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