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WAS rather worried now and then about Paul and Clare. It was painfully obvious at times that their marriage was not a complete success, as I saw when I stayed for week-ends, occasionally, between my gadabout journeys abroad. Paul and I were good friends, though he always had an amused contempt for me as “one of those writing chappies,” and he would talk for hours about his scientific work, the philosophy of life, the future of civilisation, and now and again, though not often, let out a word or two about his domestic troubles. The truth was that he was not really cut out for married life, in spite of his boy and girl, who amused him vastly, and whom he allowed to run completely wild.

Clare was certainly unsuited to this scientific, unsocial, unconventional husband, who was absorbed in his work, which he thought the most important thing in life, and was utterly regardless of money, social amenities, and even, as she complained bitterly, of ordinary respectability.

There was something to be said on Clare’s side—there generally is in such cases—and I could quite see that poor old Paul was very trying to a wife like my sister, who liked putting on pretty frocks and powdering her nose, and indulging in the chit-chat of afternoon teas, and whose sentimental and utterly false views on life were shocked continually by Paul’s rather brutal realism and ruthless sense of what he thought to be truth. It was decidedly uncomfortable for her when he left the Pasteur Institute and set up a kind of farm for bacteriological research in a remote part of Sussex, where he bred guinea pigs, rabbits, and mice, which he inoculated with various diseases and then treated with anti-toxins. He also kept knock-kneed horses and miserable donkeys for the same purpose of scientific experiment.

His collection of sheds, stables, and laboratories, and the old farm-house in which he put Clare and the children, were shunned by the local gentry, because they were afraid of catching one of those diseases which Paul kept in test-tubes, studied under the microscope, and injected into his menagerie. Even those who were bold enough to call upon Clare because they thought she might be an agreeable neighbour dropped away when they found (according to her theory) that her house was a “regular pigsty,” and the children like young savages, and when Paul alarmed them by coming in to tea in clothes that were only suitable for the backwoods, and behaving like an anarchist. That is to say, he had no parlour manners, chaffed his wife’s visitors, failed to hand them bread-and-butter at the proper time, and talked dangerously about the rights of the lower orders, the disgraceful condition of their cottages, and the crying need of social reform in England.

There was considerable gossip in the neighbourhood, so Clare told me, about the way in which he made friends with young farmers, gipsy folk, and mechanics in the village, whom he treated with more courtesy than his wife’s guests, and as though they had greater intelligence, which, said Paul, when he discussed the matter with me, was as true as the law of gravity.

“I’d rather talk five minutes with Gipsy Lee or young Slocombe, the poacher,” he said, “than five hours with the Honourable Charlotte Wincott or Lady Brierley—the Berkshire Brierleys, you know!—and learn more in the time. These Sussex men are wonderfully wise about the way of nature, and they’ve no false ideas about the importance of clothes, family connections, and clean hands. I like their manners, and they’re as honest as death, which is the only thing one can be quite sure about.”

Paul’s girl, Dorothy, whom he called “Puggy”—much to Clare’s annoyance—was a long-legged young lady, as I remember her in those days, with a wild mop of brown hair and eyes like a young deer’s—a beauty afterwards. Clare had no control over her whatever, and Paul laughed heartily at her uncivilised ways. She climbed the highest trees, hunted rats with an old wire-haired terrier, fought with the farmers’ boys, and gave one a black eye when he tried to kiss her.

She was the despair of the mistresses in the local day school, except that she read omnivorously, wrote amazing poetry, and still more amazing novelettes, and startled them by scientific theories which she picked up from her father. But her manners were shocking, and her language worse. At twelve years of age she swore like a stable boy, having learnt these bad words from the lads who looked after her father’s diseased horses, and there was a dreadful scene one day with her mother when she called the Honourable Charlotte Wincott an unmentionable name because the old lady rebuked her for showing too much of her legs as she sat curled up on the sofa reading David Copperfield.

Poor Clare! How could she establish any kind of discipline, as Paul roared with laughter when this was repeated to him, and slipped upstairs with some of his own food when Dorothy had been sent supperless to bed for this unpardonable offence?

It was the same with the boy, young Humphrey, whom his father called “Bumps.” He was a year younger than Dorothy and an attractive-looking lad, with fair hair, hazel eyes, and freckles, who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but had a genius for getting into mischief, and an air of bland and innocent surprise when rebuked for his evil deeds.

“But mother,” he would say, “I meant no harm! How could I possibly know? It’s jolly unfair blaming it on to me!”

That was when he had burnt down the greenhouse, after an experiment with some explosive chemicals, and again when he was expelled from a day school kept by two ladies because he frightened a little girl into hysterics by putting a toad in her desk.

“Why should a kid be frightened of a jolly old toad?” he asked. “It’s so silly. Isn’t it, father?”

Paul agreed.

“Ridiculous, old man. But the female species is like that—except Puggy and a few others.”

It was this agreement with all their sins that was so exasperating to Clare. That, and a thousand other things which prevented husband and wife from seeing eye to eye and gradually established a kind of feud between them, or at least a continual sense of grievance on Clare’s part, and uneasiness, disillusion, and annoyance in Paul’s mind. Clare was not in the least interested in his research work. She hated the smell of his laboratory. She loathed his experiments on guinea pigs and rabbits. She was sceptical of his results, and made a mockery of his ambitions.

