THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

3

Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.

I seem to remembermyself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a

handful of papers-galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose-on

my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and

all that it might mean to me.

It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so

elusive as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her

gripped me, fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing

filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no

doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It made it none the

less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was

transitory, and bound to go out of my life again. It is no good

trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is

gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a

multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich

curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly

weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear

preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much

deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.

Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the

train: "Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I

can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind…

If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I

could have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage

and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had

been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation-no telling

is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and

passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel

things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we

had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always

mattered enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as

badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would have hunted

shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never have had

the patience and readiness for one another we two had. I had never

for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of

understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She

gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious

effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that

it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners

of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to

explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice

heard speaking to any one-heard speaking in another room-pleased

my ears.

She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent

the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of

all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to

London for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady

Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she

wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every

one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her

sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a

scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the

undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly

the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,

developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She

was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but

she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the

management of elderly distinguished men. It was an odd experience

to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room

and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a

shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and

lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.

For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she

professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my

views and sought me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY

began to link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and

sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's

articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory

scalpel. Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade. Her

writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the

phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little

shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at

Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those

days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.

We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or

so, and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things

were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being

innocently mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a

monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to

have her as my pupil. Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at

that distance for a long time-until within a year of the Handitch

election.

After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for

comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less

formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their

cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with

them in Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men

who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the

frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her

kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck

up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking

to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked

upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had

some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of

him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with

her work. If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's

writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our

talks, or the close intimacy we had together.