“I came into Parliament, Margaret,” I said, “a little prematurely.
Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could see
things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range....”
I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up my
disquisition.
“After all,” I remarked, “most of this has been implicit in my
writings.”
She made no sign of admission.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear. Then
either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to a
General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a
quarrel.”
“You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget.”
“I'm not,” I said, “so keen against the Lords.”
On that we halted.
“But what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't quite
tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign my
seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again.”
“It's political suicide.”
“Not altogether.”
“I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like--like
undoing all we have done. What will you do?”
“Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course,
there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane.”
Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
“For me,” she said at last, “our political work has been a religion--it
has been more than a religion.”
I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the
implications of that.
“And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of
going over, almost lightly--to those others.”...
She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had
captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting
ineffectually against her fixed conviction. “It's because I think my
duty lies in this change that I make it,” I said.
“I don't see how you can say that,” she replied quietly.
There was another pause between us.
“Oh!” she said and clenched her hand upon the table. “That it should
have come to this!”
She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was
hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I
thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not
make her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to
this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperaments
was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash
of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionate
disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everything
else the relief of weeping.
“I've told you,” I said awkwardly, “as soon as I could.”
There was another long silence. “So that is how we stand,” I said with
an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
“Good-night,” I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
“Good-night,” she answered in a tragic note....
I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big
landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heard
the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom
door. Then everything was still....
She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the thought.
“Damnation!” I said wincing. “Why the devil can't people at least THINK
in the same manner?”
2
And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations that we
never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for some
time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us was
confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided. It is remarkable that
my very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with this
quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quite
unaware how or when my early romantic love for her purity and beauty
and high-principled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know that
quite early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed
resentment at the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her
standards of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and
none the less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles.
So long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now,
since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and I
could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent upon
her for house room and food and social support, as it were under false
pretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairs
altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed a
last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to keep my personal
expenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing,
and we went out together in her motor brougham, dined and made
appearances, met politely at breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon
her cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quite
understood, which I understand now, became for a time in my mind,
through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed
the landing to her room again.
In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, I
perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder is that
I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many ways
wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After our
marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let her go her way; held
her responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate things
she said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. It
wasn't fair to expect her to sympathise, anticipate, and understand.
I ought to have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came to
crossing the difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and
more tenderly, if there had not been the consciousness of my financial
dependence on her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have
moved with me from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she
did not get any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It
must have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew--for
surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and perplexed.
A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and business of the man
she has married for love to help her to help and give. But I was stupid.
My eyes had never been opened. I was stiff with her and difficult to
her, because even on my wedding morning there had been, deep down in
my soul, voiceless though present, something weakly protesting, a faint
perception of wrong-doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying
germs of shame.
3