THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

8

I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I

passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and

unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier

encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become

crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the

subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of

interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping

into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this

memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what

led to them and joined them together. And they are all mixed up

with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits

of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered

misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for Margaret

were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.

It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same

time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds

streams of thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same

time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person

quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to

level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had

no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret

was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to

certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to

matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of

vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from

her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive;

she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy,

confirmatory action.

I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I

seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I

would state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."

I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no

answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her

blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."

I admired her appearance tremendously but-I can only express it by

saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always

delectably done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears,

and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue

velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light,

the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful. And it was

clear to me that I made her happy.

My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling

at last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed

to offer me something…

She stood in my mind for goodness-and for things from which it

seemed to me my hold was slipping.

She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition

in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the

career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.

All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather

ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a

shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my

darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I could understand clearly

that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political

thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all

the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.

Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted

disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen

in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl

haunted me persistently. I would seemyself again and again sitting

amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while

her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended

meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this

was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any

permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous

degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled

by any ordered will.

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those

Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!

There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I

ought to have thought!"…

How did I get to it?"… I would ransack the phases of my

development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the

last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to

find some disorganising error…

I was also involved at that time-I find it hard to place these

things in the exact order of their dates because they were so

disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life-in an

intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated

intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her

husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we

quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and

jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of

our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable

interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,

except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us

back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and

unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality

of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions

against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in

illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent

irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine

and beautiful into a net-into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,

this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had

made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of

our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst

incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of

bodily love and wasted them…

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting

entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I

had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the

Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt

that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a

harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not

doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its

nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had

gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of

false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt

to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of

profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated with

moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I

was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were

times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.

Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three

and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but

myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse

intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied

five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that

might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those

incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was

losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in

life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-

mastering me and all my will to rule and make… And the

strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a

world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red

like scars inflamed…

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her

whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to

her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,

poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE

angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!

I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted

a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see

her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental

vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the

Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into

relief and made a grace of every weakness.

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one

talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental

quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging

the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are

times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground

she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency

at each extreme. But in neither phase could I find it easy to make

love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I

talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little

puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and

in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make

confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest

outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.