THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial

lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and

skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of

the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and

places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the

whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for

the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled

magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made

me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.

There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any

English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas

of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed

chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting

beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well

with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before

I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for

such a temperament as mine.

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared

aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no

exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost

shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help

us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be

very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the

sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of

the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be

glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her

previous Italian journey-fear of the mosquito had driven her mother

across Italy to the westward route-and now she could fill up her

gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in

colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series

delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of

Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.

But since Iam not a man to look at pictures and architectural

effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a

thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping

a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered

familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can

hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace

comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless

satisfaction these things gave her.

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated

person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was

cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of

these things. She was passive, and Iam active. She did not simply

and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for

it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and

lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did

in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to

it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points

me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty

as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal…

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more

beautiful than any picture…

So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases

and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such

things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,

New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned

to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.

Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and

destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had

gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to

me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation

behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England. The judgments

and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles

away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling

things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily

fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and

stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an

exquisite significance struggled for utterance.

We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon,

unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret

would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English

newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and

watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the

little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.

Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the

sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops

that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an

extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she said, are

quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary

looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good

deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender

handle and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply

tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-

dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like

afternoon of it.

I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was

accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the

TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get

hold of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former

paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe-I forget now

upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil

appreciations more and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and

delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.

I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts

like the catspaws before a gale. I was alarmed at these symptoms.

One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light

overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time

through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and

went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.

"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm

restless."

"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.

"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling-I've

never had it before-as though I was getting fat."

"My dear!" she cried.

"I want to do things;-ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil

out of myself."

She watched me thoughtfully.

"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.

Do what?

"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon-and walk

in the mountains-on our way home."

I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."

"Isn't there some walk?"

"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along

the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach

fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got

beyond Malamocco…

A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded

Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards

sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the

gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.

"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.

Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.

"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my

point, "but I have work to do."

She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.

"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have

remembered."

She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said,

almost apologetically.

She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,

like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.

"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has

been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has

been just With You-the time of my life. It's a pity such things

must end. But the world is calling you, dear… I ought not to

have forgotten it. I thought you were resting-and thinking. But

if you are rested.-Would you like us to start to-morrow?"

She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the

moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.