THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.

The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find

it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed

pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply

that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been

wearing down unperceived.

And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the

cycle of nature, like the onset of spring-a sharp brightness, an

uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters

with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the

earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told

me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all

she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers',

and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing

amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately

possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to

happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge

generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.

No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same

quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a

remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt-and the odd things

it seemed to open to her.

"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I

suppose every woman does."

She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."

This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to

these things. "Some one presently will-solve that," I said.

"Some one will perhaps."

I was silent.

"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have

to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master… I'll be

sorry to give them up."

"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he

should be-oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts

of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas… You

can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."

"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently

I've begun to doubt about it."

I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and

understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each

other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon

after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,

with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had

happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any

declaration. We just assumed the new footing…

It was a day early in that year-I think in January, because there

was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other

people had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression

of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very

much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the

Tropical House. But I also remember very vividly looking at certain

orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not

have been there. It is a curious thing that I do not remember we

made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as

though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been

patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy between

us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and

wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes. We wanted to

know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in

the most perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession

of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very

little passion. But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we

faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It was as if we had

taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like

people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.

I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the

ordinary observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous

contrast with all that really went on between us. I suppose there I

should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl

succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur

to us that there was any personal inequality between us. I knew her

for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison

cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her

mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction

wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from

little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile,

so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds

we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of

joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to

discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.

Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all

the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances

of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had

left not a shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate

love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with

the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out

for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and

the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings

of teachers, and all the social and religious influences that had

been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of

conviction. The code had failed with us altogether. We didn't for

a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for

all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.

Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people,

and particularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality

hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They

may render it lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There

are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its

prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly

suppressions. You may, if you choose, silence the admission of this

in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it

working out in lives. People come up to the great moments of

passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really

civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be

unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customs that

have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous

spirits are disposed to despise.

Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are

trying to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush"

without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything

about love and marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in

enforced darknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient

tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We

affect a tremendous and cultivated shyness and delicacy about

imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What

did ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a great desire,

robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of

love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the

disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in

the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the

effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit by the

intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,

irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We

might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a

sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions

to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.

Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive

terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but

neither Isabel nor I are timid people.

We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores

of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it

were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing

against it. And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love

in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep

everything to ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one

persistent obstacle that mattered to us-the haunting presence of

Margaret.

And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people

scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to

ourselves. Love will out. All the rest of this story is the

chronicle of that. Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love. It

is just exactly the point people do not understand.