THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 Iamfeeling

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. Iam 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. Iam 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 Iam 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 Iam 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 arc 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

myselfalone…

"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 Iam 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…"