Chapter 6

Stephen was completely crushed by this. It was like the things children say, unanswerable in its simple rightness, and yet, the grown-up world being what it is, all wrong.

Virginia was nearer the fount of truth than he was. Where he stood, thirty years further from it, its waters naturally were muddier; but there they were, and had to be dealt with including their mud, and not as if they remained for ever, as she so near the source supposed, crystal clear.

On the other hand he couldn’t do without his wife. He owed her everything, and above all he owed her his return to youth. She had come and released him from the darkening prison of deepening middle age. He worshipped her more than he knew. For instance, up to this he hadn’t known he was wax in her hands, he had imagined he led, guided, was in absolute authority; now suddenly he knew he was wax. When his mother-in-law had dared compare his marriage with hers, the thing had been the deadliest outrage. Virginia pointed her finger at it, and instead of being outraged he was crushed—crushed by the truth as she saw it, crushed by the knowledge that in her clear young eyes he hadn’t, in his condemnation of her mother’s action, a leg to stand on.

Yet how many legs did Stephen not know he really had to stand on. Everybody, except children like Virginia, inexperienced and new, would agree that the difference between the two cases was such that one was accepted as natural and the other with derision. But Virginia said there was no difference—he had an uneasy feeling that Christ might have said so too—and declared that if her mother’s marrying some one so much younger was terrible, then her marrying Stephen was terrible; more terrible, because there were actually eight years greater difference in their case.

All this she said that first tragic night in bed, and inquired, when she had finished, what was to be done about it.

He was wax. Not immediately; not for some black weeks of agonising separation, of days spent avoiding each other, of nights spent with their backs turned; but inevitably, before her stubbornness, he melted. She had too many of the necessities of his life in her hands. To be out of harmony with Virginia was worse, far worse—he shuddered as he admitted it, but there it was—than being out of harmony with God.

And Virginia, though she kept up her stout exterior and went doggedly through these painful days of April and May—the estrangement lasted all that time—was most wretchedly unhappy. What was she to make of all this? In her heart she was as much shocked as Stephen. But how could she not stand up for and defend her mother? How could she deny her own blood? Deeply she resented having to defend her mother; it shattered the foundations of the whole of her childhood’s faith. Was there ever anything more miserable, she thought, than to love some one and be horrified at them at the same time? She who ought to have been putting up her feet and resting more diligently than ever—’The fifth month, dear child,’ Mrs. Colquhoun anxiously reminded her, ‘we are in the fifth month now, you know, and have to be most careful’—walked ceaselessly instead in the garden, up and down, up and down, in all those paths where she was least likely to be found by her mother-in-law, trying her hardest to see clear, to think right, groping round for some way to get back to Stephen while at the same time not deserting her mother, to get back to his arms, to his heart, to the unclouded love without which she felt she couldn’t live.