第127章 THE FIRST(6)

Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are trying to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush"without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything about love and marriage at all.Doubt and knowledge creep about in enforced darknesses and silences.We are living upon an ancient tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed.We affect a tremendous and cultivated shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance.What ensues? What did ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a great desire, robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers.It is only in the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the effectual case against us.The social prohibition lit by the intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous, irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery.We might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the prospect.It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.

Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid people.

We weighed what was against us.We decided just exactly as scores of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it.And so we took our first step.With the hunger of love in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything to ourselves.That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that mattered to us--the haunting presence of Margaret.

And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves.Love will out.All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that.Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love.It is just exactly the point people do not understand.

5

But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a sudden journey to America intervened.

"This thing spells disaster," I said."You are too big and I am too big to attempt this secrecy.Think of the intolerable possibility of being found out! At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost of parting.""Just because we may be found out!"

"Just because we may be found out."

"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you.

I'm afraid--I'd be proud."

"Wait till it happens."

There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us.It is hard to tell who urged and who resisted.

She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms;she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could not endure other people for the love of me....

I fled absurdly.That is the secret of the futile journey to America that puzzled all my friends.

I ran away from Isabel.I took hold of the situation with all my strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the world.

Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how Icrossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow.I wept--tears.It was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous--and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!

New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, Iremember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity.I did the queerest things to distract myself--no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.

Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to London.

Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength to refrain.It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind--the haunting perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it.Honour, discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the thought.I couldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel.I couldn't, in short, stand it.

I don't even excuse my return.It is inexcusable.I ought to have kept upon my way westward--and held out.I couldn't.I wanted Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied.Perhaps you have never wanted anything like that.I went straight to her.

But here I come to untellable things.There is no describing the reality of love.The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder.Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, Ican't tell--I can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing LARK--it's the only word--it seemed to us.The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear justification, eludes statement.