“Some one will,” she said, almost viciously. “And then we'll have to
stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry to
give them up.”
“It's part of the requirements of the situation,” I said, “that he
should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new
topics, and open no end of attractive vistas.... You can't, you know,
always go about in a state of pupillage.”
“I don't think I can,” said Isabel. “But it's only just recently I've
begun to doubt about it.”
I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other
then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this
that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the
curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain
before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just
assumed the new footing....
It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there was
thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other people
had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenish
colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk,
as though we were nearly all the time in the Tropical House. But I
also remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-like
flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curious
thing that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate love
for one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for
each other had always been patent between us. There was so long and
frank an intimacy between us that we talked far more like brother and
sister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of the
sexes. We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever we
did we meant to do in the most perfect concert. We both felt an
extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, what
again is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in spite of
the perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It
was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each
other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.
I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary
observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with all
that really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as a
wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations.
As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personal
inequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many
things she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent
mine. The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the
response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching
sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so
bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back
of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full
of 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 I am 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 mind being 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 come to a new level of life--but
only those who know can know. This 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.