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
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
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