“What’s the good of all this silly old science?” she asked plaintively. “We got on very well without it. I believe in a good family doctor. I can’t see how it helps the world at all.”

Paul tried to explain.

Surely it would be a good thing to eliminate such scourges as diphtheria, cerebro-spinal meningitis, perhaps even cancer one day. They had already got on the track of the typhoid bug. They had practically destroyed malaria, yellow fever, typhus. They had reduced plague in India by discovering its carrier—the rat flea.

“It’s all so disgusting,” said Clare. “I want to forget disease. In any case I don’t see why we can’t live in London and have some nice friends, and go to the theatre now and then, and live like respectable people. I seldom see a soul from week’s end to week’s end.”

“That seems to me a great advantage,” argued Paul. “The average standard of conversation among one’s ‘nice friends’ is enough to sap one’s intellect.... ‘Have you been playing tennis lately?’ ‘Did you read that last speech by that scoundrel Lloyd George?’ ‘What appalling weather for the time of year!’ ‘Do you take sugar in your tea, Lady Snooks?’ ... Oh, Lord! Thank Heaven for this escape, with good old trees round us, and birds singing, and honest old nature telling no lies and making no mischief, just working out the laws of God, without a fuss!”

“You don’t believe in God,” said Clare bitterly. “You’re an infidel, without religion, as you’ve taught me to be.”

“On the contrary,” said Paul, “I’m becoming a mystic. The more I see of nature, and the closer I get to scientific truth, the more reverential I become to the great plan, and the Mind behind.”

He spoke as though in one of his satirical moods, and winked at me, but I fancied he was serious enough; and indeed, later, when we walked together in the woods about his house and on a lonely heath near by, where I loved the scent of the heather and the song of the larks and the distant view of the Sussex downs, he talked at length about this new “mysticism” of his.

“I used to jeer at the old Dad,” he said, “for his mixture of doubt and faith, his pitiful little attempts to square up Christianity with science, and the goodness of God with the awful mess of things. In those slums of his, for instance! But I’m beginning to see that he was just groping, like I am, and perhaps just about as near to the meaning of the riddle! There’s a law somewhere. Life didn’t begin by accident. At least I hardly think so. I’m almost beginning to admit that there’s a conflict between good and evil—bad bugs and good bugs fighting like hell—health and disease, life and death. As for what we call matter, it’s only another name for force. Atoms, electrons, energy, always changing into other forms of force, but never lost. What’s the truth? That’s what I want to get at.... Clare doesn’t see the use of truth. Her mind doesn’t work that way. She sees life in a pretty cloud of falsity, and craves for sentimental illusions—frocks, fashion, furniture, romantic love, all the things that don’t matter. She believes in caste, and hates my democratic instincts. And she thinks I’m a dull fellow because I glue my eye to a microscope and watch the life-history of disease germs. Rather a pity for both of us, eh?”

He gave a heavy sigh, and then laughed.

“Of course I’m an awful old bear, and those kids of ours are frightful young whelps, though it’s my fault, and I like ’em as they are.”

It was rather painful at times to see the increasing strain between husband and wife. Clare kept up a ceaseless quarrel with him because of his failure to check the children’s naughtiness, and meals became rather intolerable because of her attempts to make Dorothy behave “like a little lady,” and Humphrey to sit still and eat his food nicely, while Paul was having private jokes with the girl, making her laugh in the middle of her mother’s rebukes, and pulling the boy’s hair and making him squeal. At other times Paul would sit glum and self-absorbed, as though thinking out some scientific problem, and then laugh satirically at some remark of Clare’s about the latest gossip in the village.

“Old Mother Wincott objects to my lecture at the village institute, does she? Thinks it puts false ideas into the heads of the lower orders? What do they want to know about sanitation? Well, perhaps she’s right. They can’t afford to be clean on the wages she pays her gardener.

“God bless the Squire and his relations,

And keep us in our proper stations.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call her ‘old Mother Wincott,’ Paul!” said Clare fretfully. “It’s not kind, and it’s not good for the children to hear.”

Paul said she was motherly, which was much to her credit, and old, which was not her fault. And, anyhow, he hated her like poison.

“I like her,” said Clare. “She’s the only real lady who lives in the neighbourhood, and she’s very kind to me.”

“As long as she’ll keep her tongue off me——” said Paul.

In the evenings, when I went down for the week-end, Paul used to get me up in his study for a yarn about his latest adventure in research work, or general discussion on abstract ideas, until one evening Clare opened the door rather violently, and, looking very pale and distressed, protested against this “selfishness,” as she called it, and as, indeed, it was.

“Here am I, buried alive in this horrible old house,” she said, “never seeing a soul of my own kind from one week to another, and when my own brother comes you take him up here and leave me alone. It isn’t fair. It’s—it’s disgraceful!”

For once Paul was apologetic.

“That’s true!” he said. “Sorry, old girl, but I thought you were busy with the children. Let’s go down and have some music, or play a hand at whist.”

