“I want you to understand that the thing is at an end. It is definitely
at an end. We--we talked--yesterday. We mean to end it altogether.” I
clenched my hands. “She's--she's going to marry Arnold Shoesmith.”
I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of her
movement as she turned on me.
“It's all right,” I said, clinging to my explanation. “We're doing
nothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right--as things can
be now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing things
straight--now. Of course, you know.... We shall--we shall have to make
sacrifices. Give things up pretty completely. Very completely.... We
shall have not to see each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not a
long time. Two or three years. Or write--or just any of that sort of
thing ever--”
Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying
uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child. I was
amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was on her
knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping with mine.
“Oh, my Husband!” she cried, “my poor Husband! Does it hurt you so? I
would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you. I love you over
and away and above all these jealous little things!”
She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of
a son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. “Oh! my dear,” she
sobbed, “my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you cry.
Ever! I didn't know you could. Oh! my dear! Can't you have her, my dear,
if you want her? I can't bear it! Let me help you, dear. Oh! my Husband!
My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!” For a time she held me in
silence.
“I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two, I
mean. It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen you together,
so glad with each other.... Oh! Husband mine, believe me! believe me!
I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise how stupid and cold,
but all I want in all the world is to give my life to you.”...
6
“We can't part in a room,” said Isabel.
“We'll have one last talk together,” I said, and planned that we should
meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk ourselves out.
I still recall that day very well, recall even the curious exaltation of
grief that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable. We had
seen so much of one another, had become so intimate, that we talked of
parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness. We went
together up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the
sea, past the white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.
There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a
spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely
below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and
engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chattering
jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a
skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again,
as the tide fell and rose.
We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations.
It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that scarcely an issue in
the life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch
upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol of
all this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate love
the world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong
in it either way.. .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out
of ourselves until we were something representative and general. She was
womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
“I ought,” I said, “never to have loved you.”
“It wasn't a thing planned,” she said.
“I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned
back from America.”
“I'm glad we did it,” she said. “Don't think I repent.”