Chapter 4

After the evening of the storm we talked no more of marriage for a while, and about a week later I went over to Paris ostensibly to shop, and was joined there by Mr. Garrett on the way to Italy. I suppose that Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must be organized for the need of lovers. Nothing occurred there to break the film of our enchanted bubble. For a month we kept to the hill towns and to Venice, where we could go about in the conspicuous privacy of a gondola, and all that time we met nobody we had ever known.

It was all so easily managed—we had to think of the girls, of course—no one seeing our registered names side by side, Mrs. Thomas Bettersworth, New York, and Helmeth Garrett, Chilicojote, Mexico, would have thought of connecting them. Helmeth attended to all his business correspondence as though he were still in London, and nobody expected to hear from me in any case.

It is strange how little history there is to happiness. We had come together past incredible struggles, anxieties, triumphs, defeats; we had been buffeted and stricken, and now suddenly we were stilled. If at any time the ghosts of the uneasy past rose upon us, we kissed and they were laid. So long as we kept in touch, there ran a river of fire between our blessed isolation and the world. And for the first time we looked upon the world free of the obligations of our being in it. We looked, and exchanged our separate knowledges as precious treasure. My exploration of life had been from within—I knew what Raphael was thinking about when he painted that fine blue vein on his Madonna’s wrist. But Helmeth had looked on the movement of history; what he saw in Italy was the path of armies, lines of aqueducts, old Roman roads to and from mines. Everything began or ended for him in a mine, in Gaul or Austria or Ophir; dynasties were marked for him by change in the ownership of mines. So he drew me the white roads out of Italy as one draws fibre from a palm, and strung on them the world’s great adventures. There were hours also when we let all this great fabric of art and history float from us, sure that by the vitalizing thread of understanding which ran between us like a new, live sense, we could pull it back again ... but we loved ... we loved.

Nothing that happened to us there, came with a more revealing touch than the attitude in which I caught myself, looking out for and being surprised at not discovering in myself any qualms of conscience. All that I had known of such relations in other people, had made itself known by a subtle, penetrating, fetid savour, against which some instinct, as sure as a hound, threw up its head and bayed the tainted air.

But in my own affair, the first compulsion that irked me was the necessity I was under of not telling anybody. I wasn’t conscious at any time of any feeling that wouldn’t have gone suitably with the outward form of marriage; there were times even when I failed to see why one should take exception to the neglect of such form. I was remade every pulse and fibre of me, my beloved’s ... and so obviously, that the necessity of tagging my estate with a ceremony struck me as an impertinence. Marriage I think must be a fact, capable of going on independently of the prayer book and the county clerk. Whatever you may think, no god could have escaped the certainty of my being duly married.

There were days though, just at first, when I suffered the need of completing my condition by an outward bond. I knew very well where the custom of wedding rings came from; I should have worn anklets and armlets as well, if only they could have been taken as the advertisement of my belonging wholly to my man. Depend upon it, the subjugation of woman will be found finally to rest in the attempt visibly to establish, what the woman herself concurs in, the inward conviction of possession.

How much of what was in my own mind, was also in Helmeth’s, I do not know, but because I had brought upon myself the condition of not being married, I failed to speak of what I found regrettable in it. What did come out for me satisfyingly, was the man’s sheer content in his mate, the response, and our pride in it, of his blood and body to my presence, and the new relish it created in him for the processes of living, for his pipe and his meals, and his work. He had brought some estimates to figure out; evenings at work on these, he would call me to him and sit with his left arm thrown lightly about my chair, the pencil going as though my presence were an added fillip to activity. He took on weight in that holiday, and his mouth relaxed to a more youthful curve.