第81章 THE FOURTH(8)

That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship.But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come between.One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the possibility of such love between us.I may have done so again and again.But I doubt it very strongly.I don't think I ever thought of such aspects.I had no more sense of any danger between us, seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird.Isabel came into my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous experiences of womanhood.They were not, as I have laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class.I thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage.The shrine Ihad made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly empty.But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation or interested contempt.She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.

With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure femininity.She was my perfect friend.Could I have foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such friends.

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions.She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young animal.She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me.She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me.She says now she loved me always from the beginning.I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her mind those days.I used to find her regarding me with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring, speculative, but singularly untroubled....

5

Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo.The excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out.The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: "Nine hundred and seventy-six."My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six would have meant something entirely different."Nine hundred and seventy-six!" said Margaret."They didn't expect three hundred.""Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a paper."It means a big turnover.Two dozen short of a thousand, you know."A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into the room.

Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl."Got you in!" she said."It's been no end of a lark.""And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive.""Now you must go and be constructive," she said.

"You've got to live here," she added.

"By Jove! yes," I said."We'll have to house hunt.""I shall read all your speeches."

She hesitated.

"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not exactly the thing she was meaning to say.

"They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in her face.

"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the balcony.

"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly"Oh, RATHER!" said I.

The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.

"It's all over," he said, " and you've won.Say all the nice things you can and say them plainly."I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swaying people.The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered by a little booing.Down in one corner of the square a fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a speech could not instantly check."Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!"and then a brief "boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers.The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and instantly sank to peace.

"Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.

"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time Iremember hearing that memorable war-cry.

"Three cheers for Mrs.Remington!"

"Mrs.Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar and reiterated cries of "Speech!"Then silence came with a startling swiftness.