i would like very much to give you a portrait of mary as she was in those days. every portrait i ever had of her i burnt in the sincerity of what was to have been our final separation, and now i have nothing of her in my possession. i suppose that in the files of old illustrated weeklies somewhere, a score of portraits must be findable. yet photographs have a queer quality of falsehood. they have no movement and always there was a little movement about mary just as there is always a little scent about flowers. she was slender and graceful, so that she seemed taller than she was, she had beautifully shaped arms and a brightness in her face; it seemed to me always that there was light in her face, more than the light that shone upon it. her fair, very slightly reddish hair—it was warm like australian gold—flowed with a sort of joyous bravery back from her low broad forehead; the color under her delicate skin was bright and quick, and her mouth always smiled faintly. there was a peculiar charm for me about her mouth, a whimsicality, a sort of humorous resolve in the way in which the upper lip fell upon the lower and in a faint obliquity that increased with her quickening smile. she spoke with a very clear delicate intonation that made one want to hear her speak again; she often said faintly daring things, and when she did, she had that little catch in the breath—of one who dares. she did not talk hastily; often before she spoke came a brief grave pause. her eyes were brightly blue except when the spirit of mischief took her and then they became black, and there was something about the upper and lower lids that made them not only the prettiest but the sweetest and kindliest eyes in the world. and she moved with a quiet rapidity, without any needless movements, to do whatever she had a mind to do....
but how impossible it is to convey the personal charm of a human being. i catalogue these things and it is as if she moved about silently behind my stumbling enumeration and smiled at me still, with her eyes a little darkened, mocking me. that phantom will never be gone from my mind. it was all of these things and none of these things that made me hers, as i have never been any other person's....
we grew up together. the girl of nineteen mingles in my memory with the woman of twenty-five.
always we were equals, or if anything she was the better of us two. i never made love to her in the commoner sense of the word, a sense in which the woman is conceived of as shy, unawakened, younger, more plastic, and the man as tempting, creating responses, persuading and compelling. we made love to each other as youth should, we were friends lit by a passion.... i think that is the best love. if i could wish your future i would have you love someone neither older and stronger nor younger and weaker than yourself. i would have you have neither a toy nor a devotion, for the one makes the woman contemptible and the other the man. there should be something almost sisterly between you. love neither a goddess nor a captive woman. but i would wish you a better fate in your love than chanced to me.
mary was not only naturally far more quick-minded, more swiftly understanding than i, but more widely educated. mine was the stiff limited education of the english public school and university; i could not speak and read and think french and german as she could for all that i had a pedantic knowledge of the older forms of those tongues; and the classics and mathematics upon which i had spent the substance of my years were indeed of little use to me, have never been of any real use to me, they were ladders too clumsy to carry about and too short to reach anything. my general ideas came from the newspapers and the reviews. she on the other hand had read much, had heard no end of good conversation, the conversation of people who mattered, had thought for herself and had picked the brains of her brothers. her mother had let her read whatever books she liked, partly because she believed that was the proper thing to do, and partly because it was so much less trouble to be liberal in such things.
we had the gravest conversations.
i do not remember that we talked much of love, though we were very much in love. we kissed; sometimes greatly daring we walked hand in hand; once i took her in my arms and carried her over a swampy place beyond the killing wood, and held her closely to me; that was a great event between us; but we were shy of one another, shy even of very intimate words; and a thousand daring and beautiful things i dreamt of saying to her went unsaid. i do not remember any endearing names from that time. but we jested and shared our humors, shaped our developing ideas in quaint forms to amuse one another and talked—as young men talk together.
we talked of religion; i think she was the first person to thaw the private silences that had kept me bound in these matters even from myself for years. i can still recall her face, a little flushed and coming nearer to mine after avowals and comparisons. "but stephen," she says; "if none of these things are really true, why do they keep on telling them to us? what is true? what are we for? what is everything for?"
i remember the awkwardness i felt at these indelicate thrusts into topics i had come to regard as forbidden.
"i suppose there's a sort of truth in them," i said, and then more siddonsesquely: "endless people wiser than we are——"
"yes," she said. "but that doesn't matter to us. endless people wiser than we are have said one thing, and endless people wiser than we are have said exactly the opposite. it's we who have to understand—for ourselves.... we don't understand, stephen."
i was forced to a choice between faith and denial. but i parried with questions. "don't you," i asked, "feel there is a god?"
she hesitated. "there is something—something very beautiful," she said and stopped as if her breath had gone. "that is all i know, stephen...."
and i remember too that we talked endlessly about the things i was to do in the world. i do not remember that we talked about the things she was to do, by some sort of instinct and some sort of dexterity she evaded that, from the very first she had reserves from me, but my career and purpose became as it were the form in which we discussed all the purposes of life. i became man in her imagination, the protagonist of the world. at first i displayed the modest worthy desire for respectable service that harbury had taught me, but her clear, sceptical little voice pierced and tore all those pretences to shreds. "do some decent public work," i said, or some such phrase.
"but is that all you want?" i hear her asking. "is that all you want?"
i lay prone upon the turf and dug up a root of grass with my penknife. "before i met you it was," i said.
"and now?"
"i want you."
"i'm nothing to want. i want you to want all the world.... why shouldn't you?"
i think i must have talked of the greatness of serving the empire. "yes, but splendidly," she insisted. "not doing little things for other people—who aren't doing anything at all. i want you to conquer people and lead people.... when i see you, stephen, sometimes—i almost wish i were a man. in order to be able to do all the things that you are going to do."
"for you," i said, "for you."
i stretched out my hand for hers, and my gesture went disregarded.
she sat rather crouched together with her eyes gazing far away across the great spaces of the park.
"that is what women are for," she said. "to make[pg 60] men see how splendid life can be. to lift them up—out of a sort of timid grubbiness——" she turned upon me suddenly. "stephen," she said, "promise me. whatever you become, you promise and swear here and now never to be grey and grubby, never to be humpy and snuffy, never to be respectable and modest and dull and a little fat, like—like everybody. ever."
"i swear," i said.
"by me."
"by you. no book to kiss! please, give me your hand."
