THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a

desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel

kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,

with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which

fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would

turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk

all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of

the day. In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a

savage. She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret

lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long

ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the

constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that

unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a

man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude

for my welfare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked. We

discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history,

pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.

She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly

sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a

girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt

there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless

place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not

have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!

She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with

me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little

undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.

I favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At

that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of

passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It

seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship

in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher,

and friend. People smiled indulgently-even Margaret smiled

indulgently-at our attraction for one another.

Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays-among easy-going,

liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm,

as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never

supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the

friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we

kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it

did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it

wasn't there.

Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and

tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.

I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should

have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.

It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for

the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and

fresh with the new sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking

with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of

the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the

daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees,

and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our

own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay

window. There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed

the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some comments upon the

spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it

had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having

it out with me.

I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel

interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She bad been lying prone on

the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully,

and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I

turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear

cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight

and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something-

an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical

feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of

tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life

another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my

very heart.

Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned

back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her

intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.

From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.

Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that

this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told

how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at

my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where

there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-

making. I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a

girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's

daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her-wouldn't DO,"

and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the

world. Perhaps that is the way to live. Perhaps there is no other

method than this effectual annihilation of half-and the most

sympathetic and attractive half-of the human beings in the world,

so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. Iam quite convinced

anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into

the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an

invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is

no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women are to go so far

together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go,

without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the

basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the

liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to

love, then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept

apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of

lovers.

Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into

the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more

urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiabledesire that

comes to a young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of

that unfolding. She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and

watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the

substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems

instinctive in a natural-minded girl. There was even an engagement-

amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities. I

never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair,

to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy. She

struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself,

and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became silent

about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for

all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and

me than I was to know for several years to come.

We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but

we kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she

wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to

say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her-though I

combined it with one or two other engagements-somewhere in

February. Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make

journeys for her.

But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There

was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;

the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.

A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously

to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute

of chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one

or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.

We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.

C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of

Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who

was in a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a

game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was

impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration

possible in a rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember,

to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of

Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the

Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.

"Last months at Oxford," she said.

"And then?" I asked.

"I'm coming to London," she said.

"To write?"

She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that

quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to

work with you. Why shouldn't I?"