Chapter 32

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!”

I said no more of bolting.

“We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender,” she said.

“Something.”

“A lot.”

“Master,” she said, “it isn't all sex and stuff between us?”

“No!”

“I can't give up the work. Our work's my life.”

We came upon another long pause.

“No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers--if we simply do,” she said.

“We shouldn't.”

“We've got to do something more parting than that.”

I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming to something.

“I could marry Shoesmith,” she said abruptly.

“But--” I objected.

“He knows. It wasn't fair. I told him.”

“Oh, that explains,” I said. “There's been a kind of sulkiness--But--you told him?”

She nodded. “He's rather badly hurt,” she said. “He's been a good friend to me. He's curiously loyal. But something, something he said one day--forced me to let him know.... That's been the beastliness of all this secrecy. That's the beastliness of all secrecy. You have to spring surprises on people. But he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd already suspected. He wants me very badly to marry him....”

“But you don't want to marry him?”

“I'm forced to think of it.”

“But does he want to marry you at that? Take you as a present from the world at large?--against your will and desire?... I don't understand him.”

“He cares for me.”

“How?”

“He thinks this is a fearful mess for me. He wants to pull it straight.”

We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately refused to take up the realities of this proposition.

“I don't want you to marry Shoesmith,” I said at last.

“Don't you like him?”

“Not as your husband.”

“He's a very clever and sturdy person--and very generous and devoted to me.”

“And me?”

“You can't expect that. He thinks you are wonderful--and, naturally, that you ought not to have started this.”

“I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself. I'm quite ready to think it myself.”

“He'd let us be friends--and meet.”

“Let us be friends!” I cried, after a long pause. “You and me!”

“He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, he can go round fighting these rumours, defending us both--and force a quarrel on the Baileys.”

“I don't understand him,” I said, and added, “I don't understand you.”

I was staring at her face. It seemed white and set in the dimness.

“Do you really mean this, Isabel?” I asked.

“What else is there to do, my dear?--what else is there to do at all? I've been thinking day and night. You can't go away with me. You can't smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die than that should happen. Look what you are becoming in the country! Look at all you've built up!--me helping. I wouldn't let you do it if you could. I wouldn't let you--if it were only for Margaret's sake. THIS... closes the scandal, closes everything.”

“It closes all our life together,” I cried.

She was silent.

“It never ought to have begun,” I said.

She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her hands upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.

“My dear,” she said very earnestly, “don't misunderstand me! Don't think I'm retreating from the things we've done! Our love is the best thing I could ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; nothing could ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have had together. Never! You have loved me; you do love me....”

No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one could ever love me as you have loved me, my king. And it's just because it's been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than have a tithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for it's made me, it's all I am--dear, it's years since I began loving you--it's just because of its goodness that I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end in the smashing up of all the big things I understand in you and love in you....

“What is there for us if we keep on and go away?” she went on. “All the big interests in our lives will vanish--everything. We shall become specialised people--people overshadowed by a situation. We shall be an elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone! People will always think of it first when they think of us; all our work and aims will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good enough, dear? Just to specialise.... I think of you. We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, but do we want to spend all our lives defending it and justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you care for Margaret--you care more than you think you do. You have said fine things of her. I've watched you about her. Little things have dropped from you. She's given her life for you; she's nothing without you. You feel that to your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things. Oh, I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love you in relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, another thing worth saving.”

Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into my face. “We've done wrong--and parting's paying. It's time to pay. We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track.... You and I, Master, we've got to be men.”

“Yes,” I said; “we've got to be men.”

4

I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid and clumsy informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from her.

I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in that large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to come home. It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-room; only it was for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the door open so that she would come in to me.

I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in the doorway. “May I come in?” she said.

“Do,” I said, and turned round to her.

“Working?” she said.

“Hard,” I answered. “Where have YOU been?”

