scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that
we did not at least touch upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I
have become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem
between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to
solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way..
.. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves
until we were something representative and general. She was
womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."
"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.
"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have
turned back from America."
"I'm glad we did it," she said. "Don't think I repent."
I looked at her.
"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to
her life in saying it.
I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us
then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible
for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the
scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow
such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of
marriage. We criticised the current code, how muddled and
conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and
concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of
women. "It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said;
for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose
dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right in
the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day
must practise a tainted goodness."
These questions need discussion-a magnificent frankness of
discussion-if any standards are again to establish an effective
hold upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already,
will never hold any one worth holding-longer than they held us.
Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,-
the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its
purpose. "You and I, Isabel," I said, "have always been a little
disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes
to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate
strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish humbugs would leave duty
alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime. That's where the
real mischief comes in. Passion can always contrive to clothe
itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That carried us. But for
all its mean associations there is this duty…
"Don't we come rather late to it?"
"Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do."
"It's queer to think of now," said Isabel. "Who could believe we
did all we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who
could believe we thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it
all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness
in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love… Master, there's
not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will
credit. And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our
story…
"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked-"shield
you-knowing of… THIS?"
"I'm certain. I don't understand-just as I don't understand
Shoesmith, but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is
just thin air to us. They've got something we haven't got.
Assurances? I wonder."…
Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life
might be with him.
"He's good," she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic.
He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You
can't say a thing against him or I-except that something-something
in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice-fails for
me. Why don't I love him?-he's a better man than you! Why don't
you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's
the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,-a gentleman.
You're your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will
trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time…"
We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It
seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to
the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held
between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder
half the substance of their lives. We feltourselves crushed and
beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in
the service of jealousy. "The mass of people don't feel these
things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said. "Is it
because they're different in grain, or educated out of some
primitive instinct?"
"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more
than the gateway," I said. "Lust and then jealousy; their simple
conception-and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in
hand…"