1
There comes into my mind a confused memory 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 feel myself 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 already 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 I am 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 I am 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 me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life,
but I take my beauty 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.”