“At the Vallerys'. Mr. Evesham was talking about you. They were all talking. I don't think everybody knew who I was. Just Mrs. Mumble I'd been to them. Lord Wardenham doesn't like you.”

“He doesn't.”

“But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then I went on to Park Lane to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's.”

“Yes.”

“Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I came on here. They'd got some writers--and Grant was there.”

“You HAVE been flying round....”

There was a little pause between us.

I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace of her golden-robed body. What gulfs there were between us! “You've been amused,” I said.

“It's been amusing. You've been at the House?”

“The Medical Education Bill kept me.”...

After all, why should I tell her? She'd got to a way of living that fulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd never hear. But all that day and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.

“I want to tell you something,” I said. “I wish you'd sit down for a moment or so.”...

Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.

Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of unusual gravity. She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat down slowly in my armchair.

“What is it?” she said.

I went on awkwardly. “I've got to tell you--something extraordinarily distressing,” I said.

She was manifestly altogether unaware.

“There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently heard of it--about myself--and Isabel.”

“Isabel!”

I nodded.

“What do they say?” she asked.

It was difficult, I found, to speak.

“They say she's my mistress.”

“Oh! How abominable!”

She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our eyes met.

“We've been great friends,” I said.

“Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?” She paused and looked at me. “It's so incredible. How can any one believe it? I couldn't.”

She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression changed to dread. There was a tense stillness for a second, perhaps.

I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful of paper fasteners.

“Margaret,” I said, “I'm afraid you'll have to believe it.”

5

Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was very white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she spoke. “You really mean--THAT?” she said.

I nodded.

“I never dreamt.”

“I never meant you to dream.”

“And that is why--we've been apart?”

I thought. “I suppose it is.”

“Why have you told me now?”

“Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you.”

“Or else it wouldn't have mattered?”

“No.”

She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch her tears. “I am sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I was in love.... I did not understand....”

Presently she asked: “What are you going to do?”

“You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know what you--what you want.”

“You want to leave me?”

“If you want me to, I must.”

“Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this fine movement of yours?”

“No.” I spoke sullenly. “I don't want to leave anything. I want to stay on. I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--have got to drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far things may go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to any revelation--”

She made no answer.

“When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn't unfold--consequences.... People have got hold of these vague rumours.... Directly it reached any one else but--but us two--I saw it had to come to you.”

I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful if she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her and shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get at her, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my movement she moved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort to wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes. “Oh, my Husband!” she sobbed.

“What do you mean to do?” she said, with her voice muffled by her handkerchief.

“We're going to end it,” I said.

Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair beside her and sat down. “You and I, Margaret, have been partners,” I began. “We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't have done it without you. We've made a position, created a work--”

She shook her head. “You,” she said.

“You helping. I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you to have--all that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've made an immense and tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, how different they seemed! My character and accident have conspired--We'll pay--in ourselves, not in our public service.”

I halted again. Margaret remained very still.

“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.”

I looked at her.

“I will never repent,” she said. “Never!” as though she clung to her life in saying it.

I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of marriage. We criticised the current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of women. “It's all like Bromstead when the building came,” I said; for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose dissolving again into chaotic forces. “There is no clear right in the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day must practise a tainted goodness.”

These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective hold upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already, will never hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us. Against every “shalt not” there must be a “why not” plainly put,--the “why not” largest and plainest, the law deduced from its purpose. “You and I, Isabel,” I said, “have always been a little disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish humbugs would leave duty alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime. That's where the real mischief comes in. Passion can always contrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That carried us. But for all its mean associations there is this duty....

“Don't we come rather late to it?”

“Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do.”

“It's queer to think of now,” said Isabel. “Who could believe we did all we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who could believe we thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love.... Master, there's not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our story....

“Does Margaret really want to go on with you?” she asked--“shield you--knowing of... THIS?”

“I'm certain. I don't understand--just as I don't understand Shoesmith, but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is just thin air to us. They've got something we haven't got. Assurances? I wonder.”...