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“Yes,” said Britten. “That's all very well—”

I interrupted him. “I know there's a case—I'm beginning to think it a valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and think and act—untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a cage by itself!” I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him. “This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and wipe it?—damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I will!”

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. “That's all very well, Remington,” he said. “You mean to go.”

He stopped and began again. “If you didn't know you were in the wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you.”

He swung round upon his swivel at me. “Remington,” he said, “have you forgotten the immense things our movement means?”

I thought. “Perhaps I am rhetorical,” I said.

“But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now—even now! Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go on—perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You know, Remington—you KNOW.”

I thought and went back to his earlier point. “If I am rhetorical, at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the implications of our aims—very splendid, very remote. But just now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going out of this—for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine—that excites them! When I think of the things these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a fire—ends clean. I'm going for love, Britten—if I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I've been a cold man—I've led a rhetorical life—you hit me with that word!—I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick thing—a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'm not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten—there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or achievements in the world.... I made her what she is—as I never made Margaret. I've made her—I've broken her.... I'm going with my own woman. The rest of my life and England, and so forth, must square itself to that....”

For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.

I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. “This man goes on doing first-rate stuff,” I said. “I hope you will keep him going.”

He did not answer for a moment or so. “I'll keep him going,” he said at last with a sigh.

5

I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind....

“Certainly,” she says, “I want to hear from you, but I do not want to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with. Something I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you—but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Then perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING for the world—had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly at loose ends....

“We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you and your schemes....

“After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...

“It is just as though you were wilfully dead....

“Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe impossible....

“Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood away from. You let my first repugnances repel you....

“It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATE you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time, thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life, when clearly I have understood so little of yours. But I am savage—savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.

“Oh, why—why did you give things up?

“No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great purposes. They ARE great purposes....

“If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength you had—then indeed I feel I could let you go—you and your young mistress.... All that matters so little to me....