“I want to begin over again.”
I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and kissed
it.
“Ah!” she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with her
arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my face. I felt the
most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thought
of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence between
us....
“Tell me,” I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, “tell me
plainly what you mean by this.”
I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with an
odd effect of defending myself. “Have you been reading that old book of
mine?” I asked.
“That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down
to Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't
understand--what you were teaching.”
There was a little pause.
“It all seems so plain to me now,” she said, “and so true.”
I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in the
middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. “I'm tremendously glad,
Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse,” I began.
I launched out into a rather trite and windy exposition of my views, and
she sat close to me on the sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on my
words, a deliberate and invincible convert.
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”...
I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the lives of
all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at
their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business to
admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on talking. And I was
now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications,
restatements, and confirmations....
Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my political
projects to her. “I have been foolish,” she said. “I want to help.”
And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I
think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had
brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with it,
and put it down on the table and turned to go.
“Husband!” she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was
compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly about my
neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them very gently,
and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her hands.
“Good-night,” I said. There came a little pause. “Good-night, Margaret,”
I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind of sham
preoccupation to the door.
I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me. If I
had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to me....
At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel and
myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
7
The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretend
that nothing had changed except a small matter between us. We believed
quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thing
that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through some
magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world about us! Seen in
retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a week
I realised it; but that does not alter the fact that we did believe as
much, and that people who are deeply in love and unable to marry will
continue to believe so to the very end of time. They will continue to
believe out of existence every consideration that separates them until
they have come together. Then they will count the cost, as we two had to
do.
I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world. The
moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and
say, “At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have
done”--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that it
didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doing
it came. It amazes me now to think how little either of us troubled
about the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an
atom of respect for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public
morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in defence that they
are very bad guardians--provocative guardians.... And when at last there
came a claim against us that had an effective validity for us, we were
in the full tide of passionate intimacy.
I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return.
She had suddenly presented herself to me like something dramatically
recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed
how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and
conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me there was such
a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living,
breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was my honour, that I had had
no right even to imperil.
I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and
putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps
I may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so
freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at
the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylight
brought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we
declared, “pull the thing off.” Margaret must not know. Margaret should
not know. If Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever would be done.
We tried to sustain that....
For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically
cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began
to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all
about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming
possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of her
unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden
love made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husband
and wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect
of our case. How could I? The time for that had gone....
Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements
crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be secret.
It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm conspiracy;
then presently it became irksome and a little shameful. Her essential
frankness of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that many
women would have enjoyed. Together in our secrecy we relaxed, then in
the presence of other people again it was tiresome to have to watch
for the careless, too easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from the
limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch.
Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always meeting,
and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had to snatch at
remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to this
or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of idle people perhaps,
but not for an intense personal relationship. It is like lighting a
candle for the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each time
blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing to children playing
with the matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it in
order to do fine and honourable things together. We had achieved--I
give the ugly phrase that expresses the increasing discolouration in my
mind--“illicit intercourse.” To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in
our style. But where were we to end?...
Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we could
have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the glow of our
cell blinded us.... I wonder what might have happened if at that time we
had given it up.... We propounded it, we met again in secret to discuss
it, and our overpowering passion for one another reduced that meeting to
absurdity....
Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all our
conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in the quality
of our minds that physical love without children is a little weak,
timorous, more than a little shameful. With imaginative people there
very speedily comes a time when that realisation is inevitable. We
hadn't thought of that before--it isn't natural to think of that before.
We hadn't known. There is no literature in English dealing with such
things.
There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their
order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first bright
perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were
no more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows
spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid and luminous cell.
8
The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble
the reader with a detailed history of events that must be quite
sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of
journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the reader
very probably, as for most people outside a comparatively small circle,
it meant my emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name in
the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before
Handitch I was a journalist and writer of no great public standing;
after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group of
persons who stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a
very large extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how
much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election
I was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialist
flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance at
all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with
its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at
the last election, offered a hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensions
and the belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate were
providential interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane,
Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me, did count
tremendously in my favour. “We aren't going to win, perhaps,” said
Crupp, “but we are going to talk.” And until the very eve of victory, we
treated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And so it
was the Endowment of Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into
English politics.
Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
“They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the Family,” he
said.
“I think the Family exists for the good of the children,” I said; “is
that queer?”
“Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it. And about
marriage--?”
“I'm all right about marriage--trust me.”
“Of course, if YOU had children,” said Plutus, rather
inconsiderately....
They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call
the HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I spoke
for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy of the
SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest exposition
of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever been made up
to that time in England. Its effect on the press was extraordinary. The
Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space under the impression
that I had only to be given rope to hang myself; the Conservatives cut
me down or tried to justify me; the whole country was talking. I had had
a pamphlet in type upon the subject, and I revised this carefully and
put it on the book-stalls within three days. It sold enormously and
brought me bushels of letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch
alone. At meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long
before polling day Plutus was converted.
“It's catching on like old age pensions,” he said. “We've dished the
Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our side!”
But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was won.
No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by over fifteen
hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apologetics varied
by repudiation to triumphant praise. “A renascent England, breeding
men,” said the leader in his chief daily on the morning after the
polling, and claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the pioneers
in sanely bold constructive projects.
I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
train.