THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 44

joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to

  discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.

  Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all

  the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances

  of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had

  left not a shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate

  love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with

  the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out

  for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and

  the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings

  of teachers, and all the social and religious influences that had

  been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of

  conviction. The code had failed with us altogether. We didn't for

  a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for

  all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.

  Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people,

  and particularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality

  hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They

  may render it lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There

  are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its

  prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly

  suppressions. You may, if you choose, silence the admission of this

  in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it

  working out in lives. People come up to the great moments of

  passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really

  civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be

  unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customs that

  have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous

  spirits are disposed to despise.

  Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are

  trying to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush"

  without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything

  about love and marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in

  enforced darknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient

  tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We

  affect a tremendous and cultivated shyness and delicacy about

  imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What

  did ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a great desire,

  robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of

  love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the

  disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in

  the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the

  effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit by the

  intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,

  irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We

  might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a

  sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions

  to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.

  Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive

  terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but

  neither Isabel nor I are timid people.

  We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores

  of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it

  were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing

  against it. And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love

  in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep

  everything to ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one

  persistent obstacle that mattered to us-the haunting presence of

  Margaret.

  And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people

  scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to

  ourselves. Love will out. All the rest of this story is the

  chronicle of that. Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love. It

  is just exactly the point people do not understand.

  5

  But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and

  a sudden journey to America intervened.

  "This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and Iam too

  big to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility

  of being found out! At any cost we have to stop-even at the cost

  of parting."

  "Just because we may be found out!"

  "Just because we may be found out."

  "Master, I shouldn't in the least mindbeing found out with you.

  I'm afraid-I'd be proud."

  "Wait till it happens."

  There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is

  hard to tell who urged and who resisted.

  She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY,

  and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms;

  she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life

  possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could

  not endure other people for the love of me…

  I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to

  America that puzzled all my friends.

  I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my

  strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit

  the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among

  other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the

  world.

  Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical

  my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to

  prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I

  crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with

  ungovernable sorrow. I wept-tears. It was inexpressibly queer and

  ridiculous-and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!

  New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things

  slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago-eating and drinking, I

  remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of

  desperate voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself-

  no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.

  Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that

  the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and

  everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the

  end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to

  London.

  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 seeI'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