. The father must come with a little pony and a little gun and manly wear, and take the boy away. Then one could come afterwards to one's mother's balcony.... It must be fine to have a mother.
The father and the son..."
"This is all very pretty in its way," I said at last, "but it's a dream. Let's come back to reality. What I want to know is, what are you going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green NOW?"
"Oh! damn it!" he remarked, "Walham Green! What a chap you are, Ponderevo!" and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He wouldn't even reply to my tentatives for a time.
"While I was talking just now," he remarked presently, "I had a quite different idea."
"What?"
"For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars.
Only not heads, you know. We don't see the people who do things to us nowadays..."
"How will you do it, then?"
"Hands--a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century.
I'll do it. Some day some one will discover it--go there--see what I have done, and what is meant by it."
"See it where?"
"On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate Slope! All the little, soft feminine hands, the nervous ugly males, the hands of the flops, and the hands of the snatchers!
And Grundy's loose, lean, knuckly affair--Grundy the terror!--the little wrinkles and the thumb! Only it ought to hold all the others together--in a slightly disturbing squeeze....Like Rodin's great Hand--you know the thing!"
IV
I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off of our engagement and Marion's surrender. But I recall now the sharpness of my emotion, the concentrated spirit of tears and laughter in my throat as I read the words of her unexpected letter--"I have thought over everything, and I was selfish...."
I rushed off to Walham Green that evening to give back all she had given me, to beat her altogether at giving. She was extraordinarily gentle and generous that time, I remember, and when at last I left her, she kissed me very sweetly.
So we were married.
We were married with all the customary incongruity. I gave--perhaps after a while not altogether ungrudgingly--and what I gave, Marion took, with a manifest satisfaction. After all, I was being sensible. So that we had three livery carriages to the church (one of the pairs of horses matched) and coachmen--with improvised flavour and very shabby silk hats--bearing white favours on their whips, and my uncle intervened with splendour and insisted upon having a wedding breakfast sent in from a caterer's in Hammersmith. The table had a great display of chrysanthemums, and there was orange blossom in the significant place and a wonderful cake. We also circulated upwards of a score of wedges of that accompanied by silver-printed cards in which Marion's name of Ramboat was stricken out by an arrow in favour of Ponderevo. We had a little rally of Marion's relations, and several friends and friends' friends from Smithie's appeared in the church and drifted vestry-ward. I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of two. The effect in that shabby little house was one of exhilarating congestion. The side-board, in which lived the table-cloth and the "Apartments" card, was used for a display of the presents, eked out by the unused balance of the silver-printed cards.
Marion wore the white raiment of a bride, white silk and satin, that did not suit her, that made her seem large and strange to me; she obtruded bows and unfamiliar contours. She went through all this strange ritual of an English wedding with a sacramental gravity that I was altogether too young and egotistical to comprehend. It was all extraordinarily central and important to her; it was no more than an offensive, complicated, and disconcerting intrusion of a world I was already beginning to criticise very bitterly, to me. What was all this fuss for? The mere indecent advertisement that I had been passionately in love with Marion! I think, however, that Marion was only very remotely aware of my smouldering exasperation at having in the end behaved "nicely." I had played--up to the extent of dressing my part; I had an admirably cut frock--coat, a new silk hat, trousers as light as I could endure them--lighter, in fact--a white waistcoat, night tie, light gloves. Marion, seeing me despondent had the unusual enterprise to whisper to me that I looked lovely; I knew too well I didn't look myself. I looked like a special coloured supplement to Men's Wear, or The Tailor and Cutter, Full Dress For Ceremonial Occasions. I had even the disconcerting sensations of an unfamiliar collar. I felt lost--in a strange body, and when I glanced down myself for reassurance, the straight white abdomen, the alien legs confirmed that impression.
My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker--a little banker--in flower. He wore a white rose in his buttonhole. He wasn't, I think, particularly talkative. At least I recall very little from him.
"George" he said once or twice, "this is a great occasion for you--a very great occasion." He spoke a little doubtfully.
