The Judgment of Eve | Page 6

face met hers, and before she knew it
Aggie's initiation came.
"Ah," said Arthur, rising solemn from the consecration of the primal
kiss, and drawing himself up like a man for the first time aware of his
full stature, "that makes that seem pretty poor stuff, doesn't it?"
Young Arthur had just looked upon Love himself, and for that moment
his vision was purged of vanity.
"Not Browning?" asked Aggie, a little anxiously.
"No--Not Browning. Me. Browning could write poetry. I can't. I know
that now."
And she knew it, too; but that made no difference. It was not for his
poetry she loved him.
"And so," said her mother, after Arthur had stayed for tea and supper,
and said his good-bye and gone--"so that's the man you've been waiting
for all this time?"
"Yes, that's the man I've been waiting for," said Aggie.
Three days later Queningford knew that Aggie was going to marry
Arthur Gatty, and that John Hurst was going to marry Susie.
Susie was not pretty, but she had eyes like Aggie's.

III
After all, Susie was married before her eldest sister; for Aggie had to
wait till Arthur's salary rose. He thought it was going to rise at

midsummer, or if not at midsummer, then at Michaelmas. But
midsummer and Michaelmas passed, Christmas and Easter, too, and
Arthur's salary showed no sign of rising. He daren't tell Aggie that he
had been obliged to leave off reading Latin in the evenings, and was
working feverishly at shorthand in order to increase his efficiency. His
efficiency increased, but not his salary.
Meanwhile he spent all his holidays at Queningford, and Aggie had
been twice to town. They saw so little of each other that every meeting
was a divine event, a spiritual adventure. If each was not exactly an
undiscovered country to the other, there was always some territory left
over from last time, endlessly alluring to the pilgrim lover. Whenever
Arthur found in Aggie's mind a little bare spot that needed cultivating,
he planted there a picture or a poem, that instantly took root, and began
to bloom as it had never (to his eyes) bloomed in any other soil. Aggie,
for her part, yielded all the treasure of her little kingdom as tribute to
the empire that had won her.
Many things were uncertain, the rise of Arthur's salary among them;
but of one thing they were sure, that they would lead the intellectual
life together. Whatever happened, they would keep it up.
They were keeping it up as late as August, when Arthur came down for
the Bank Holiday. He was still enthusiastic, but uncertainty had
dimmed his hope. Marriage had become a magnificent phantasm,
superimposed upon a dream, a purely supposititious rise of salary. The
prospect had removed itself so far in time that it had parted with its
substance, like an object retired modestly into space.
They were walking together in the Queningford fields, when Arthur
stopped suddenly and turned to her.
"Aggie," he said, "supposing, after all, we can never marry?"
"Well," said Aggie, calmly, "if we don't we shall still lead our real life
together.
"But how, if we're separated?"

"It would go on just the same. But we sha'n't be separated. I shall get
something to do in town and live there. I'll be a clerk, or go into a
shop--or something."
"My darling, that would never do."
"Wouldn't it, though!"
"I couldn't let you do it."
"Why ever not? We should see each other every evening, and every
Saturday and Sunday. We should always be learning something new,
and learning it together. We should have a heavenly time."
But Arthur shook his head sadly. "It wouldn't work, my sweetheart. We
aren't made like that."
"I am," said Aggie, stoutly, and there was silence.
"Anyhow," she said, presently, "whatever happens, we're not going to
let it drop."
"Rather not," said he, with incorruptible enthusiasm.
Then, just because he had left off thinking about it, he was told that in
the autumn of that year he might expect a rise.
And in the autumn they were married.
Aggie left the sweet gardens, the white roads and green fields of
Queningford, to live in a side street in Camden Town, in a creaking
little villa built of sulphurous yellow brick furred with soot.
They had come back from their brilliant fortnight on the south coast,
and were standing together in the atrocious bow-window of their little
sitting room looking out on the street. A thick gray rain was falling, and
a dust-cart was in sight.
"Aggie," he said, "I'm afraid you'll miss the country."

She said nothing; she was lost in thought.
"It looks rather a brute of a place, doesn't it? But it won't be so bad
when the rain clears