“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 complicated 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 to offer
me something....
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 see myself 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 delayed, 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 itself 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 I am. 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.