Part 78

Britten shook his head. “Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,” he said.

His indignation rose. “In the middle of life!” he said. “No man has a right to take his hand from the plough!”

He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. “You know, Remington,” he said, “and I know, that if this could be fended off for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down for a year, say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, as friends. Saved! You KNOW it.”

I turned and stared at him. “You're wrong, Britten,” I said. “And does it matter if we could?”

I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not been able to find for myself alone.

“I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this scandal.”

He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.

“It's our duty,” I went on, “to smash now openly in the sight of every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I mean it--until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have picked man after man out of English public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to be penitent--”

Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.

“I'm boiling with indignation,” I said. “I lay in bed last night and went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful things in life--like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we were mumbled at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean, was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and grime!”

“Yes,” said Britten. “That's all very well--”

I interrupted him. “I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think it a valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a cage by itself!” I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him. “This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I will!”

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. “That's all very well, Remington,” he said. “You mean to go.”

He stopped and began again. “If you didn't know you were in the wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you.”

He swung round upon his swivel at me. “Remington,” he said, “have you forgotten the immense things our movement means?”

I thought. “Perhaps I am rhetorical,” I said.

“But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now! Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You know, Remington--you KNOW.”

I thought and went back to his earlier point. “If I am rhetorical, at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going out of this--for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine--that excites them! When I think of the things these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a fire--ends clean. I'm going for love, Britten--if I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I've been a cold man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that word!--I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick thing--a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'm not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or achievements in the world.... I made her what she is--as I never made Margaret. I've made her--I've broken her.... I'm going with my own woman. The rest of my life and England, and so forth, must square itself to that....”

For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.

I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. “This man goes on doing first-rate stuff,” I said. “I hope you will keep him going.”

He did not answer for a moment or so. “I'll keep him going,” he said at last with a sigh.

I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind....

“Certainly,” she says, “I want to hear from you, but I do not want to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with. Something I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you--but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Then perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING for the world--had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly at loose ends....

“We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you and your schemes....

“After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...

“It is just as though you were wilfully dead....

“Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe impossible....

“Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood away from. You let my first repugnances repel you....