The New Machiavelli


Page 52 of 114



She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.

Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation. “What has held me back,” I said, “is the thought that you could not possibly understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. I have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs. Passion—desire. You see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled—”

She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. “I'm not telling you,” I said, “what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It didn't seem so at first—”

I stopped blankly. “Dirty,” I thought, was the most idiotic choice of words to have made.

I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.

“I drifted into this—as men do,” I said after a little pause and stopped again.

She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.

“Did you imagine,” she began, “that I thought you—that I expected—”

“But how can you know?”

“I know. I do know.”

“But—” I began.

“I know,” she persisted, dropping her eyelids. “Of course I know,” and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.

“All men—” she generalised. “A woman does not understand these temptations.”

I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. ...

“Of course,” she said, hesitating a little over a transparent difficulty, “it is all over and past.”

“It's all over and past,” I answered.

There was a little pause.

“I don't want to know,” she said. “None of that seems to matter now in the slightest degree.”

She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable commonplaces. “Poor dear!” she said, dismissing everything, and put out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in the background—doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable world—telling something in indistinguishable German—I know not what nor why....

I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with tears. She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.

“I have loved you,” she whispered presently, “Oh! ever since we met in Misterton—six years and more ago.”





CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE

1

There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay before us. I was now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had. We called each other “confederate” I remember, and made during our brief engagement a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and work. We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for him from the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer War was so recent that that blessed word “efficiency” echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a memorable oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going in the channels that took it to him—if as a matter of fact it was taken to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that sort. They certainly did their share to keep “efficient” going. Altiora's highest praise was “thoroughly efficient.” We were to be a “thoroughly efficient” political couple of the “new type.” She explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in the world.

I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously focussed upon the ideal of social service.

Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our destination. Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.

“You see,” I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism, “it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits—and to be distracted from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans. For a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like ourselves it's—it's the constant small opportunity of agreeable things.”

“Frittering away,” she says, “time and strength.”

“That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too seriously. We've GOT to take ourselves seriously.”

She endorses my words with her eyes.

“I feel I can do great things with life.”

“I KNOW you can.”

“But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our scheme.”



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