“Dear heart,” said I, “isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--”
“And I want to darn your socks,” she said, smiling back at me.
“You're insatiable.”
She smiled “No,” she said. “I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a woman
in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is necessary to
me--and what I can't have. That's all.”
“We get a lot.”
“We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of one
another--and I'm not satisfied.”
“What more is there?
“For you--very little. I wonder. For me--every thing. Yes--everything.
You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more than I did when I
began, but love between a man and a woman is sometimes very one-sided.
Fearfully one-sided! That's all....”
“Don't YOU ever want children?” she said abruptly.
“I suppose I do.”
“You don't!”
“I haven't thought of them.”
“A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have.... I want them--like hunger.
YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you! That's the
trouble.... I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't have you.”
She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
“I'm going to make a scene,” she said, “and get this over. I'm so
discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come between
us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything--with all my
brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master, never you
fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This election--You're
going up; you're going on. In these papers--you're a great big fact.
It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my mind I've always had
the idea I was going to have you somehow presently for myself--I mean to
have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals for,
to watch for of an evening. It's a sort of habitual background to my
thought of you. And it's nonsense--utter nonsense!” She stopped. She was
crying and choking. “And the child, you know--the child!”
I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
clear and strong.
“We can't have that,” I said.
“No,” she said, “we can't have that.”
“We've got our own things to do.”
“YOUR things,” she said.
“Aren't they yours too?”
“Because of you,” she said.
“Aren't they your very own things?”
“Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of children,
telling them the only good thing in a state is happy, hopeful children,
working to free mothers and children--”
“And we give our own children to do it?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too much
altogether.... Children get into a woman's brain--when she mustn't have
them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the child
we might have now!--the little creature with soft, tender skin, and
little hands and little feet! At times it haunts me. It comes and says,
Why wasn't I given life? I can hear it in the night.... The world is
full of such little ghosts, dear lover--little things that asked for
life and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little fist
beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold
hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!” She was holding
my arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew
herself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. “I shall never
sit with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
and your lover!...”
2
But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and
more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clinging
passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and
fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but
also we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with these
desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and
intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept
altering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or
that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything aside for our love,
and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't
altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part
a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other
interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us
like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't want
each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted
to do big things together, and for us to take each other openly and
desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wanted
children indeed passionately, but children with every helpful chance in
the world, and children born in scandal would be handicapped at every
turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude.
And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us....
I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it,
with that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel
almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it her
business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us both with
consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret,
and her friend went off “reserving her freedom of action.”
Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and
an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased to
invade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we knew not how--a
private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity,
a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed from
absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge
of our relations.
It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long
smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared
up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether
disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity.
It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my
position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done.
Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring
in.... It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping
through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the
consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A
certain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruption
with extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England people
to a kind of competition in denunciation. The old methods of the
Anti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too wide
a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be
restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations
of an extensive circulation of “private and confidential” letters....
I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly
one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One
walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible
accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open,
separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face.
Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses;
men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an
intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I
became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles
of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still grow
warm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting
me full on the steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead. “By God!” I cried,
and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him what
of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and
empty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had
an open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were
disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidence
of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similar
things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting,
meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against
us.
For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.
Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The
Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group
they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had
long been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its
allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was “doing nothing,”
and found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers
Street a dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to
find them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think Handitch
had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only
abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power of
misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their spider's web,
difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their
work and devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt for
a certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerility
of their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than
injuries, and anyhow they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found,
was warning fathers of girls against me as a “reckless libertine,” and
Altiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender
curb after dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a
time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was
open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that
came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles in
the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEW
which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up to
the present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora had
had not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her
praises in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so many
people who rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writes
a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her
University training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark
power of a clear-headed man. “Now we know,” said Altiora, with just a
gleam of malice showing through her brightness, “now we know who helps
with the writing!”
She revealed astonishing knowledge.
For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I had,
indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I bethought
me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist and
secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of
our breach. “Of course!” said I, “Curmain!” He was a tall, drooping,
sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long
thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter
drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty
and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in
a state of hot indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the
air between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same
time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him
off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheap
anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem him if
anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man's
kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were looked
after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And Altiora, I've
no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me,
and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening to get to the
bottom of the matter. She got quite to the bottom of it,--it must have
been a queer duologue. She read Isabel's careless, intimate letters
to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this
information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her
since our political breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it
helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in
any public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man. She knew she was
behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse.
She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her information
was irresistible. And she set to work at it marvellously. Never before,
in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels
of efficiency. I wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-advised and angry,
I went to her and tried to stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't
think, she denied and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six
years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I
think, that she couldn't bear our political and social influence; she
also--I realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed
to her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable. While such
things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in and
taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in
a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and
was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed
penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted
everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of
her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with
grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
“Then part,” she cried, “part. If you don't want a smashing up,--part!
You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each other ever,
never to speak.” There was a zest in her voice. “We're not circulating
stories,” she denied. “No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmain
is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. You
misjudged him altogether.”...
I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in
the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where he had
got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave him
the names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous,
he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM. He did his
horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just
left England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me
as mean, even for Bailey. I've still the odd vivid impression of his
fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading
me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the
would-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous
ugly hands.
“I can assure you, my dear fellow,” he said; “I can assure you we've
done everything to shield you--everything.”...
3
Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made
a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. I
sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.
“The Baileys don't intend to let this drop,” I said. “They mean that
every one in London is to know about it.”
“I know.”
“Well!” I said.
“Dear heart,” said Isabel, facing it, “it's no good waiting for things
to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways.”
“What are we to do?”
“They won't let us go on.”
“Damn them!”
“They are ORGANISING scandal.”
“It's no good waiting for things to overtake us,” I echoed; “they have
overtaken us.” I turned on her. “What do you want to do?”
“Everything,” she said. “Keep you and have our work. Aren't we Mates?”
“We can't.”
“And we can't!”
“I've got to tell Margaret,” I said.
“Margaret!”
“I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it. I've
been wincing about Margaret secretly--”
“I know. You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her.”
She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
“We've had some good times, Master;” she said, with a sigh in her voice.
And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
“We haven't much time left,” she said.
“Shall we bolt?” I said.
“And leave all this?” she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
“And that?” And her head indicated Westminster. “No!”