difficulty, "it is all over and past."
"It's all over and past," I answered.
There was a little pause.
"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now
in the slightest degree."
She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put
out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl
in the background-doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
world-telling something in indistinguishable German-I know not
what nor why…
I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with
tears. She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met
in Misterton-six years and more ago."
CHAPTER THE THIRD
MARGARET IN VENICE
1
There comes into my mind a confusedmemory of conversations with
Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now
for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with
later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the
immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay
before us. I was now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt
not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had. We called each
other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement
a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the
County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers,
and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was
full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and
work. We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of
wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for
him from the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer
War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still
in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a memorable
oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the
Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going
in the channels that took it to him-if as a matter of fact it was
taken to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that
sort. They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.
Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient." We were to be
a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type." She
explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves,
she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and
afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and
expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate
for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in
the world.
I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless
activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where
chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and
discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously
focussed upon the ideal of social service.
Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a
gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of
Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of
smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a
mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-
necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float
aerially. Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our
destination. Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely
through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go
swishing back again. Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face
shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.
"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect
acquiescence I feelmyself reasoning against an indefinable
antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.
There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline,
but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits-and to be
distracted from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants men to
serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans. For
a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for
people like ourselves it's-it's the constant small opportunity of
agreeable things."
"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."
"That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply
modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too
seriously. We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."
She endorses my words with her eyes.
"I feel I can do great things with life."
"I KNOW you can."
"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one
main end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our
scheme."
"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give-every hour."
Her face becomes dreamy. "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.
2
That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial
lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and
skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of
the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and
places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the
whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for
the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled
magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made
me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.
There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any
English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas
of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed
chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting
beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well
with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before
I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for
such a temperament as mine.
Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no
exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost
shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help
us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be
very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the
sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of
the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be
glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her
previous Italian journey-fear of the mosquito had driven her mother
across Italy to the westward route-and now she could fill up her
gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she a
lready knew in
colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series
delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of
Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.
But since Iam not a man to look at pictures and architectural
effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a
thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping
a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered
familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can
hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace
comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless
satisfaction these things gave her.
Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was
cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of
these things. She was passive, and Iam active. She did not simply
and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for
it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and
lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did
in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to
it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points
as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal…
And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
beautiful than any picture…
So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases
and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such
things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,
New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned
to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.
Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had
gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to
me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation
behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England. The judgments
and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles
away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling
things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily
fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and
stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an
exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon,
unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret
would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English
newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and
watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the
little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.
Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the
sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops
that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an
extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she said, are
quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary
looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good
deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender
handle and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply
tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-
dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like
afternoon of it.
I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the
TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get
hold of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former
paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe-I forget now
upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil
appreciations more and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and
delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.
I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts
like the catspaws before a gale. I was alarmed at these symptoms.
One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time
through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and
went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.
"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm
restless."
"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling-I've
never had it before-as though I was getting fat."
"My dear!" she cried.
"I want to do things;-ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil
out of myself."
She watched me thoughtfully.
"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.
Do what?
"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon-and walk
in the mountains-on our way home."
I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."
"Isn't there some walk?"
"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach
beyond Malamocco…
A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the
gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.
Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my
point, "but I have work to do."
She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.
"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have
remembered."
She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said,
almost apologetically.
She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,
like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has
been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has
been just With You-the time of my life. It's a pity such things
must end. But the world is calling you, dear… I ought not to
have forgotten it. I thought you were resting-and thinking. But
if you are rested.-Would you like us to start to-morrow?"
She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
1
Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square,
Westminster, before
our marriage, a house that seemed particularly
adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been
very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions,
white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now
we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging
and-with our Venetian glass as a beginning-furnishing it. We had
been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most
part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and
just precisely where we would put it.
Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine,
and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us,
I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a
consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until
everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent
Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally
intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards
became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."
I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about
Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest
ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not
sway her. It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my
hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest
determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in
that great project of "doing something for the world."
"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You
don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"
"I want them so."
"Altiora has things hard."
"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and
uncomfortable things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow
they won't help me."
So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple
and very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was
a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson,
for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to