"Oh! you'll get through. You have a way of going on. But I shall have
to watch over you. I see I shall have to watch over you. Tell me of the
things you mean to do. Where are you standing?"
I began to tell her a little disjointedly of the probabilities of my
Yorkshire constituency....
§ 6
I have a vivid vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house,
down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep
valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing
but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and
the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of
Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was
moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always
loved. I wanted passionately to be as she desired, the friend she
demanded, that intimate brother and confederate, but all my heart cried
out for her, cried out for her altogether.
I would be her friend, I repeated to myself, I would be her friend. I
would talk to her often, plan with her, work with her. I could put my
meanings into her life and she should throw her beauty over mine. I
began already to dream of the talk of to-morrow's meeting....
§ 7
And now let me go on to tell at once the thing that changed life for
both of us altogether, that turned us out of the courses that seemed
set for us, our spacious, successful and divergent ways, she to the
tragedy of her death and I from all the prospects of the public career
that lay before me to the work that now, toilsomely, inadequately and
blunderingly enough, I do. It was to pierce and slash away the
appearances of life for me, it was to open my way to infinite
disillusionment, and unsuspected truths. Within a few weeks of our
second meeting Mary and I were passionately in love with one another; we
had indeed become lovers. The arrested attractions of our former love
released again, drew us inevitably to that. We tried to seem outwardly
only friends, with this hot glow between us. Our tormented secret was
half discovered and half betrayed itself. There followed a tragi-comedy
of hesitations and disunited struggle. Within four months the crisis of
our two lives was past....
It is not within my purpose to tell you, my son, of the particular
events, the particular comings and goings, the chance words, the chance
meetings, the fatal momentary misunderstandings that occurred between
us. I want to tell of something more general than that. This
misadventure is in our strain. It is our inheritance. It is a
possibility in the inheritance of all honest and emotional men and
women. There are no doubt people altogether cynical and adventurous to
whom these passions and desires are at once controllable and permissible
indulgences without any radiation of consequences, a secret and
detachable part of life, and there may be people of convictions so
strong and simple that these disturbances are eliminated, but we
Strattons are of a quality neither so low nor so high, we stoop and
rise, we are not convinced about our standards, and for many
generations to come, with us and with such people as the Christians, and
indeed with most of our sort of people, we shall be equally desirous of
free and intimate friendship and prone to blaze into passion and
disaster at that proximity.
This is one of the essential riddles in the adaptation of such human
beings as ourselves to that greater civilized state of which I dream. It
is the gist of my story. It is one of the two essential riddles that
confront our kind. The servitude of sex and the servitude of labor are
the twin conditions upon which human society rests to-day, the two
limitations upon its progress towards a greater social order, to that
greater community, those uplands of light and happy freedom, towards
which that Being who was my father yesterday, who thinks in myself
to-day, and who will be you to-morrow and your sons after you, by his
very nature urges and must continue to urge the life of mankind. The
story of myself and Mary is a mere incident in that gigantic, scarce
conscious effort to get clear of toils and confusions and encumbrances,
and have our way with life. We are like little figures, dots ascendant
upon a vast hillside; I take up our intimacy for an instant and hold it
under a lens for you. I become more than myself then, and Mary stands
for innumerable women. It happened yesterday, and it is just a part of
that same history that made Edmond Stratton of the Hays elope with
Charlotte Anstruther and get himself run through the body at Haddington
two hundred years ago, which drove the Laidlaw-Christians to Virginia in
'45, gave Stratton Street to the moneylenders when George IV. was
Regent, and broke the heart of Margaret Stratton in the days when
Charles the First was king. With our individual variations and under
changed conditions the old desires and impulses stirred us, the old
antagonisms confronted us, the old difficulties and sloughs and
impassable places baffled us. There are times when I think of my history
among all those widespread repeated histories, until it seems to me that
the human Lover is like a creature who struggles for ever through a
thicket without an end....
There are no universal laws of affection and desire, but it is
manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association,
and any real fellowship between men and women turns with an extreme
readiness to love. And that being so it follows that under existing
conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women
in society is a monstrous sham, a merely dangerous pretence of
encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a
woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one
man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil
impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have
one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a
little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent,
intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it.
To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you
live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social
disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to
us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what
they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity.
And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not
standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and
emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between
Mary and myself, as it breaks down in a thousand other cases, as it
breaks down everywhere. Our social life is honeycombed and rotten with
secret hidden relationships. The rigid, the obtuse and the
unscrupulously cunning escape; the honest passion sooner or later flares
out and destroys.... Here is a difficulty that no bullying imposition of
arbitrary rules on the one hand nor any reckless abandonment of law on
the other, can solve. Humanity has yet to find its method in sexual
things; it has to discover the use and the limitation of jealousy. And
before it can even begin to attempt to find, it has to cease its present
timid secret groping in shame and darkness and turn on the light of
knowledge. None of us knows much and most of us do not even know what is
known.
§ 8
The house is very quiet to-day. It is your mother's birthday, and you
three children have gone with her and Mademoiselle Potin into the forest
to celebrate the occasion. Presently I shall join you. The sunlit
garden, with its tall dreaming lilies against the trellised vines upon
the wall, the cedars and the grassy space about the sundial, have that
distinguished stillness, that definite, palpable and almost outlined
emptiness which is so to speak your negative presence. It is like a
sheet of sunlit colored paper out of which your figures have been cut.
There is a commotion of birds in the jasmine, and your Barker reclines
with an infinite tranquillity, a masterless dog, upon the lawn. I take
up this writing again after an interval of some weeks. I have been in
Paris, attending the Sabotage Conference, and dealing with those
intricate puzzles of justice and discipline and the secret sources of
contentment that have to be solved if sabotage is ever to vanish from
labor struggles again. I think a few points have been made clearer in
that curious riddle of reconciliations....
Now I resume this story. I turn over the sheets that were written and
finished before my departure, and come to the notes for what is to
follow.
Perhaps my days of work in Paris have carried my mind on beyond the
point at which I left the narrative. I sit as it were among a pile of
memories that are now all disordered and mixed up together, their proper
sequences and connexions lost. I cannot trace the phases through which
our mutual passion rode up through the restrained and dignified
intentions of our friendship. But I know that presently we were in a
white heat of desire. There must have been passages that I now
altogether forget, moments of tense transition. I am more and more
convinced that our swiftest, intensest, mental changes leave far less
vivid memories than impressions one receives when one is comparatively
passive. And of this phase in my life of which I am now telling I have
clear memories of a time when we talked like brother and sister, or like
angels if you will, and hard upon that came a time when we were planning
in all our moments together how and when and where we might meet in
secret and meet again.
Things drift with a phantom-like uncertainty into my mind and pass
again; those fierce motives of our transition have lost now all stable
form and feature, but I believe there was a curious tormenting urgency
in our jealousy of those others, of Justin on my part and of Rachel on
hers. At first we had talked quite freely about Rachel, had discussed my
conceivable marriage with her. We had indeed a little forced that topic,
as if to reassure ourselves of the honesty of our new footing. But the
force that urged us nearer pervaded all our being. It was hard enough to
be barred apart, to snatch back our hands from touching, to avoid each
other's eyes, to hurry a little out of the dusk towards the lit house
and its protecting servants, but the constant presence and suggestion of
those others from whom there were no bars, or towards whom bars could be
abolished at a look, at an impulse, exacerbated that hardship, roused a
fierce insatiable spirit of revolt within us. At times we grew angry
with each other's formalism, came near to quarrelling....
I associate these moods with the golden stillnesses of a prolonged and
sultry autumn, and with slowly falling leaves....
I will not tell you how that step was taken, it matters very little to
my story, nor will I tell which one of us it was first broke the
barriers down.
§ 9
But I do want to tell you certain things. I want to tell you them
because they are things that affect you closely. There was almost from
the first a difference between Mary and myself in this, that I wanted to
be public about our love, I wanted to be open and defiant, and
she--hesitated. She wanted to be secret. She wanted to keep me; I
sometimes think that she was moved to become my mistress because she
wanted to keep me. But she also wanted to keep everything else in her
life,--her position, her ample freedoms and wealth and dignity. Our love
was to be a secret cavern, Endymion's cave. I was ready enough to do
what I could to please her, and for a time I served that secrecy, lied,
pretended, agreed to false addresses, assumed names, and tangled myself
in a net-work of furtive proceedings. These are things that poison and
consume honest love.
You will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the
respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate
world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,--for all passion
that wears a mask is perversion--and that thousands of people of our
sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications,
their true relationships. I do not mean the open offenders, for they are
mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the
shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and
respectable. This underworld is not for us. I wish that I who have
looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the
repetition of my misadventure. We Strattons are daylight men, and if I
work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and
independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because
I know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness,
that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code
to-day.
And I want to tell you too of something altogether unforeseen that
happened to us, and that was this, that from the day that passion
carried us and we became in the narrower sense of the word lovers, all
the wider interests we had in common, our political intentions, our
impersonal schemes, began to pass out of our intercourse. Our situation
closed upon us like a trap and hid the sky. Something more intense had
our attention by the feet, and we used our wings no more. I do not think
that we even had the real happiness and beauty and delight of one
another. Because, I tell you, there is no light upon kiss or embrace
that is not done with pride. I do not know why it should be so, but
people of our race and quality are a little ashamed of mere
gratification in love. Always we seem in my memory to have been
whispering with flushed cheeks, and discussing
interminably--_situation_. Had something betrayed us, might something
betray, was this or that sufficiently cunning? Had we perhaps left a
footmark or failed to burn a note, was the second footman who was
detailed as my valet even now pausing astonished in the brushing of my
clothes with our crumpled secret in his hand? Between myself and the
clear vision of this world about me this infernal net-work of
precautions spread like a veil.
And it was not only a matter of concealments but of positive deceptions.
The figure of Justin comes back to me. It is a curious thing that in
spite of our bitter antagonism and the savage jealousy we were to feel
for one another, there has always been, and there remains now in my
thought of him, a certain liking, a regret at our opposition, a quality
of friendliness. His broad face, which the common impression and the
caricaturist make so powerful and eagle-like, is really not a brutal or
heavy face at all. It is no doubt aquiline, after the fashion of an
eagle-owl, the mouth and chin broad and the eyes very far apart, but
there is a minute puckering of the brows which combines with that queer
streak of brown discoloration that runs across his cheek and into the
white of his eyes, to give something faintly plaintive and pitiful to
his expression, an effect enhanced by the dark softness of his eyes.
They are gentle eyes; it is absurd to suppose them the eyes of a
violently forceful man. And indeed they do not belie Justin. It is not
by vehemence or pressure that his wealth and power have been attained;
it is by the sheer detailed abundance of his mind. In that queer big
brain of his there is something of the calculating boy and not a little
of the chess champion; he has a kind of financial gift, he must be rich,
and grows richer. What else is there for him to do? How many times have
I not tried to glance carelessly at his face and scrutinize that look in
his eyes, and ask myself was that his usual look, or was it lit by an
instinctive jealousy? Did he perhaps begin to suspect? I had become a
persistent visitor in the house, he might well be jealous of such minor
favors as she showed me, for with him she talked but little and shared
no thoughts. His manner with her was tinctured by an habituated despair.
They were extraordinarily polite and friendly with one another....
I tried a hundred sophistications of my treachery to him. I assured
myself that a modern woman is mistress and owner of herself; no chattel,
and so forth. But he did not think so, and neither she nor I were
behaving as though we thought so. In innumerable little things we were
doing our best tacitly to reassure him. And so you see me shaking hands
with this man, affecting an interest in his topics and affairs, staying
in his house, eating his food and drinking his wine, that I might be the
nearer to his wife. It is not the first time that has been done in the
world, there are esoteric codes to justify all I did; I perceive there
are types of men to whom such relationships are attractive by the very
reason of their illicit excitement. But we Strattons are honest people,
there is no secretive passion in our blood; this is no game for us;
never you risk the playing of it, little son, big son as you will be
when you read this story. Perhaps, but I hope indeed not, this may reach
you too late to be a warning, come to you in mid-situation. Go through
with it then, inheritor of mine, and keep as clean as you can, follow
the warped honor that is still left to you--and if you can, come out of
the tangle....
It is not only Justin haunts the memories of that furtive time, but
Rachel More. I see her still as she was then, a straight, white-dressed
girl with big brown eyes that regarded me now with perplexity, now with
a faint dismay. I still went over to see her, and my manner had changed.
I had nothing to say to her now and everything to hide. Everything
between us hung arrested, and nothing could occur to make an end.
