THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical

  feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of

  tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life

  another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my

  very heart.

  Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned

  back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her

  intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.

  From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.

  Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that

  this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told

  how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at

  my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where

  there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-

  making. I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a

  girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's

  daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her-wouldn't DO,"

  and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the

  world. Perhaps that is the way to live. Perhaps there is no other

  method than this effectual annihilation of half-and the most

  sympathetic and attractive half-of the human beings in the world,

  so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. Iam quite convinced

  anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into

  the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an

  invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is

  no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women are to go so far

  together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go,

  without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the

  basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the

  liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to

  love, then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept

  apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of

  lovers.

  Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into

  the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more

  urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiabledesire that

  comes to a young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of

  that unfolding. She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and

  watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the

  substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems

  instinctive in a natural-minded girl. There was even an engagement-

  amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities. I

  never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair,

  to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy. She

  struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself,

  and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became silent

  about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for

  all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and

  me than I was to know for several years to come.

  We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but

  we kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she

  wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to

  say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her-though I

  combined it with one or two other engagements-somewhere in

  February. Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make

  journeys for her.

  But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There

  was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;

  the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.

  A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously

  to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute

  of chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one

  or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.

  We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.

  C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of

  Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who

  was in a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a

  game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was

  impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration

  possible in a rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember,

  to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of

  Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the

  Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.

  "Last months at Oxford," she said.

  "And then?" I asked.

  "I'm coming to London," she said.

  "To write?"

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that

  quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to

  work with you. Why shouldn't I?"

  3

  Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.

  I seem to remembermyself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a

  handful of papers-galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose-on

  my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and

  all that it might mean to me.

  It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so

  elusive as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her

  gripped me, fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing

  filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no

  doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It made it none the

  less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was

  transitory, and bound to go out of my life again. It is no good

  trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is

  gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a

  multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich

  curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly

  weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear

  preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much

  deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.

  Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the

  train: "Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I

  can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind…

  If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I

  could have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage

  and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had

  been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation-no telling

  is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and

  passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel

  things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we

  had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always

  mattered enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as

  badly if she had be
en some crippled old lady; we would have hunted

  shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never have had

  the patience and readiness for one another we two had. I had never

  for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of

  understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She

  gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious

  effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that

  it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners

  of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to

  explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice

  heard speaking to any one-heard speaking in another room-pleased

  my ears.

  She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent

  the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of

  all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to

  London for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady

  Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she

  wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every

  one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her

  sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a

  scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the

  undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly

  the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,

  developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She

  was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but

  she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the

  management of elderly distinguished men. It was an odd experience

  to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room

  and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a

  shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and

  lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.

  For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she

  professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my

  views and sought me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY

  began to link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and

  sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's

  articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory

  scalpel. Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade. Her

  writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the

  phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little

  shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at

  Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those

  days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.

  We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or

  so, and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things

  were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being

  innocently mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a

  monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to

  have her as my pupil. Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at

  that distance for a long time-until within a year of the Handitch

  election.

  After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for

  comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less

  formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their

  cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with

  them in Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men

  who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the

  frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her

  kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck

  up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking

  to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked

  upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had

  some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of

  him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with

  her work. If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's

  writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our

  talks, or the close intimacy we had together.

  4

  Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.

  The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find

  it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed

  pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply

  that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been

  wearing down unperceived.

  And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the

  cycle of nature, like the onset of spring-a sharp brightness, an

  uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters

  with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the

  earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told

  me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all

  she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers',

  and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing

  amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately

  possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to

  happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge

  generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.

  No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same

  quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a

  remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt-and the odd things

  it seemed to open to her.

  "I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I

  suppose every woman does."

  She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."

  This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to

  these things. "Some one presently will-solve that," I said.

  "Some one will perhaps."

  I was silent.

  "Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have

  to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master… I'll be

  sorry to give them up."

  "It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he

  should be-oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts

  of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas… You

  can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."

  "I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently

  I've begun to doubt about it."

  I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and

  understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each

  other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon

  after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,

  with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had

  happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any

  declaration
. We just assumed the new footing…

  It was a day early in that year-I think in January, because there

  was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other

  people had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression

  of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very

  much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the

  Tropical House. But I also remember very vividly looking at certain

  orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not

  have been there. It is a curious thing that I do not remember we

  made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as

  though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been

  patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy between

  us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and

  wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes. We wanted to

  know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in

  the most perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession

  of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very

  little passion. But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we

  faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It was as if we had

  taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like

  people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.

  I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the

  ordinary observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous

  contrast with all that really went on between us. I suppose there I

  should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl

  succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur

  to us that there was any personal inequality between us. I knew her

  for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison

  cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her

  mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction

  wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from

  little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile,

  so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds

  we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of