“It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to stand
against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your lives?”
“No end of things.”
“Nothing.”
“I don't believe you are right,” I said. “I believe we can save
something--”
Britten shook his head. “Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,” he
said.
His indignation rose. “In the middle of life!” he said. “No man has a
right to take his hand from the plough!”
He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. “You
know, Remington,” he said, “and I know, that if this could be fended off
for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way
somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down for a year,
say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, as friends.
Saved! You KNOW it.”
I turned and stared at him. “You're wrong, Britten,” I said. “And does
it matter if we could?”
I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not
been able to find for myself alone.
“I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this
scandal.”
He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in me,
but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
“It's our duty,” I went on, “to smash now openly in the sight of every
one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison whitewash. I am
convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I mean
it--until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully,
adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel
story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have
picked man after man out of English public life, the men with active
imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering
old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You
say I ought to be penitent--”
Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
“I'm boiling with indignation,” I said. “I lay in bed last night and
went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but
what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I
recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told
and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all
are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful
things in life--like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light,
never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive,
canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it!
The shame of it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children
better than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a
view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby
subservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission to
unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the
dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we
were mumbled at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean,
unclean, was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and grime!”
“Yes,” said Britten. “That's all very well--”
I interrupted him. “I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think it a
valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in
self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and
think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current
thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a
cage by itself!” I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him.
“This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world,
and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call
immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime
if they care for it, and wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say:
'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I
will!”
Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. “That's
all very well, Remington,” he said. “You mean to go.”
He stopped and began again. “If you didn't know you were in the wrong
you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain
to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife
who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't
see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might
come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing
yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you.”
He swung round upon his swivel at me. “Remington,” he said, “have you
forgotten the immense things our movement means?”