by H. G. Wells
me…
At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel
and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
7
The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to
pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.
We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep
this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps
through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world
about us! Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this
belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the
fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in
love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end
of time. They will continue to believe out of existence every
consideration that separates them until they have come together.
Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.
I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
chiefly Iam telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
have happened to me-me as a sort of sounding board for my world.
The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure
and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to
have done"-so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is
that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the
time for doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little either
of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the
situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or
acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad
people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians-
provocative guardians… And when at last there came a claim
against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the
full tide of passionate intimacy.
I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's
return. She had suddenly presented herself to me like something
dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of
feeling. I was amazed how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt
for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for
me there was such a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and
near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was
my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.
I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel
and putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did.
Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending
what had so freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished
next day at the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the
darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our
resolution again. We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."
Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If Margaret did
not know, then no harm whatever would be done. We tried to sustain
that…
For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell,
magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and
then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that
the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us,
threatening us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore the
injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. I tried to
maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the
now irreparable breach between husband and wife. But I never spoke
of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case. How could
I? The time for that had gone…
Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements
crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be
secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm
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 emerge
nce 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
of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest
exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever
been made up to that time in England. Its effect on the press was
extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space
under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang
myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the
whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the
subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls
within three days. It sold enormously and brought me bushels of
letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone. At
meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long before
polling day Plutus was converted.
"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished
the Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our
side!"
But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was
won. No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by
over fifteen hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from
apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A
renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily
on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives
had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.
I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
train.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
1
To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel
and myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most
successful and enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an
uncongenial start in political life; I had become a considerable
force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly
influential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament with quite
dramatic distinction, and in spite of a certain faltering on the
part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in
our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making
me a power in the party. People were coming to our group,
understandings were developing. It was clear we should play a
prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a
Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world
opened out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape
in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years
ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise
of immense achievement.
And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret
of my relations with Isabel-like a seed that germinates and
thrusts, thrusts relentlessly.
From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her
had been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation.
It had innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we
wanted to be together as much as possible-we were beginning to long
very much for actual living together in the same house, so that one
could come as it were carelessly-unawares-upon the other, busy
perhaps about some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in
the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively sterile passion,
you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as
our individual lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew
an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us. We
brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see
them in each other's light. It is hard to convey that quality of
intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it. I
thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her
possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!-with
the very sound of her voice.
I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going
about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of
her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The
morning of the polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw
her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee rooms.
"Going?" said I.
She nodded.
"Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember-the other
time."
She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. "If I see her smiling
there like a queen by your side-! She did-last time. I
remember." She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face
impatiently. "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool!
…
Good luck, old man, to you! You're going to win. But I don't want
to see the end of it all the same…"
"Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in
the passage…
I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse
with victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's
flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping
about her eyes. I came into the room to her and shut the door.
"You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.
She hugged me closely for a moment.
"My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing-without you-nothing!"
We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold.
"Look!" she said, smiling like winter sunshine. "I've had in all
the morning papers-the pile of them, and you-resounding."
"It's more than I dared hope."
"Or I."
She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was
sobbing in my arms. "The bigger you are-the more you show," she
said-" the more we are parted. I know, I know-"
I held her close to me, making no answer.
Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her
eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down
beside her.
"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the
coals, "when we went love-making."
I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in
my hand and kissed it.
"You've done a great thing this time," she said. "Handitch will
make you."
"It opens big chances," I said. "But why are you weeping, dear
one?"
"Envy," she said, "and love."
"You're not lonely?"
"I've plenty to do-and lots of people."
"Well?"
"I want you."
"You've got me."
She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I want you," she said,
"just as if I had nothing of you. You don't understand-how a woman
wants a man. I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would
be enough. It was nothing-it was just a step across the threshold.
My dear, every moment you are away I ache for you-ache! I want to
be about when it isn't love-making or talk. I want to be doing