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 Iam 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 mindbeing 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