Kitabı oku: «J. R. R. Tolkien», sayfa 5
CHAPTER V OXFORD
Already as the car bowled into Oxford he had decided that he would be happy there. This was a city that he could love and revere after the squalor and the drabness of Birmingham. Admittedly, to the eyes of a casual observer his own college, Exeter, was not the loveliest in the University. Its insipid frontage by George Gilbert Scott and its chapel, a tasteless copy of the Sainte Chapelle, were in truth no more remarkable than Barry’s mock-gothic school in Birmingham. But a few yards away was the Fellows’ Garden where the tall silver birch rose above the roof-tops and the plane and horse-chestnut stretched their branches over the wall into Brasenose Lane and Radcliffe Square. And to Ronald Tolkien it was his own college, his home, the first real home he had known since his mother’s death. At the foot of his staircase was his name painted on a board, and up the uneven wooden steps with the broad black banister were his rooms, a bedroom and a plain but handsome sitting-room looking down to the narrow Turl Street. It was perfection.
The majority of undergraduates at Oxford in 1911 were from prosperous upper-class families. Many of them were members of the aristocracy. It was for this class of young man that the University (at this time) primarily catered; hence the comparatively luxurious lifestyle, with ‘scouts’ (college servants) waiting on undergraduates in their rooms. But besides the rich and aristocratic there was quite a different group of students: the ‘poor scholars’ who if not actually poor did not come from rich families, and who could only come to the university thanks to financial aid from scholarships. The first group did not always make life pleasant for the second, and had Tolkien (as a scholar from a middle-class background) found himself at one of the more fashionable colleges, he would probably have been the victim of a good deal of snobbery. By contrast, and fortunately for him, there was no such tradition of social distinction at Exeter College.
Yet it was as well for Tolkien that among the second-year men at his college were a couple of Catholics, who sought him out and made sure that he settled in. After that, he made friends quickly, though he had to be careful about money, for he only had a tiny income, and it was not easy to live economically in a society designed for the tastes of the rich. His ‘scout’ brought breakfast to his rooms every morning, and this could be restricted to a frugal meal of toast and coffee; but there was a tradition of entertaining one’s friends to breakfast, and this demanded that something more substantial should be provided at one’s own expense. Lunch was a mere ‘commons’ of bread, cheese, and beer, again brought to his rooms by the scout; while dinner, taken formally in Hall, was not an expensive meal; but it was pleasant at dinner to accept an offer of beer or wine from one’s friends, and of course this gesture had to be returned. When the ‘battel’ or college account was presented for payment each Saturday morning it could be unpleasantly high. Then there were clothes to be bought, and a few pieces of furniture to be found for his rooms, for the college provided only the bare necessities. The cost soon mounted, and although Oxford tradesmen were accustomed to allowing almost unlimited credit they had to be paid in the end. After a year Tolkien wrote that he had ‘a good few bills unaccounted for’, and added: ‘Money matters are not very cheerful.’
He had soon thrown himself wholeheartedly into university activities. He played rugger, though he did not become a leading figure in the college team. He did not row, for that sport above all at Oxford was the preserve of public-school men, but he joined the college Essay Club and the Dialectical Society. He also took part in the Stapeldon, the college debating society; and for good measure he started his own club. It was called the Apolausticks (‘those devoted to self-indulgence’) and it was chiefly composed of freshmen like himself. There were papers, discussions, and debates, and there were also large and extravagant dinners. It was one degree more sophisticated than the teas in the school library, but it was an expression of the same instinct that had helped to create the T.C.B.S. Indeed Tolkien was at his happiest in groups of cronies where there was good talk, plenty of tobacco (he was now firmly dedicated to a pipe, with occasional excursions into expensive cigarettes), and male company.
At Oxford the company had to be male. Admittedly there were a number of women students attending lectures, but they lived in ladies’ colleges, grim enclaves on the outskirts of the city; and they had to be severely chaperoned whenever they approached a young man. In any case the men really preferred each other’s company. The majority of them were fresh from the male preserves of the public school and they gladly accepted the masculine tone of Oxford.
They also used among themselves a curious slang, which converted breakfast to brekker, lecture to lekker, the Union to the Ugger, and a sing-song and a practical joke to a sigger-sogger and a pragger-jogger. Tolkien adopted this manner of speech, and he also joined enthusiastically in the Town versus Gown ‘rags’ that were popular at the time. Here is his account of a not untypical evening’s entertainment:
‘At ten to nine we heard a distant roar of voices and knew that there was something on foot so we dashed out of College and were in the thick of the fun for two hours. We “ragged” the town and the police and the proctors all together for about an hour. Geoffrey and I “captured” a bus and drove it up to Cornmarket making various unearthly noises followed by a mad crowd of mingled varsity and “townese”. It was chockfull of undergrads before it reached the Carfax. There I addressed a few stirring words to a huge mob before descending and removing to the “maggers memugger” or the Martyr’s Memorial where I addressed the crowd again. There were no disciplinary consequences of all this!’
This kind of behaviour, noisy, brash, and boorish, was more common among the upper-class undergraduates than among the ‘poor scholars’ like Tolkien, the majority of whom avoided such pranks and devoted themselves to their studies; but Tolkien was too sociable to be left out of anything lively that was happening. Partly as a result, he was not doing much work.
He was reading Classics, and he had to go to regular lectures and tutorials, but Exeter College had no resident classical tutor in his first two terms, and by the time the post was filled (by E. A. Barber, a good scholar but a dry teacher) Tolkien had got into slack ways. By now he was bored with Latin and Greek authors and was far more excited by Germanic literature. He had no interest in lectures on Cicero and Demosthenes and was glad to escape to his rooms where he could go on working at his invented languages. Yet there was one area of the syllabus that interested him. For his special subject he had chosen Comparative Philology, and this meant that he attended classes and lectures given by the extraordinary Joseph Wright.
Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology. He had been employed in a woollen-mill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and rising again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a night-school in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition. When he was twenty-one he decided to use his savings to finance a term’s study at a German university, so he took a boat to Antwerp and walked stage by stage to Heidelberg, where he became interested in philology. So this former mill-hand studied Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and Old English, eventually taking a doctorate. Returning to England he established himself in Oxford, where he was soon appointed Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology. He could afford the lease of a small house in Norham Road, where he engaged a housekeeper. He lived with the native economy of a true Yorkshireman: he used to drink beer which he bought in a small barrel, but he thought that it went too quickly, so he arranged with Sarah the housekeeper that she should buy it and he should pay for each glass as he consumed it. He continued to work without ceasing, beginning to write a series of language primers, among which was the Gothic book that proved such a revelation to Tolkien. Most important of all, he began his English Dialect Dictionary that was eventually published in six huge volumes. He himself had never lost his Yorkshire accent, and he remained fluent in the dialect of his native village. Nightly he sat up into the small hours working. His house was semi-detached, and in the other half of the building lived Dr Neubauer, Reader in Rabbinical Literature. Neubauer’s eyes were bad and he could not work by artificial light. When Joe Wright went to bed at dawn he would knock on the wall to wake his neighbour, calling out ‘Good morning!’, and Neubauer would reply ‘Good night!’
Wright married a former pupil. Two children were born to them, but both died in childhood. Nevertheless the Wrights carried on a stoic and lively existence in a huge house built to Joe’s design in the Banbury Road. In 1912 Ronald Tolkien came to Wright as a pupil, and ever afterwards remembered ‘the vastness of Joe Wright’s dining-room table, when I sat alone at one end learning the elements of Greek philology from glinting glasses in the further gloom’. Nor was he ever likely to forget the huge Yorkshire teas given by the Wrights on Sunday afternoons, when Joe would cut gargantuan slices from a heavyweight plum cake, and Jack the Aberdeen terrier would perform his party trick of licking his lips noisily when his master pronounced the Gothic word for fig-tree, smakka-bagms.
