"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it"s too much to give--too much altogether.... Children get into a woman"s brain--when she mustn"t have them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the child we might have now!--the little creature with soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn"t I given life? I can hear it in the night.... The world is full of such little ghosts, dear lover--little things that asked for life and were refused. They clamour to me. It"s like a little fist beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman and your lover!..."
2
But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clinging pa.s.sionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn"t as if we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn"t altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn"t want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wanted children indeed pa.s.sionately, but children with every helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude.
And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us....
I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom of action."
Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we knew not how--a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London pa.s.sed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.
It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity.
It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done.
Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring in.... It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of compet.i.tion in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters....
I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly one"s confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the a.s.sault, get it out into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face.
Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead. "By G.o.d!" I cried, and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against us.
For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.
Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing,"
and found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their spider"s web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-headed man. "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with the writing!"
She revealed astonishing knowledge.
For a time I couldn"t for the life of me discover her sources. I had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of our breach. "Of course!" said I, "Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret"s manifestly in a state of hot indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same time I didn"t want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn"t for any man"s kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were looked after with an efficiency altogether surpa.s.sing mine. And Altiora, I"ve no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to the bottom of it,--it must have been a queer duologue. She read Isabel"s careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn"t ashamed to use this information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in any public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man. She knew she was behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse.
She"d got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her information was irresistible. And she set to work at it marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to stop her. She wouldn"t listen, she wouldn"t think, she denied and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn"t only, I think, that she couldn"t bear our political and social influence; she also--I realised at that interview couldn"t bear our loving. It seemed to her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable. While such things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
I"ve the vividest memory of that call of mine. She"d just come in and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn"t suit her and was muddy about the skirts; she"d a cold in her head and sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don"t want a smashing up,--part!
You two have got to be parted. You"ve got never to see each other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We"re not circulating stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. You misjudged him altogether."...
I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn"t say where he had got his facts, he wouldn"t admit he had told any one. When I gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM. He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. I"ve still the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous ugly hands.
"I can a.s.sure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can a.s.sure you we"ve done everything to shield you--everything."...
3
Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. I sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.
"The Baileys don"t intend to let this drop," I said. "They mean that every one in London is to know about it."
"I know."
"Well!" I said.
"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it"s no good waiting for things to overtake us; we"re at the parting of the ways."
"What are we to do?"
"They won"t let us go on."
"d.a.m.n them!"
"They are ORGANISING scandal."
"It"s no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they have overtaken us." I turned on her. "What do you want to do?"
"Everything," she said. "Keep you and have our work. Aren"t we Mates?"
"We can"t."
"And we can"t!"
"I"ve got to tell Margaret," I said.
"Margaret!"
"I can"t bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it. I"ve been wincing about Margaret secretly--"
"I know. You"ll have to tell her--and make your peace with her."
She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
"We"ve had some good times, Master;" she said, with a sigh in her voice.
And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
"We haven"t much time left," she said.
"Shall we bolt?" I said.
"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
"And that?" And her head indicated Westminster. "No!"
I said no more of bolting.
"We"ve got to screw ourselves up to surrender," she said.
"Something."