ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED

1

The fine weather ended.  Early October had been warm, full of golden light, with clear, still evenings.  Later the wind blustered, and it was cold.  Sometimes Jane felt sick; that was the baby.  But not often.  She went about all right, and she was writing—­journalism and a novel.  She thought she would perhaps send it in for a prize novel competition in the spring, only she felt no certainty of pleasing the three judges, all so very dissimilar.  Jane’s work was a novel about a girl at school and college and thereafter.  Perhaps it would be the first of a trilogy; perhaps it would not.  The important thing was that it should be well reviewed.  How did one work that?  You could never tell.  Some things were well reviewed, others weren’t.  Partly luck it was, thought Jane.  Novels were better treated usually than they deserved.  Verse about as well as it deserved, which, however, wasn’t, as a rule, saying very much.  Some kinds of book were unkindly used—­anthologies of contemporary verse, for instance.  Someone would unselfishly go to the trouble of collecting some of the recent poetical output which he or she personally preferred and binding it up in a pleasant portable volume, and you would think all that readers had to do was to read what they liked in it, if anything, and leave out the rest and be grateful.  Instead, it would be slated by reviewers, and compared to the Royal Academy, and to a literary signpost pointing the wrong way, and other opprobrious things; as if an anthology could point to anything but the taste of the compiler, which of course could not be expected to agree with any one else’s; tastes never do.  The thing was, thought Jane, to hit the public taste with the right thing at the right moment.  Another thing was to do better than Johnny.  That should be possible, because Jane was better than Johnny; had always been.  Only there was this baby, which made her feel ill before it came, and would need care and attention afterwards.  It wasn’t fair.  If Johnny married and had a baby it wouldn’t get in his way, only in its mamma’s.  It was a handicap, like your frock (however short it was) when you were climbing.  You had got round that by taking it off and climbing in knickerbockers, but you couldn’t get round a baby.  And Jane wanted the baby too.

‘I suppose I want everything,’ said Jane.

Johnny wanted everything too.  He got a lot.  He got love.  He was polygamous by nature, and usually had more than one girl on hand.  That autumn he had two.  One was Nancy Sharpe, the violinist.  They were always about together.  People who didn’t know either of them well, thought they would get engaged.  But neither of them wanted that.  The other girl was a different kind:  the lovely, painted, music-hall kind you don’t meet.  No one thought Johnny would marry her, of course.  They merely passed the time for one another.