I don't go! Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going
to be much to ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been
thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and over
again from the beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came
back from America-I grant you THAT-but SINCE, there's never been a
step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as
wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend
this way or that and never change. You talk as though Isabel was a
cat one could give to any kind of owner… We two are things
that change and grow and alter all the time. We're-so interwoven
that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples…
You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of
things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us.
You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you
don't know anything."
Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered
to a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put
back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
There was a long pause.
"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for
balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate
them. I saw her yesterday… She's-ill… I'd take her
now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."
"Torture?"
I thought. "Yes."
"For her?"
"There isn't," I said.
"If there was?"
I made no answer.
"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to
stand against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your
lives?"
"No end of things."
"Nothing."
"I don't believe you are right," I said. "I believe we can save
something-"
Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,"
he said.
His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man
has a right to take his hand from the plough!"
He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You
know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended
off for six months-if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of
the way somehow,-until this marriage was all over and settled down
for a year, say-you know then you two could meet, curious, happy,
as friends. Saved! You KNOW it."
I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And
does it matter if we could?"
I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had
not been able to find for myselfalone.
"Iam certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up
this scandal."
He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in
me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of
every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain-as prison
whitewash. Iam convinced that we have got to be public to the
uttermost now-I mean it-until every corner of our world knows this
story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton
Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all
the other stories that have picked man after man out of English
public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong
initiative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should
dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to be
penitent-"
Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. " I lay in bed last night
and went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of
us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last
night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all
I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and
debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I
came to the most beautiful things in life-like peeping Tom of
Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural
manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English
world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it! The
very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the
English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they
call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as
the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable
prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of
pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught-we were mumbled
at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean,
was Pagan beauty-God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and