conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.
Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and
falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed. Together in our
secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it
was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to
snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light,
familiar touch.
Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always
meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning-and then we had
to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and
go back to this or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of
idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.
It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and
over again, and each time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be
very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people
who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable
things together. We had achieved-I give the ugly phrase that
expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind-"illicit
intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our
style. But where were we to end?…
Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we
could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the
glow of our cell blinded us… I wonder what might have
happened if at that time we had given it up… We propounded
it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering
passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity…
Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from
all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in
the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a
little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful. With
imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that
realisation is inevitable. We hadn't thought of that before-it
isn't natural to think of that before. We hadn't known. There is
no literature in English dealing with such things.
There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in
their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first
bright perfection of our relations. For a time these developing
phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us,
little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid
and luminous cell.
8
The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not
trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be
quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge
stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.
For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a
comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.
We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet
been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist
and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was
definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for
the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large
extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much
one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I
was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-
Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance
at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the
seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal
majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.
The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible
Socialist candidate were providential interpositions. I think,
however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to
fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going
to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until
the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a
battlefield as a hoarding. And so it was the Endowment of
Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English
politics.
Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the
Family," he said.
"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said;
"is that queer?"
"Not when you explain it-but they won't let you explain it. And
about marriage-?"
"I'm all right about marriage-trust me."
"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather
inconsiderately…
They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the
HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I
spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy