The complete works, p.309
The Complete Works, page 309
Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength to refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind--the haunting perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour, discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the thought. I couldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in short, stand it.
I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have kept upon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you have never wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.
But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder. Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, I can't tell--I can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing LARK--it's the only word--it seemed to us. The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear justification, eludes statement.
What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties evaded and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say that one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throb and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand?
Robbed of encompassing love, these things are of no more value than the taste of good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing of music,--just sensuality and no more. No one can tell love--we can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences. Given love--given mutuality, and one has effected a supreme synthesis and come to a new level of life--but only those who know can know. This business has brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever expected to bear, but even now I will not say that I regret that wilful home-coming altogether. We loved--to the uttermost. Neither of us could have loved any one else as we did and do love one another. It was ours, that beauty; it existed only between us when we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save ourselves.
My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within me. It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet except Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in upon Britten and stood in the doorway.
"GOD!" he said at the sight of me.
"I'm back," I said.
He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his.
Silently I defied him to speak his mind.
"Where did you turn back?" he said at last.
6
I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive lies to Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her from Chicago and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on the spot in England for the new session, and that I was coming back--presently. I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made a calculated prevarication when I announced my presence in London.
I telephoned before I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came back to Radnor Square I had been at home a day.
I remember her return so well.
My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from my mind much of our long estrangement. Something, too, had changed in her. I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it plainly. I came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the turmoil of her arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened gladness. It was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar dark furs that suited her extremely and reinforced the delicate flush of her sweet face. She held out both her hands to me, and drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed me.
"So glad you are back, dear," she said. "Oh! so very glad you are back."
I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness.
I think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.
"I never knew what it was to be away from you," she said.
I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement.
She put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
"These are jolly furs," I said.
"I got them for you."
The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage cab.
"Tell me all about America," said Margaret. "I feel as though you'd been away six year's."
We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.
She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I had expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this sudden abolition of our distances.
"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes scrutinising me. "Why did you come back?"
I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat listening.
"But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?"
"I wanted to come back. I was restless."
"Restlessness," she said, and thought. "You were restless in Venice. You said it was restlessness took you to America."
Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea things, and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the teapot. Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage with expressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table tremble slightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness possessed me. What might she not know or guess?
She spoke at last with an effort. "I wish you were in Parliament again," she said. "Life doesn't give you events enough."
"If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative side."
"I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful.
"Lately," she began, and paused. "Lately I've been reading--you."
I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I waited.
"I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I didn't know. I think perhaps I was rather stupid." Her eyes were suddenly shining with tears. "You didn't give me much chance to understand."
She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I want to begin over again!"
I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. "My dear!" I said.
"I want to begin over again."
I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and kissed it.
"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with her arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my face. I felt the most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thought of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence between us. . . .
"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell me plainly what you mean by this."
I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with an odd effect of defending myself. "Have you been reading that old book of mine?" I asked.
"That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down to Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't understand--what you were teaching."
There was a little pause.
"It all seems so plain to me now," she said, "and so true."
I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in the middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. "I'm tremendously glad, Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse," I began. I launched out into a rather trite and windy exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on my words, a deliberate and invincible convert.
"Yes," she said, "yes." . . .
I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the lives of all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business to admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on talking. And I was now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications, restatements, and confirmations. . . .
Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my political projects to her. "I have been foolish," she said. "I want to help."
And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with it, and put it down on the table and turned to go.
"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly about my neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them very gently, and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her hands.
"Good-night," I said. There came a little pause. "Good-night, Margaret," I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind of sham preoccupation to the door.
I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me.
If I had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to me. . . .
At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
7
The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.
We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world about us! Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end of time. They will continue to believe out of existence every consideration that separates them until they have come together.
Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.
I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world.
The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have done"--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little either of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians--provocative guardians. . . . And when at last there came a claim against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the full tide of passionate intimacy.
I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return. She had suddenly presented herself to me like something dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me there was such a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.
I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did.
Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."
Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever would be done. We tried to sustain that. . . .
For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husband and wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case. How could I? The time for that had gone. . . .
Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them, hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.
Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed. Together in our secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch.
Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to this or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.
It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable things together. We had achieved--I give the ugly phrase that expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind--"illicit intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our style. But where were we to end? . . .
Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the glow of our cell blinded us. . . . I wonder what might have happened if at that time we had given it up. . . . We propounded it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity. . . .
Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful. With imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that realisation is inevitable. We hadn't thought of that before--it isn't natural to think of that before. We hadn't known. There is no literature in English dealing with such things.
There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first bright perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid and luminous cell.
8
The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.
For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.
We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.