As a teacher, Wright communicated to Tolkien his huge enthusiasm for philology, the subject that had raised him from penniless obscurity. Wright was always a demanding teacher, which was just what Tolkien needed. He had begun to feel a little superior to his fellow-classicists, with his wide-ranging knowledge of linguistics. But here was somebody who could tell him that he had a long way to go. At the same time Joe Wright encouraged him to show initiative. Hearing that Tolkien had an embryonic interest in Welsh, he advised him to follow it up – though he gave that advice in a characteristically Yorkshire manner: ‘Go in for Celtic, lad; there’s money in it.’
Tolkien followed this advice, though not exactly in the way that Joe Wright had intended. He managed to find books of medieval Welsh, and he began to read the language that had fascinated him since he saw a few words of it on coal-trucks. He was not disappointed; indeed he was confirmed in all his expectations of beauty. Beauty: that was what pleased him in Welsh; the appearance and sound of the words almost irrespective of their meaning. He once said: ‘Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is “beautiful” ‘, especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.’ Tolkien was so enthusiastic about Welsh that it is surprising that he did not visit Wales during his undergraduate days. But in a way this characterised his life. Though he studied the ancient literature of many countries he visited few of them, often through force of circumstance but perhaps partly through lack of inclination. And indeed the page of a medieval text may be more potent than the modern reality of the land that gave it birth.
During his undergraduate days Tolkien developed his childhood interest in painting and drawing and began to show some skill at it, chiefly in the sketching of landscapes. He also paid a great deal of attention to handwriting and calligraphy, and became accomplished in many styles of manuscript. This interest was a combination of his enthusiasm for words and his artist’s eye, but it also reflected his many-sided personality, for as someone who knew him during these years remarked (with only slight exaggeration): ‘He had a different style of handwriting for each of his friends.’
His first vacation from the University, at Christmas 1911, was spent in revisiting old haunts. The T.C.B.S. had survived his departure from King Edward’s, and the club was now preparing for the biggest event in its short history, a performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals. R. Q. Gilson, an enthusiast for the eighteenth century, had started it all, and as his father was headmaster there was no difficulty in obtaining permission, although a play by an English dramatist had never before been performed at the school. He and Christopher Wiseman, who were both still pupils at King Edward’s, allocated parts to their friends. A clear choice for inclusion was G. B. Smith, not yet really regarded as a member of the T.C.B.S. but already much liked by them. And who was to take the crucial comic role of Mrs Malaprop? Who but their very own John Ronald. So Tolkien, at the end of his first term at Oxford, travelled to Birmingham and joined in the final rehearsals.
There was to be only one performance. As it happened the dress rehearsal finished long before curtain-up time, and, rather than hang about, the T.C.B.S. decided to go and have tea at Barrow’s (the department store that had added the ‘B’ to T.C.B.S.’) with coats over their costumes. The ‘Railway Carriage’ was empty when they arrived, so they removed the coats. The astonishment of the waitress and the shop-assistants remained in their memories for the rest of their lives.
Then came the performance. The school magazine reported: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Mrs Malaprop was a real creation, excellent in every way and not least so in make-up. R. Q. Gilson as Captain Absolute was a most attractive hero, bearing the burden of what is a very heavy part with admirable spirit and skill; and as the choleric old Sir Anthony, C. L. Wiseman was extremely effective. Among the minor characters, G. B. Smith’s rendering of the difficult and thankless part of Faulk-land was worthy of high praise.’ The occasion cemented Tolkien’s friendship with G. B. Smith. The friendship was to be lasting and productive, and Smith was henceforth regarded as a full member of the T.C.B.S.
In the summer vacation of 1912 Tolkien went into camp for a fortnight with King Edward’s Horse, a territorial cavalry regiment in which he had recently enrolled. He enjoyed the experience of galloping across the Kentish plains – the camp was near Folkestone – but it was a wet and windy fortnight and the tents were often blown down in the night. This taste of life on horseback and under canvas was enough for him, and he resigned from the regiment after a few months. When the camp had concluded he went on a walking holiday in Berkshire, sketching the villages and climbing the downs. And then, all too soon, his first year as an undergraduate was over.
