steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of
smoke reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a
marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a
mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details,
minutely fine.
As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, Iam back
there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old
desk. I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is
a green shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and
letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the
shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a
rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window seat black in the
darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window. How
often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from me
slowly out of sight. The people were black animalculae by day,
clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom
face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and
shade.
I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work.
Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful
of time until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp
to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower
Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with the dawn.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE BESETTING OF SEX
1
Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But Iam concerned
with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a
contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the
social organism in relation to that man. To tell my story at all I
have to simplify. I have given now the broad lines of my political
development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to
the conception of a constructive aristocracy. I have tried to set
that out in the form of a man discovering himself. Incidentally
that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife. One
has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two
different languages and coming to an understanding. But Margaret
and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my
own, diverged.
I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended
for me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me
up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement,
tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in
which these interests break upon the life of a young man under
contemporary conditions. I do not think my lot was a very
exceptional one. I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates,
but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small
families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I
was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were encounters of
sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them
things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish
disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had
passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time
Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and
so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a
little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She
didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from
my world… And then came this secret separation…
Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development
of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to
have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I
thought these things were over. I went about my career with
Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly
strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished
sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would
not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest
degree if we had.
And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and
her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life
returned. The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its
invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy. I have already
compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in
his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these
high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the
beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and
woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the
light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting,
demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I
feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my
time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere
physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she
is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to
the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a
thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came to me
and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once
trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest,
most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,
explicitness of understanding…
2
In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed
either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow
they didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they"
were, had to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was