Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora was
systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry Margaret,
and freed from the need of making an income I was to come into
politics--as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with the other
excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her summer holiday.
It was her pride and glory to put things down and plan them out in
detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she did not even mark
off the day upon which the engagement was to be declared. If she did,
I disappointed her. We didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the
broadest hints and the glaring obviousness of everything, that summer.
Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired
or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went
on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in the
open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for long
walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally explained
themselves to) any social “types” that lived in the neighbourhood. One
invaded type, resentful under research, described them with a dreadful
aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho Panza--and himself as a harmless
windmill, hurting no one and signifying nothing. She did rather tilt
at things. This particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in
level country near Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester,
and they asked me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora
took them for a month for me in August--and board with them upon
extremely reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret
sitting in a hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were
coming and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but these
irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between Margaret and
myself.
Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She sent
us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good walker--she
exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet, not
understanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for lovers
in the world. And Margaret and I were always getting left about, and
finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the kitchen-garden with nothing
to do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run away
and amuse each other.
Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather than
imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such excursions. But
there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's brink
to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so much zeal and so little
skill--his hat fell off and he became miraculously nothing but
paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled brow--that at last he had to
be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase of
rigid discretion, as nearly as possible drowned herself--and me no doubt
into the bargain--with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise
the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity
Organisation Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it
for the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.
We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, and
afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe,
let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively harmful
paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters. Still it
was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and
not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forward
at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions
than to remember the moods and suggestions that produced them.
Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and unmarried
when you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmth
and leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of the
more experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The young
people married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother
turned their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other
things. That to Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed it
to be the quality of the great bulk of the life about her.
One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating to
sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in charity and
imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeed
for no single man nor woman does there seem to be any fixed standard, so
much do the accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affect
one's interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexual
fact that may not seem supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or
magnificently wicked or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant,
according to the eye that sees or the mood that colours. Here is
something that may fill the skies and every waking hour or be almost
completely banished from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less
than nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in
these matters all men and women were commensurable one with another,
with an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty....
I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom days, I
always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainly
her general effect now was of an entirely passionless worldliness in
these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her, she regarded sexual
passion as being hardly more legitimate in a civilised person than--let
us say--homicidal mania. She must have forgotten--and Bailey too. I
suspect she forgot before she married him. I don't suppose either of
them had the slightest intimation of the dimensions sexual love can take
in the thoughts of the great majority of people with whom they come in
contact. They loved in their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond
way--but it had no relation to beauty and physical sensation--except
that there seemed a decree of exile against these things. They got their
glow in high moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid
worldly success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
and so “captured,” and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval. They
saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and just put it
down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate Altiora manifestly
viewed my situation and Margaret's with an abnormal and entirely
misleading simplicity. There was the girl, rich, with an acceptable
claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, quite capable of political
interests, and there was I, talented, ambitious and full of
political and social passion, in need of just the money, devotion and
regularisation Margaret could provide. We were both unmarried--white
sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there ever a simpler situation? What
more could we possibly want?
She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect upon
her judgment and good intentions.
7