But half-way through the game of whist he became restless, and flung his cards down.

“This is the last refuge of imbecility! You two have a game of halma or something while I go and do a bit of work on the microscope.”

Clare spoke to me with tears in her eyes after that.

“Paul’s impossible!” she said. “And this life of mine! I can’t stand it much longer. These lonely woods get on my nerves, I never get any pleasant society, never go to a theatre, never see well-dressed people ...”

I suggested that she should go and stay with Katherine now and then, but she shrugged her shoulders and said; “I can’t stand freaks. Katherine’s house is full of vegetarians, pacifists, traitors, and Russian anarchists.”

“They’re amusing,” I remarked. “And Katherine is wonderfully kind.”

“She’s too much like Paul,” said Clare. “Always thinking about the truth of things. I hate truth.”

She spoke those words passionately, as though she had a real grudge against that truth of things for which Paul and Katherine were searching.

It was about that time that she came to know young Doctor Farrell, who bought the practice in the neighbouring village. He attended her for a slight illness, and they became great friends. Paul was glad of that, until he became a little jealous because she saw so much of this good-looking young man, who discussed the latest novels with her, or the latest society sensation, and came to the house more often than was pleasing to Paul. Even then he didn’t object very much, as long as he could leave them talking while he slipped off to his laboratory, or had a look at his sick rabbits, or took a stroll in the quiet woods on summer nights....

I have suggested, perhaps, that he had no great love for Clare, and yet I’m certain that, in spite of his grumpiness and her lack of sympathy with his work and ideas, he had a sincere affection for her. After all, she was the mother of his children, whom he adored, and though Paul was selfish in a way, and ruthless regarding truth, or what he believed to be truth, he was not without sentiment and tenderness.

It was Katherine who told me that a tragedy had happened, or something approaching tragedy. It was when I looked in one day at the house in the Cromwell Road on my way back from a trip to Ireland, where things were boiling up for trouble.

“How are you?” I asked. “And how’s everybody?”

“Haven’t you heard about Clare?” said Katherine.

She saw that I had a blank look, and told me the news.

“She’s fallen in love with a young doctor—or thinks she has.”

I’m bound to say I didn’t take this revelation very seriously.

“It’s just the kind of thing Clare would do! But has the young doctor fallen in love with her?”

Katherine smiled for a moment, and then was grave again.

“It looked like it when Paul found them together in the woods one night. He gave the young man a thrashing, rather too violent, I’m afraid, and Clare became hysterical. That night she went to your sister Evelyn’s house, and made a great story of Paul’s “brutality” and her life of “torture.” She refuses to go back again, and Evelyn is on her side.”

“Clare can be very pig-headed,” I said; “and Evelyn’s an idiot—a mass of sentiment.... Poor old Paul! And those two little savages.”

Katherine nodded, and her eyes filled with tears for a moment.

“Paul’s heart-broken. He cried like a baby when he came to tell me. I’m going to stay with him and take Michael with me. He hasn’t dared to tell the children yet—pretends that Clare is coming back again. Poor little Humphrey was devoted to his mother.”

“How long ago did all this happen?” I asked, and Katherine told me that Clare had been away a month, but had not seen the young doctor who was the cause of all the trouble. He had gone into a nursing-home in London.

“Paul must have hit him rather hard!” I remarked, with a touch of irony. “It’s the worst of a pacifist when he does take to physical force!”

“What a curse is passion!” said Katherine suddenly. “This silly sex stuff—like Clare’s with that man. It’s the ugly devil in life, spoiling marriage, spoiling friendship, spoiling loyalty. Look at that pretty sister of yours. A few silly talks with a good-looking man, a little emotion between them, and she breaks her vows, abandons her children, and smashes up a happy home. It’s senseless!”

“It wasn’t a happy home, I’m afraid. That was the cause of it all. Paul wasn’t altogether blameless.”

“No,” said Katherine. “It was the idea of romantic love, and lawlessness, instead of loyalty.”

“Clare believed in law,” I reminded her. “It was Paul who preached liberty. Clare was a conventionalist. That’s what makes it so strange.”

“She was full of false ideas,” said Katherine. “The sort of stuff Evelyn writes in her sentimental novels. I wish they could all be burnt! She wanted a “soul-mate,” and couldn’t put up with Paul’s grumpiness or see the splendor of his work.”

Suddenly some remembrance overwhelmed her, and a wave of colour swept her face.

“Oh, I’m intolerant, and talking foolishly! I pity Clare more than I blame her. We’re so weak, all of us. This absurd thing called love, beyond control sometimes—with some terrible power over us!”

I knew she remembered Hugh Evesham, and the spell he had put upon her once.

“I’m harking back to the need of religion,” she said, and smiled, as though I might find it funny. “We’re not strong enough alone. That’s why I’m teaching Michael to say his prayers—only he will interrupt and ask all sorts of questions that make me laugh.”

She asked me to go down and cheer up Paul for a week-end before seeing Clare, as I supposed I ought to do, and it was there, at the old farmstead in Sussex, that I spent the last days of my comradeship with Katherine before her belief in loyalty took her away for a time.