He had done very little work and he was getting into lazy habits. At Birmingham he had attended mass several times a week, but without Father Francis to watch over him he found it all too easy to stay in bed in the mornings, particularly after sitting up late talking to friends and smoking in front of the fire. He recorded sadly that his first terms at Oxford had passed ‘with practically none or very little practice of religion’. He tried to mend his ways, and he kept a diary for Edith in which he recorded all his misdemeanours and failings. But though she was a shining ideal to him – had they not vowed their love to each other, and did this not commit them to each other? – he was still forbidden to write to her or see her until he was twenty-one, and this would not happen for many months. In the meantime it was easy to while away the terms in expensive dinners, late-night conversations, and hours spent poring over medieval Welsh and invented languages.
At about this time he discovered Finnish. He had hoped to acquire some knowledge of the language ever since he had read the Kalevala in an English translation, and now in Exeter College library he found a Finnish grammar. With its aid he began an assault on the original language of the poems. He said afterwards: ‘It was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.’
He never learned Finnish well enough to do more than work through part of the original Kalevala, but the effect on his language-inventing was fundamental and remarkable. He abandoned neo-Gothic and began to create a private language that was heavily influenced by Finnish. This was the language that would eventually emerge in his stories as ‘Quenya’ or High-elven. That would not happen for many years; yet already a seed of what was to come was germinating in his mind. He read a paper on the Kalevala to a college society, and in it began to talk about the importance of the type of mythology found in the Finnish poems. ‘These mythological ballads,’ he said, ‘are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people.’ And he added: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ An exciting notion; and perhaps he was already thinking of creating that mythology for England himself.
He spent Christmas 1912 with his Incledon relatives at Barnt Green near Birmingham. As usual in that family, the season was enlivened with theatricals, and this time Ronald himself wrote the play that they performed. It was called ‘The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette’. Later in life he professed to despise drama, but on this occasion he was not only the author but the leading actor, playing ‘Professor Joseph Quilter, M.A., B.A., A.B.C., alias world-wide detective Sexton Q. Blake-Holmes, the Bloodhound’, who is searching for a lost heiress named Gwendoline Goodchild. She meanwhile has fallen in love with a penniless student whom she meets while they are living in the same lodging-house, and she has to remain undiscovered by her father until her twenty-first birthday in two days’ time, after which she will be free to marry.
This piece of family nonsense was even more topical than the Incledons realised. Not only was Ronald due to celebrate his own twenty-first a few days after the performance, but he also intended to reunite himself with Edith Bratt, for whom he had waited for nearly three years, and who he was quite certain had waited for him. As the clock struck midnight and marked the beginning of 3 January 1913, his coming of age, he sat up in bed and wrote a letter to her, renewing his declaration of love and asking her: ‘How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the world?’
But when Edith wrote in reply, it was to say that she was engaged to be married to George Field, brother of her school-friend Molly.
CHAPTER VI REUNION
He could have decided to forget all about her. His friends did not know of her existence and his aunts and uncles and cousins had never been told about her. Only Father Francis knew, and even though he was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian he had no wish that the affair with Edith should begin again. So Ronald could have torn up Edith’s letter and left her to marry George Field.
Yet there had been declarations and promises in the Duchess Road days that Ronald felt could not be lightly broken. Moreover Edith had been his ideal in the last three years, his inspiration and his hope for the future. He had nurtured and cultivated his love for her so that it grew in secret, even though it had to be fed solely on his memories of their adolescent romance and a few photographs of her as a child. He now perceived only one course of action: he must go to Cheltenham, beseech her to give up George Field, and ask her to marry him.
In truth he knew that she would say yes. She had hinted as much in her letter, explaining that she had only become engaged to George because he had been kind to her, and she felt ‘on the shelf’, and there was no other young man that she knew, and she had given up believing that Ronald would want to see her again after the three years had passed. ‘I began to doubt you, Ronald,’ she told him in her letter, ‘and to think you would cease to care for me.’ But now that he had written to renew his vow of love, she indicated that everything had changed.
