as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal…
And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
beautiful than any picture…
So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases
and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such
things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,
New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned
to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.
Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had
gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to
me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation
behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England. The judgments
and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles
away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling
things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily
fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and
stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an
exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon,
unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret
would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English
newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and
watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the
little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.
Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the
sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops
that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an
extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she said, are
quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary
looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good
deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender
handle and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply
tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-
dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like
afternoon of it.
I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the
TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get
hold of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former
paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe-I forget now
upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil
appreciations more and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and
delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.
I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts
like the catspaws before a gale. I was alarmed at these symptoms.
One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time
through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and
went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.
"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm
restless."
"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling-I've
never had it before-as though I was getting fat."
"My dear!" she cried.
"I want to do things;-ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil
out of myself."
She watched me thoughtfully.
"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.
Do what?
"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon-and walk
in the mountains-on our way home."
I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."
"Isn't there some walk?"
"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach
fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got
beyond Malamocco…
A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the
gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.
Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my
point, "but I have work to do."
She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.
"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have
She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said,
almost apologetically.
She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,
like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has
been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has
been just With You-the time of my life. It's a pity such things
must end. But the world is calling you, dear… I ought not to
have forgotten it. I thought you were resting-and thinking. But
if you are rested.-Would you like us to start to-morrow?"
She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
1
Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square,
Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly
adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been
very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions,
white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now
we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging
and-with our Venetian glass as a beginning-furnishing it. We had
been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most
part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and
just precisely where we would put it.
Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine,
and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us,
I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a
consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until
everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent
Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally
intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards
became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."