第130章 THE FIRST(9)

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 emergence from obscurity.