But in details of surface he was unusual. In them he happened to be rather ahead of his time. He was a socialist, for example. In 1890
there was only one other socialist in Oxford, and he not at all an undergraduate, but a retired chimney-sweep, named Hines, who made speeches, to which nobody, except perhaps William, listened, near the Martyrs’ Memorial. And William wore a flannel shirt, and rode a bicycle—very strange habits in those days, and very horrible. He was said to be (though he was short-sighted and wore glasses) a first-rate `back’ at football; but, as football was a thing frowned on by the rowing men, and coldly ignored by the bloods, his talent for it did not help him: he was one of the principal pariahs of our College; and it was rather in a spirit of bravado, and to show how sure of myself I was, that I began, in my second year, to cultivate his acquaintance.
We had little in common. I could not think Political Economy `the most exciting thing in the world,’ as he used to call it. Nor could I without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris’
interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young socialist that he was, thought `glorious.’ He had begun to write an Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of verses. None of these pleased him, though to me they seemed very like his master’s. I can see him now, standing on his hearth-rug, holding his MS. close to his short-sighted eyes, declaiming the verses and trying, with many angular gestures of his left hand, to animate them-a tall, broad, raw-boned fellow, with long brown hair flung back from his forehead, and a very shabby suit of clothes. Because of his clothes and his socialism, and his habit of offering beer to a guest, I had at first supposed him quite poor; and I was surprised when he told me that he had from his guardian (his parents being dead) an allowance of 350, and that when he came of age he would have an income of 400. `All out of dividends,’ he would groan. I would hint that Mr. Hines and similar zealots might disembarrass him of this load, if he asked them nicely. `No,’ he would say quite seriously, `I can’t do that,’ and would read out passages from `Fabian Essays’ to show that in the present anarchical conditions only mischief could result from sporadic dispersal of rent. `Ten, twelve years hence—’ he would muse more hopefully. `But by that time,’ I would say, `you’ll probably be married, and your wife mightn’t quite—’, whereat he would hotly repeat what he had said many times: that he would never marry.
Marriage was an anti-social anachronism. I think its survival wasin some part due to the machinations of Capital. Anyway, it was doomed.
Temporary civil contracts between men and women would be the rule `ten, twelve years hence’; pending which time the lot of any man who had civic sense must be celibacy, tempered perhaps with free love.
Long before that time was up, nevertheless, William married. One afternoon in the spring of ‘95 I happened to meet him at a corner of Cockspur Street. I wondered at the immense cordiality of his greeting; for our friendship, such as it was, had waned in our two final years at Oxford. `You look very flourishing, and,’ I said, `you’re wearing a new suit!’ `I’m married,’ he replied, obviously without a twinge of conscience. He told me he had been married just a month. He declared that to be married was the most splendid thing in all the world; but he weakened the force of this generalisation by adding that there never was any one like his wife. `You must see her,’ he said; and his impatience to show her proudly off to some one was so evident, and so touching, that I could but accept his invitation to go and stay with them for two or three days—`why not next week?’ They had taken and furnished `a sort of cottage’ in —shire, and this was their home. He had `run up for the day, on business—journalism’ and was now on his way to Charing Cross. `I know you’ll like my wife,’ he said at parting. She’s—well, she’s glorious.’
As this was the epithet he had erst applied to `Beowulf’ and to `Sigurd the Volsung’ it raised no high hopes. And indeed, as I was soon to find, he had again misused it. There was nothing glorious about his bride. Some people might even have not thought her pretty. I myself did not, in the flash of first sight. Neat, insignificant, pleasing, was what she appeared to me, rather than pretty, and far rather than glorious. In an age of fringes, her brow was severely bare. She looked `practical.’ But an instant later, when she smiled, I saw that she was pretty, too. And presently I thought her delightful.
William had met me in a `governess cart,’ and we went to see him unharness the pony. He did this in a fumbling, experimental way, confusing the reins with the traces, and profiting so little by his wife’s directions that she began to laugh. And her laugh was a lovely thing; quite a small sound, but exquisitely clear and gay, coming in a sequence of notes that neither rose nor fell, that were quite even; a trill of notes, and then another, and another, as though she were pulling repeatedly a little silver bell… As I describe it, perhaps the sound may be imagined irritating. I can only say it was enchanting.
I wished she would go on laughing; but she ceased, she darted forward and (William standing obediently aside, and I helping unhelpfully) unharnessed the pony herself, and led it into its small stable.
Decidedly, she was `practical,’ but—I was prepared now to be lenient to any quality she might have.
Had she been feckless, no doubt I should have forgiven her that, too; but I might have enjoyed my visit less than I did, and might have been less pleased to go often again. I had expected to `rough it’ under William’s roof. But everything thereunder, within the limits of a strict Arcadian simplicity, was well-ordered. I was touched, when I went to my bedroom, by the precision with which the very small maid had unpacked and disposed my things. And I wondered where my hostess had got the lore she had so evidently imparted. Certainly not from William. Perhaps (it only now strikes me) from a handbook. For Mary was great at handbooks. She had handbooks about gardening, and others about poultry, and one about `the stable,’ and others on cognate themes. From these she had filled up the gaps left in her education by her father, who was a widower and either a doctor or a solicitor—I forget which—in one of the smallest towns of an adjoining county. And I daresay she may have had, somewhere hidden away, a manual for young hostesses. If so, it must have been a good one. But to say this is to belittle Mary’s powers of intuition. It was they, sharpened by her adoration of William, and by her intensity for everything around him, that made her so efficient a housewife.
If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed in. The `sort of cottage’ had been vacant for many years—an unpromising and ineligible object, a mile away from a village, and three miles away from a railway station. The main part of it was an actual cottage, of seventeenth-century workmanship; but a little stuccoed wing had been added to each side of it, in 1850 or thereabouts, by an eccentric old gentleman who at that time chose to make it his home. He had added also the small stable, a dairy, and other appanages. For these, and for garden, there was plenty of room, as he had purchased and enclosed half an acre of the surrounding land Those two stuccoed, very Victorian wings of his, each with a sashwindow above and a French window below, consorted queerly with the old red brick and the latticed panes. And the long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn’t want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right—at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a thing she must coddle to the utmost in a proper setting. She was a year older than he (though, being so small and slight, she looked several years younger), and in her devotion the maternal instinct played a great part. William, as I have already conveyed to you, was not greatly gifted. Mary’s instinct, in this one matter, was at fault. But endearingly, rightly at fault.