So on Wednesday 8 January 1913 he travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. They walked out into the country and sat under a railway viaduct where they talked. By the end of the day Edith had declared that she would give up George Field and marry Ronald Tolkien.
She wrote to George and sent him back his ring; and he, poor young man, was dreadfully upset at first and his family was insulted and angry. But eventually the matter ceased to be alluded to, and they all became friends once more. Edith and Ronald did not announce their engagement, being a little nervous of family reaction and wanting to wait until Ronald’s prospects were more certain. But Ronald returned to his new term at Oxford in ‘a bursting happiness’.
One of his first actions on arriving was to write to Father Francis explaining that he and Edith intended to be married. He was very nervous about this, but when Father Francis’s reply came it was calm and resigned if far from enthusiastic. This was as well, for although the priest was no longer Ronald’s legal guardian, he still gave him much-needed financial support; so it was essential that he tolerate the engagement.
Now that Ronald had been reunited with Edith he had to turn his full attention to Honour Moderations,1 the first of the two examinations that would earn him his degree in Classics. He tried to cram into six weeks the work that he should have done during the previous four terms, but it was not easy to break the habit of sitting up late talking to friends, and he found it difficult to get up in the morning – though like many others before him he blamed this on the damp Oxford climate rather than on his own late hours. When Honour Moderations began at the end of February he was still poorly prepared for many papers. On the whole he was relieved when he learnt that he had at least managed to achieve a Second Class.
But he knew that he ought to have done better. A first in ‘Mods’ is not easy to achieve, but it is within the range of an able undergraduate who devotes himself to his work. Certainly it is expected of someone who intends to follow an academic career, and Tolkien already had such a career in mind. However he had achieved a ‘pure alpha’, a practically faultless paper, in his special subject, Comparative Philology. This was partly a tribute to the excellence of Joe Wright’s teaching, but it was also an indication that Tolkien’s greatest talents lay in this field; and Exeter College took note. The college was disappointed that as one of its award-holders he had missed a First, but suggested that if he had earned an alpha in philology he ought to become a philologist. Dr Farnell who was Rector of Exeter (the head of the college) knew that he was interested in Old and Middle English and other Germanic languages, so would it not be sensible if he changed to the English School? Tolkien agreed, and at the beginning of the summer term of 1913 he abandoned Classics and began to read English.
The Honour School of English Language and Literature was still young by Oxford standards, and it was split down the middle. On one side were the philologists and medievalists who considered that any literature later than Chaucer was not sufficiently challenging to form the basis of a degree-course syllabus. On the other were the enthusiasts for ‘modern’ literature (by which they meant literature from Chaucer to the nineteenth century) who thought that the study of philology and Old and Middle English was ‘word-mongering and pedantry’. In some ways it was mistaken to try and squeeze both factions of opinion into the same Honours School. The result was that undergraduates who chose to specialise in ‘Language’ (that is, Old and Middle English and philology) were nevertheless compelled to read a good deal of modern literature, while those who wanted to read ‘Literature’ (the modern course) were also obliged to study texts in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and acquaint themselves with a certain amount of philology. Both courses were compromises, and neither side was entirely satisfied.
There was no question as to which side of the school would claim Tolkien. He would specialise in linguistic studies, and it was arranged that his tutor would be Kenneth Sisam, a young New Zealander who was acting as an assistant to A. S. Napier, the Professor of English Language and Literature. After meeting Sisam and surveying the syllabus Tolkien was ‘seized with panic, because I cannot see how it is going to provide me with honest labour for two years and a term’. It all seemed too easy and familiar: he was already well acquainted with many of the texts he would have to read, and he even knew a certain amount of Old Norse, which he was going to do as a special subject (under the Icelandic expert W. A. Craigie). Moreover Sisam did not at first appear to be an inspiring tutor. He was a quiet-spoken man only four years older than Tolkien, certainly lacking the commanding presence of Joe Wright. But he was an accurate and painstaking scholar, and Tolkien soon came to respect and like him. As to the work, Tolkien spent more time at his desk than he had while studying Classics. It was not as easy as he had expected, for the standard of the Oxford English School was very high; but he was soon firmly in command of the syllabus and was writing lengthy and intricate essays on ‘Problems of the dissemination of phonetic change’, ‘The lengthening of vowels in Old and Middle English times’, and ‘The Anglo-Norman element in English’. He was particularly interested in extending his knowledge of the West Midland dialect in Middle English because of its associations with his childhood and ancestry; and he was reading a number of Old English works that he had not previously encountered.
