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The Rise of Tono-BungayMarion IVI
The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable.
My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.
I won`t pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a young and fairly vigorous male; all my appetite for love had been roused and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and my marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of all else, and it had failed me. It had faded when I had hoped it would grow brighter. I despaired of life and was embittered. And things happened as I am telling. I don`t draw any moral at all in the matter, and as for social remedies, I leave them to the social reformer. I`ve got to a time of life when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about realities.
To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a room in which the typists worked. They were the correspondence typists; our books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we had had the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess, always in a faintly cloudily-emotional way aware of that collection of for the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of the girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon my attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight little back, a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with a smiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair very neatly done--and as a side-long glance; presently as a quickly turned face that looked for me.
My eye would seek her as I went through on business things--I dictated some letters to her and so discovered she had pretty, soft-looking hands with pink nails. Once or twice, meeting casually, we looked one another for the flash of a second in the eyes.
That was all. But it was enough in the mysterious free-masonry of sex to say essential things. We had a secret between us.
One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was alone, sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I entered, and then became very still, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table. I walked right by her to the door of the inner office, stopped, came back and stood over her.
We neither of us spoke for quite a perceptible time. I was trembling violently.
"Is that one of the new typewriters?" I asked at last for the sake of speaking.
She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her eyes alight, and I bent down and kissed her lips. She leant back to put an arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me again and again. I lifted her and held her in my arms. She gave a little smothered cry to feel herself so held.
Never before had I known the quality of passionate kisses.
Somebody became audible in the shop outside.
We started back from one another with flushed faces and bright and burning eyes.
"We can`t talk here," I whispered with a confident intimacy. "Where do you go at five?"
"Along the Embankment to Charing Cross," she answered as intimately. "None of the others go that way..."
"About half-past five?"
"Yes, half-past five..."
The door from the shop opened, and she sat down very quickly.
"I`m glad," I said in a commonplace voice, "that these new typewriters are all right."
I went into the inner office and routed out the paysheet in order to find her name--Effie Rink. And did no work at all that afternoon. I fretted about that dingy little den like a beast in a cage.
When presently I went out, Effie was working with an extraordinary appearance of calm--and there was no look for me at all....
We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when there was none to overhear; we came to an understanding. It was strangely unlike any dream of romance I had ever entertained.
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