The New Machiavelli

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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?"

3

Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
I seem to remember myself 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.

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.

5

But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and
a sudden journey to America intervened.

"This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and I am too
big to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility
of being found out! At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost
of parting."

"Just because we may be found out!"

"Just because we may be found out."

"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you.
I'm afraid--I'd be proud."

"Wait till it happens."

There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is
hard to tell who urged and who resisted.

She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY,
and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms;
she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life
possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could
not endure other people for the love of me. . . .

I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to
America that puzzled all my friends.

I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my
strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit
the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among
other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the
world.

Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical
my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to
prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I
crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with
ungovernable sorrow. I wept--tears. It was inexpressibly queer and
ridiculous--and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!

New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things
slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I
remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of
desperate voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself--
no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.
Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that
the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and
everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the
end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to
London.

Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust
and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had
strength to refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the
separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her
jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind--the haunting
perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the
Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour, discretion, the careers of both
of us, became nothing at the thought. I couldn't conceive my life
resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in short, stand it.

I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have
kept upon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted
Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the
world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you
have never wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.

But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the
reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual
happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon
them and a wonder. Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure,
the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, I
can't tell--I can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing
LARK--it's the only word--it seemed to us. The beauty which was the
essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear
justification, eludes statement.

What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties
evaded and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say
that one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart
throb and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand?
Robbed of encompassing love, these things are of no more value than
the taste of good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing
of music,--just sensuality and no more. No one can tell love--we
can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences. Given
love--given mutuality, and one has effected a supreme synthesis and
come to a new level of life--but only those who know can know. This
business has brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever
expected to bear, but even now I will not say that I regret that
wilful home-coming altogether. We loved--to the uttermost. Neither
of us could have loved any one else as we did and do love one
another. It was ours, that beauty; it existed only between us when
we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save
ourselves.

My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme
vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within
me. It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of
it yet except Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in
upon Britten and stood in the doorway.

"GOD!" he said at the sight of me.

"I'm back," I said.

He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his.
Silently I defied him to speak his mind.

"Where did you turn back?" he said at last.

6

I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive
lies to Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her
from Chicago and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to
be on the spot in England for the new session, and that I was coming
back--presently. I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made
a calculated prevarication when I announced my presence in London.
I telephoned before I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She
was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came
back to Radnor Square I had been at home a day.

I remember her return so well.

My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from
my mind much of our long estrangement. Something, too, had changed
in her. I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it
plainly. I came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the
turmoil of her arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened
gladness. It was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar
dark furs that suited her extremely and reinforced the delicate
flush of her sweet face. She held out both her hands to me, and
drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed me.

"So glad you are back, dear," she said. "Oh! so very glad you are
back."

I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too
undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness.
I think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.

"I never knew what it was to be away from you," she said.

I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement.
She put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.

"These are jolly furs," I said.

"I got them for you."

The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage
cab.

"Tell me all about America," said Margaret. "I feel as though you'd
been away six year's."

We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the
fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.
She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I
had expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this
sudden abolition of our distances.

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