paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-
haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in
broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first
inadequate to understand…
I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the
meaning came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and
she was telling me-just as one tells something too strange for
comment or emotion-how her father had been shot and her sister
outraged and murdered before her eyes.
It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you
know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite
brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,
with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful
adventure fading out of my mind.
"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten
and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a
detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of
what I was striving to say.
8
I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I
passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier
encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the
subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of
interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping
into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this
memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what
led to them and joined them together. And they are all mixed up
with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits
of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered
misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for Margaret
were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.
It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same
time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds
streams of thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same
time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person
quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to
level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had
no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret
was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to
certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to
matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of
vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from
her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive;
she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy,
confirmatory action.
I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I
seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I
would state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."
I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her
blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."
I admired her appearance tremendously but-I can only express it by
saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always
delectably done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears,
and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue
velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light,
the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful. And it was
clear to me that I made her happy.
My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling
at last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed
She stood in my mind for goodness-and for things from which it
seemed to me my hold was slipping.
She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition
in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the
career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.
All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather
ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a
shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my
darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I could understand clearly
that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political
thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all
the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.
Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen
in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl
haunted me persistently. I would seemyself again and again sitting
amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while
her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended
meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this
was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any
permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous
degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled
by any ordered will.
"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I
ought to have thought!"…
How did I get to it?"… I would ransack the phases of my
development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the
last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to
find some disorganising error…
I was also involved at that time-I find it hard to place these
things in the exact order of their dates because they were so
disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life-in an
intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated
intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her
husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we
quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and
jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of
our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable
interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,
except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us
back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and
unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality
of work dela
yed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions
against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in
illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent
irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine
and beautiful into a net-into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,
this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had
made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of
our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
bodily love and wasted them…
It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I
had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the
Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt
that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a
harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not
doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its
nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had
gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of
false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt
to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of
profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated with
moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I
was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were
times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.
Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three
and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but
myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse
intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied
five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that
might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those
incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was
losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in
life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-
mastering me and all my will to rule and make… And the
strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!
Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
like scars inflamed…
I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,
poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE
angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!
I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted
a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see
her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental
vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the
Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into
relief and made a grace of every weakness.
Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental
quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging
the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are
times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground
she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency
at each extreme. But in neither phase could I find it easy to make
love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I
talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little
puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and
in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make
confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest
outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
9
I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and
with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs.
Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite
passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished.
It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret
absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils
from its dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and
qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.
She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or
perish.
I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in
passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying
with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett
Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down
to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept waiting for some
minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory
opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white
cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese
thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall. To
this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the
sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I
suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She
closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand
and stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.
The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way
vanished at the sight of her.
"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.
For some seconds neither of us said a word.
"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.
She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."
"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I
didn't. I didn't because-because you had too much to give me."
"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to
my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you
things, things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell
you."
She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining
through the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It
was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the
situation whatever I might say. I began walking up and down the
room between those cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little
gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each
had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or
something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in
my mind concerned itse
lf with that quite intently. Yet I seem to
have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of
things. "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.
You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding. You know
my political ambitions. You know all that I might do in the world.
I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things
perhaps, in this wild jumble… Only you don't know a bit what
I am. I want to tell you what Iam. I'm complex… I'm
streaked."
I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."
She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the
ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.
"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not
possibly understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as
women are. I have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs.
Passion-desire. You see, I have had a mistress, I have been
entangled-"
She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling
you," I said, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly
that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I
say, dirty. It didn't seem so at first-"
I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice
of words to have made.
I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
"I drifted into this-as men do," I said after a little pause and
stopped again.
She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you-that I expected-"
"But how can you know?"
"I know. I do know."
"But-" I began.
"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know,"
and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not
know.
"All men-" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these
temptations."
I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession.
…
"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent