The complete works, p.315
The Complete Works, page 315
So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaret heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write my note to Isabel. "Give me a word--the world aches without you,"
was all I scrawled, though I fully meant that she should come to me.
I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was with the Balfes--she was to have been married from the Balfes--and I sent my letter there. And I went out into the silent square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morning I should never post it at all.
3
I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting.
(Of all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the bridge opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self pity, and eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the ill-written scrawl in which she had replied had been full of the suggestion of her own weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows were altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something had happened to her that I did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She came towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so bravely; her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn. All my life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters or children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate appeal to me, and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my life!--I felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here was something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, a new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed fountain was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I should protect her. I trembled as I came near her, and could scarcely speak to her for the emotion that filled me. . . .
"I had your letter," I said.
"I had yours."
"Where can we talk?"
I remember my lame sentences. "We'll have a boat. That's best here."
I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree.
The square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs, I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from the pathway and the scrutiny of passers-by. And there we talked.
"I had to write to you," I said.
"I had to come."
"When are you to be married?"
"Thursday week."
"Well?" I said. "But--can we?"
She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open.
"What do you mean?" she said at last in a whisper.
"Can we stand it? After all?"
I looked at her white face. "Can you?" I said.
She whispered. "Your career?"
Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as a child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep. . . .
"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now. I don't care. Damn the whole system of things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I want to take care of you, Isabel! and have you with me."
"I can't stand it," she blubbered.
"You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you. . . . I thought indeed it was best for you. I thought even you wanted it like that."
"Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?"
"No," I said, "you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've thought of that; I've got to shelter you."
"And I want you," I went on. "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand life without you."
She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and looked at me steadfastly for a moment. "I was going to kill myself," she whispered. "I was going to kill myself quietly--somehow. I meant to wait a bit and have an accident. I thought--you didn't understand. You were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ."
"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said. "We've gone too far together."
"Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes.
"The horror of it," she whispered. "The horror of being handed over. It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do.
He tries to be kind to me. . . . I didn't know. I felt adventurous before. . . . It makes me feel like all the women in the world who have ever been owned and subdued. . . . It's not that he isn't the best of men, it's because I'm a part of you. . . . I can't go through with it. If I go through with it, I shall be left--robbed of pride--outraged--a woman beaten. . . ."
"I know," I said, "I know."
"I want to live alone. . . . I don't care for anything now but just escape. If you can help me. . . ."
"I must take you away. There's nothing for us but to go away together."
"But your work," she said; "your career! Margaret! Our promises!"
"We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of us. I don't know which. Our flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's too late to save those other things! They have to go. You can't make terms with defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most.
But it's you. And I need you. I didn't think of that either. I haven't a doubt left in the world now. We've got to leave everything rather than leave each other. I'm sure of it. Now we have gone so far. We've got to go right down to earth and begin again. . . . Dear, I WANT disgrace with you. . . ."
So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded cushions of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been so valiant and careless a girl. "I don't care," I said. "I don't care for anything, if I can save you out of the wreckage we have made together."
4
The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get as much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left London with Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office.
Upstairs I found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, methodically reading the title of each and sometimes the first half-dozen lines, and either dropping them in a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, or putting them aside for consideration. I interrupted him, squatted on the window-sill of the open window, and sketched out my ideas for the session.
"You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of mine which reached out ahead.
"I like to see things prepared," I answered.
"Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
I was silent while he read.
"You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said abruptly.
"Well!" I said, amazed.
"I know," he said, and lost his breath. "Not my business. Only--"
It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
"It's not playing the game," he said.
"What do you know?"
"Everything that matters."
"Some games," I said, "are too hard to play."
There came a pause between us.
"I didn't know you were watching all this," I said.
"Yes," he answered, after a pause, "I've watched."
"Sorry--sorry you don't approve."
"It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington."
I did not answer.
"You're going away then?"
"Yes."
"Soon?"
"Right away."
"There's vour wife."
"I know."
"Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked him out and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of course--it's nothing to you. Honour--"
"I know."
"Common decency."
I nodded.
"All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most. . . .
It's come to be a big thing, Remington."
"That will go on."
"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it. No one. . . .
I'm not sure it will go on."
"Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?"
He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America. You were alight with it." Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment.
"But I thought you would stick to your bargain."
"It's not so much choice as you think," I said.
"There's always a choice."
"No," I said.
He scrutinised my face.
"I can't live without her--I can't work. She's all mixed up with this--and everything. And besides, there's things you can't understand. There's feelings you've never felt. . . . You don't understand how much we've been to one another."
Britten frowned and thought.
"Some things one's GOT to do," he threw out.
"Some things one can't do."
"These infernal institutions--"
"Some one must begin," I said.
He shook his head. "Not YOU," he said. "No!"
He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night too. It matters to me. It matters immensely to me. In a way--it's a thing one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you. I'm the sort of man who leads a narrow life. . . . But you've been something fine and good for me, since that time, do you remember?
when we talked about Mecca together."
I nodded.
"Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow.
I know things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them. .
. . Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now like a man who is hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It was wrong for you two people ever to be lovers."
He paused.
"It gripped us hard," I said.
"Yes!--but in your position! And hers! It was vile!"
"You've not been tempted."
"How do you know? Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood the consequences and thought of other people. You could have ended it at the first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered again. You kept on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You didn't keep it. You were careless. You made things worse. This engagement and this publicity!--Damn it, Remington!"
"I know," I said, with smarting eyes. "Damn it ! with all my heart!
It came of trying to patch. . . . You CAN'T patch."
"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two ought to stand these last consequences--and part. You ought to part. Other people have to stand things! Other people have to part. You ought to. You say--what do you say? It's loss of so much life to lose each other. So is losing a hand or a leg. But it's what you've incurred. Amputate. Take your punishment--After all, you chose it."
"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.
"Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full of justifiable damns. But you two did choose it. You ought to stick to your undertaking."
I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. "My dear Britten!" I cried. "Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose I don't go! Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going to be much to ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and over again from the beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came back from America--I grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend this way or that and never change. You talk as though Isabel was a cat one could give to any kind of owner. . . . We two are things that change and grow and alter all the time. We're--so interwoven that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples. . . .
You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us.
You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you don't know anything."
Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered to a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
There was a long pause.
"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate them. I saw her yesterday. . . . She's--ill. . . . I'd take her now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."
"Torture?"
I thought. "Yes."
"For her?"
"There isn't," I said.
"If there was?"
I made no answer.
"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to stand against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your lives?"
"No end of things."
"Nothing."
"I don't believe you are right," I said. "I believe we can save something--"
Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,"
he said.
His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man has a right to take his hand from the plough!"
He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended off for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down for a year, say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, as friends. Saved! You KNOW it."
I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And does it matter if we could?"
I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not been able to find for myself alone.
"I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this scandal."
He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I mean it--until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have picked man after man out of English public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to be penitent--"
Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. " I lay in bed last night and went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful things in life--like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we were mumbled at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean, was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and grime!"
