The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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СКАЧАТЬ her? My jealousy of Jack vanished: I was content that he should be your composer if I might be your friend. Mary’s attachment to him now became the source of my greatest happiness. His music and your playing were the attractions on which all the concerts relied. Jack went to these concerts: Mary went with Jack: I followed Mary. We always had an opportunity of speaking to you, thanks to my rival. It was he who encouraged Mary to call on you. It is to him that I owe my freedom from any serious obligation in respect of my long engagement; and hence it is through him also that I dare to come here and beg you to be my wife. Aurélie: I passed the whole of yesterday questioning myself as to the true story of my engagement, in Order that I might confess it to you with the most exact fidelity; and I believe I have told you the truth; but I could devise no speech that can convey to you what I feel towards you. Love does not describe it, it is something new — something extraordinary. There is a new sense — a new force, born in me. There are no words for it in any language:I could not tell you in my own. It—”

      “I understand you very well. Your engagement with Miss S-Sutherland — she always pronounced this name with difficulty— “is not yet broken off?”

      “Not explicitly. But if you need—”

      “Hear me, Monsieur Herbert I will not come between her and her lover. But if you can affirm on your honor as an English gentleman that she no longer loves you, go and obtain an assurance from her that it is so.”

      “And then?”

      “And then — Come back to me; and we shall see. But I do not think she will release you.”

      “She will. Would I have spoken to you if I had any doubts left? For, if she holds me to my word, I am, as you say, an English gentleman, and must keep it. But she will not.”

      “You will nevertheless go to her, and renew your offer.”

      “Do you mean my offer to you — or to her?”

      “My God! he does not understand! Listen to me, Monsieur Herbert.” Here Aurélie again resorted to the English tongue. “You must go to her and say, ‘Marie: I come to fulfill my engagement.’ If she reply, ‘No, Monsieur Adrian, I no longer wish it,’ then — then, as I have said, we shall see. But if she say ‘yes,’ then you must never any more come back.”

      “But—”

      “No, no, no,” murmured Aurélie, turning away her head. “It must be exactly as I have said.”

      “I will undertake to learn her true mind, Aurélie, and to abide by it. That I promise. But were I to follow your instructions literally, she too would hold herself bound by her word, and would say ‘yes,’ in spite of her heart. We should sacrifice each other and ourselves to a false sense of honor.” Aurélie twisted a button of her chair, and shook her head, unconvinced. “Aurélie,” he added gravely: “are you anxious to see her accept me? If so, it would be kinder to tell me so at once. Would you be so cruel as to involve me in an unhappy marriage merely to escape the unpleasantness of uttering a downright refusal?”

      “Ah” she said, raising her head again, but still not looking at him, “I will not answer you. You seek to entrap me — you ask too much.” Then, after a pause, “Have I not told you that if she releases you, you may return here?”

      “And I may infer from that — ?”

      She clasped hands with a gesture of despair. “And they say these Englishmen think much of themselves! You will not believe it possible that a woman should care for you!” He hesitated even yet, until she made a sudden movement towards the door, when he seized her hand and kissed it. She drew it away quickly, checked him easily by begging him to excuse her, bowed, and left the room.

      He went out elated, and had walked as far as Portland Place before he began to consider what he should say for himself at Cavendish Square, where Mary was staying with Mrs Phipson. At Fitzroy Square he had been helped by the necessity of speaking French, in which language he found it natural and easy to say many things which in English would have sounded extravagant to him. He had kissed Aurélie’s hand, as it were, in French. To kiss Mary’s hand would, he felt, be a ridiculous ceremony, unworthy of a civilized Englishman. A proposal to jilt her, which was the substance of his business with her now, was not easy to frame acceptably in any language.

      When he reached the house he found her with her hat on and a workbag in her hand.

      “I am waiting” for Miss Cairns, she said. “She is coming with me on an expedition. Guess what it is.”

      “I cannot. I did not know that Miss Cairns was in town.”

      “We have decided that the condition of Mr. Jack’s wardrobe is no longer tolerable. He is away at Birmingham today; and we are going to make a descent on his lodgings with a store of buttons and darning cotton, and a bottle of benzine. We shall make his garments respectable, and he will be none the wiser. Now, Adrian, do not look serious. You are worse than an old woman on questions of propriety.”

      “It is a matter of taste,” said Herbert, shrugging his shoulders. “Is your expedition too important to be postponed for half an hour? I want to speak to you rather particularly.”

      “If you wish,” said Mary slowly, her face lengthening a little. She was in the humor to sally out and play a prank on Jack, not to sit down and be serious with Herbert.

      “It is possible,” he said, noticing this with some mortification, though it strung him up a little, too, “that when you have heard what I have to say, you will go on your expedition with a lighter heart. Nevertheless, I am sorry to detain you.”

      “You need not apologize,” she said, irritated. “I am quite willing to wait, Adrian. What is the matter?”

      “Are you quite sure we shall not be disturbed here, even by Miss Cairns?”

      “If it is so particular as that, we had better go out into the Square. I cannot very well barricade myself in Mrs Phipson’ drawing room. There is hardly anybody in the Square at this hour.”

      “Very well,” said Herbert, trying to repress a sensation of annoyance which he also began to experience. They left the house together in silence, opened the gate of the circular enclosure which occupies the centre of Cavendish Square, and found it deserted except for themselves and a few children. Mary walked beside him with knitted brows, waiting for him to begin.

      “Mary: if I were asking you now for the first time the question I put to you that day when we rowed on the Serpentine, would you give me the same answer?”

      She stopped, bewildered by this unexpected challenge.

      “If you had not put that question before today, would you put it at all?” she said, walking on again.

      “For Heaven’s sake,” he said, angry at at being being parried, “do not let us begin to argue. I did not mean to reproach you,”

      Mary thought it better not to reply. Her temper was so far under control that she could suppress the bitter speeches which suggested themselves to her, but she could not think of any soft answers, and so she had either to retort or be silent.

      “I have noticed — or at least I fancy so” — he said quietly, after a pause, “that our engagement has not been so pleasant a topic as it once was.”

      “I am perfectly ready to fulfill it,” said Mary steadfastly.

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