I told Mary I must cease my visits to the Mores. I tried to make her
feel my own sense of an accumulating cruelty to Rachel. "But it explains
away so much," she said. "If you stop going there--everyone will talk.
Everything will swing round--and point here."
"Rachel!" I protested.
"No," she said, overbearing me, "you must keep on going to Ridinghanger.
You must. You must." ...
For a long time I had said nothing to Mary of the burthen these
pretences were to me; it had seemed a monstrous ingratitude to find the
slightest flaw in the passionate love and intimacy she had given me. But
at last the divergence of our purposes became manifest to us both. A
time came when we perceived it clearly and discussed it openly. I have
still a vivid recollection of a golden October day when we had met at
the edge of the plantation that overlooks Bearshill. She had come
through the gardens into the pine-wood, and I had jumped the rusty
banked stream that runs down the Bearshill valley, and clambered the
barbed wire fence. I came up the steep bank and through a fringe of
furze to where she stood in the shade; I kissed her hand, and discovered
mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was
dripping blood. "Mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed
with my arm held aloof.
We sat down side by side upon the warm pine needles that carpeted the
sand, and she made a mothering fuss about my petty wound, and bound it
in my handkerchief. We looked together across the steep gorge at the
blue ridge of trees beyond. "Anyone," she said, "might have seen us this
minute."
"I never thought," I said, and moved a foot away from her.
"It's too late if they have," said she, pulling me back to her. "Over
beyond there, that must be Hindhead. Someone with a telescope----!"
"That's less credible," I said. And it occurred to me that the grey
stretch of downland beyond must be the ridge to the west of
Ridinghanger.
"I wish," I said, "it didn't matter. I wish I could come and go and
fear nobody--and spend long hours with you--oh! at our ease."
"Now," she said, "we spend short hours. I wonder if I would like----
It's no good, Stephen, letting ourselves think of things that can't be.
Here we are. Kiss that hand, my lover, there, just between wrist and
thumb--the little hollow. Yes, exactly there."
But thoughts had been set going in my mind. "Why," I said presently,
"should you always speak of things that can't be? Why should we take all
this as if it were all that there could be? I want long hours. I want
you to shine all the day through on my life. Now, dear, it's as if the
sun was shown ever and again, and then put back behind an eclipse. I
come to you half-blinded, I go away unsatisfied. All the world is dark
in between, and little phantom _yous_ float over it."
She rested her cheek on her hand and looked at me gravely.
"You are hard to satisfy, brother heart," she said.
"I live in snatches of brightness and all the rest of life is waiting
and thinking and waiting."
"What else is there? Haven't we the brightness?"
"I want you," I said. "I want _you_ altogether."
"After so much?"
"I want the more. Mary, I want you to come away with me. No, listen!
this life--don't think I'm not full of the beauty, the happiness, the
wonder---- But it's a suspense. It doesn't go on. It's just a dawn,
dear, a splendid dawn, a glory of color and brightness and freshness and
hope, and--no sun rises. I want the day. Everything else has stopped
with me and stopped with you. I do nothing with my politics now,--I
pretend. I have no plans in life except plans for meeting you and again
meeting you. I want to go on, I want to go on with you and take up work
and the world again--you beside me. I want you to come out of all this
life--out of all this immense wealthy emptiness of yours----"
"Stop," she said, "and listen to me, Stephen."
She paused with her lips pressed together, her brows a little knit.
"I won't," she said slowly. "I am going on like this. I and you are
going to be lovers--just as we are lovers now--secret lovers. And I am
going to help you in all your projects, hold your party together--for
you will have a party--my house shall be its centre----"
"But Justin----"
"He takes no interest in politics. He will do what pleases me."
I took some time before I answered. "You don't understand how men feel,"
I said.
She waited for what else I had to say. I lay prone, and gathered
together and shaped and reshaped a little heap of pine needles. "You
see---- I can't do it. I want you."
She gripped a handful of my hair, and tugged hard between each word.
"Haven't you got me?" she asked between her teeth. "What more _could_
you have?"
"I want you openly."
She folded her arms beneath her. "_No_," she said.
For a little while neither of us spoke.
"It's the trouble of the deceit?" she asked.
"It's--the deceit."
"We can stop all that," she said.