Among these was the Crist of Cynewulf, a group of Anglo-Saxon religious poems. Two lines from it struck him forcibly:
Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended.
‘Hail Earendel brightest of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men.’ Earendel is glossed by the Anglo-Saxon dictionary as ‘a shining light, ray’, but here it clearly has some special meaning. Tolkien himself interpreted it as referring to John the Baptist, but he believed that ‘Earendel’ had originally been the name for the star presaging the dawn, that is, Venus. He was strangely moved by its appearance in the Cynewulf lines. ‘I felt a curious thrill,’ he wrote long afterwards, ‘as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.’
He found even more to excite his imagination when he studied his special subject. Old Norse (or Old Icelandic: the names are interchangeable) is the language that was brought to Iceland by the Norwegians who fled from their native land in the ninth century. Tolkien was already moderately acquainted with Norse, and he now made a thorough study of its literature. He read the sagas and the Prose or Younger Edda. He also studied the Poetic or Elder Edda; and so it was that he came upon the ancient storehouse of Icelandic myth and legend.
‘The Elder Edda’ is the name given to a collection of poems, some of them incomplete or textually corrupt, whose principal manuscript dates from the thirteenth century. But many of the poems themselves are more ancient, perhaps originating at a period earlier than the settlement of Iceland. Some are heroic, describing the world of men, while others are mythological, treating of the deeds of gods. Among the mythological lays in the Elder Edda none is more remarkable than the Völuspa or Prophecy of the Seeress, which tells the story of the cosmos from its creation, and foretells its doom. The most remarkable of all Germanic mythological poems, it dates from the very end of Norse heathendom, when Christianity was taking the place of the old gods; yet it imparts a sense of living myth, a feeling of awe and mystery, in its representation of a pagan cosmos. It had a profound appeal to Tolkien’s imagination.
In the months following their reunion, the question of Edith’s religion caused some concern to her and Ronald. If their marriage was to be blessed by his church she would have to become a Catholic. She was in theory quite happy to do this – indeed she believed that her family had long ago been Catholic. But it was not a simple matter. She was a member of the Church of England, and a very active member. During her separation from Ronald a large proportion of her life had centred on the parish church at her Cheltenham home, and she had made herself useful in church affairs. She had in consequence acquired some status in the parish; and it was a smart parish, typical of the elegant town. Now Ronald wanted her to renounce all this and to go to a church where nobody knew her; and looking at it from that point of view she did not relish the prospect. She was also afraid that her ‘Uncle’ Jessop in whose house she lived might be very angry, for like many others of his age and class he was strongly anti-Catholic. Would he allow her to go living under his roof until her marriage if she ‘poped’? It was an awkward situation, and she suggested to Ronald that the matter might be delayed until they were officially engaged or the time of their marriage was near. But he would not hear of this. He wanted her to act quicky. He despised the Church of England, calling it ‘a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs’. And if Edith were persecuted for her decision to become a Catholic, why then, that was precisely what had happened to his own dear mother, and she had endured it. ‘I do so dearly believe,’ he wrote to Edith, ‘that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.’ (He himself was once more attending mass regularly and had perhaps chosen to forget his lapses of the previous year.) Clearly the question of Edith becoming a Catholic was an emotional matter to him; perhaps it was also in part, though he would not have admitted it, a test of her love after her unfaithfulness in becoming engaged to George Field.
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