“But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now! Oh!
you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go
on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You
know, Remington--you KNOW.”
I thought and went back to his earlier point. “If I am rhetorical,
at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the
implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just now it's
rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from
end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly
mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going
out of this--for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles
and Keyhole imagine--that excites them! When I think of the things
these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical
passion that burns like a fire--ends clean. I'm going for love,
Britten--if I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw
her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I've
been a cold man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that
word!--I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of
me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick
thing--a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'm
not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man
that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imagine
the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going to do things easily;
she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put things when one isn't
rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--there are distresses that matter
more than all the delights or achievements in the world.... I made
her what she is--as I never made Margaret. I've made her--I've broken
her.... I'm going with my own woman. The rest of my life and England,
and so forth, must square itself to that....”
For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd
said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk
before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. “This
man goes on doing first-rate stuff,” I said. “I hope you will keep him
going.”
He did not answer for a moment or so. “I'll keep him going,” he said at
last with a sigh.
5
I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot
resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word
of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written
in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is
essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me;
but what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind....
“Certainly,” she says, “I want to hear from you, but I do not want
to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with.
Something I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you--but
I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid
of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Then
perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our
political work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your
presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING for
the world--had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing
to DO. I am suddenly at loose ends....
“We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of
my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you
and your schemes....
“After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask
again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...
“It is just as though you were wilfully dead....
“Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might
not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe
impossible....
“Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and
tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance;
not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood
away from. You let my first repugnances repel you....
“It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking
myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATE
you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time,
thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I
exact that you should watch and understand my life, when clearly I have
understood so little of yours. But I am savage--savage at the wrecking
of all you were to do.
“Oh, why--why did you give things up?
“No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not
only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
purposes. They ARE great purposes....
“If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength
you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and your young
mistress.... All that matters so little to me....
“Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At times
I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to give
you.... I've always hidden my tears from you--and what was in my heart.
It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things brought to you to see.
You are so curious as to be almost cruel. You don't understand reserves.
You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. You are not really
a CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretences--and not only pretences but
decent coverings....
“It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slow
people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't I bold and
reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as to
ask why my hair is fair....
“I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
myself alone....
“My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I shall
never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to have been
the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which you
were to forge so much of the new order....
“But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of you, I
mean.... It tears me when I think of you poor and discredited. You will
let me help you if I can--it will be the last wrong not to let me do
that....
“You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall come
after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as a
wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district
visitor....”
There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating
analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
“There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to.
There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like
nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through
everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid
dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but
by a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watched
you so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow
rules. I don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at once
makers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people--criminal
people, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're
so much better than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making
without destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing
but an instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do you
remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it
disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat
because there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crust
forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again.
You talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, mysterious,
imperative. YOUR beauty is something altogether different from anything
I know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was
something I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is
a quiet thing. You have always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned
chintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED
things. My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I
know nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one should go
deliberately out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers
and be singed and tormented and destroyed. I don't understand....”
6
I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the
platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead, the
bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboys
and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends seeing
travellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very quiet and still in the
compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the door open, with
a curious reluctance to take the last step that should sever me from
London's ground. I showed our tickets, and bought a handful of red roses
for her. At last came the guards crying: “Take your seats,” and I got
in and closed the door on me. We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to
ourselves. I let down the window and stared out.
There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of “Stand
away, please, stand away!” and the train was gliding slowly and smoothly
out of the station.
I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly gathering
pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the pedestrians
in the footway, and the curve of the river and the glowing great hotels,
and the lights and reflections and blacknesses of that old, familiar
spectacle. Then with a common thought, we turned our eyes westward to
where the pinnacles of Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hard
and clear against the still, luminous sky.
“They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night,” I said, a
little stupidly.
“And so,” I added, “good-bye to London!”
We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below--bright gleams
of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes of houses
and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, New
Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to me that for a time
we had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our knot,
we had accepted the last penalty of that headlong return of mine from
Chicago a year and a half ago. That was all settled. That harvest of
feelings we had reaped. I thought now only of London, of London as the
symbol of all we were leaving and all we had lost in the world. I felt
nothing now but an enormous and overwhelming regret....
The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran through old Bromstead,
where once I had played with cities and armies on the nursery floor. The
sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim tree-set
country under a cloud-veiled, intermittently shining moon. We passed
Cardcaster Place. Perhaps old Wardingham, that pillar of the old
Conservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with
our young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and
how it would confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps some
faint intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the
young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lighted
carriage windows gliding southward....
Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I
had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all my
ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be going
out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell from
us--and before us was no meaning any more. We were leaving London; my
hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had been
forced from it, my fingers left their hold. That was over. I should
never have a voice in public affairs again. The inexorable unwritten
law which forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going out to a
new life, a life that appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelled
remnant of me, a mere residuum of sheltering and feeding and seeing
amidst alien scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were going
to live cheaply in a foreign place, so cut off that I meet now the
merest stray tourist, the commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture
of shyness and hunger.... And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving
appeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before.
How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle
remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now
suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal
abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and
favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood
for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great
city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link,
a reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seek
vaguely for in vain? What is one life against the State? Ought I not
to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, and
held to my thing--stuck to my thing?
I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's “It WAS
a good game.” No end of a game. And for the first time I imagined the
faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt of
this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite unwarned. And
Shoesmith might be there in the house,--Shoesmith who was to have been
married in four days--the thing might hit him full in front of any kind
of people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why the devil hadn't I written
letters to warn them all? I could have posted them five minutes before
the train started. I had never thought to that moment of the immense
mess they would be in; how the whole edifice would clatter about their
ears. I had a sudden desire to stop the train and go back for a day,
for two days, to set that negligence right. My brain for a moment
brightened, became animated and prolific of ideas. I thought of a
brilliant line we might have taken on that confounded Reformatory
Bill....
That sort of thing was over....
What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous
perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora
began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thought
of people I had been merry with, people I had worked with and played
with, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of houses that
had once glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose them
all. I saw life like a tree in late autumn that had once been rich and
splendid with friends--and now the last brave dears would be hanging on
doubtfully against the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured in
the universal gale of indignation, trying to evade the cold blast of the
truth. I had betrayed my party, my intimate friend, my wife, the
wife whose devotion had made me what I was. For awhile the figure of
Margaret, remote, wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of
my immense ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I had
a feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the
throat, some one talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for not
keeping me, for letting things go so far.... I wanted the whole world
to know how fine she was. I saw in imagination the busy, excited
dinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly excited, brightly
indignant, merciless.
Well, it's the stuff we are!...
Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's
tears and the sound of her voice saying, “Husband mine! Oh! husband
mine! To see you cry!”...
I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow compartment,
with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand-baggage swaying on
the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my wilting red
roses tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I perceived
she was sitting bent together with her head averted from the light to
hide the tears that were streaming down her face. She had not got her
handkerchief out for fear that I should see this, but I saw her tears,
dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve....