part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making

soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to

convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural

insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our

minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs

who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The

impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of

impossible utterances. It was with a real quality of rescue that our

hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table,

and to introduce me to mine. "You shall have him again on your other

side," she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me

as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider I was.

We talked very little at dinner. Both of us I think were quite unequal

to the occasion. Whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of

us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting

hour side by side. I began to remember old happenings with an

astonishing vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand I had

kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed

off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. Was she too

remembering? But I perhaps had changed altogether....

"Why did you go away as you did?" she asked abruptly, when for a moment

we were isolated conversationally. "Why did you never write?"

She had still that phantom lisp.

"What else could I do?"

She turned away from me and answered the man on her left, who had just

addressed her....

When the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent

things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent of

unspoken intimacies. We discussed something; I think Lady Tarvrille's

flowers and the Cape Flora and gardens. She told me she had a Japanese

garden with three Japanese gardeners. They were wonderful little men to

watch. "Humming-bird gardeners," she called them. "They wear their

native costume."

"We are your neighbors in Surrey," she said, going off abruptly from

that. "We are quite near to your father."

She paused with that characteristic effect of deliberation in her

closed lips. Then she added: "I can see the trees behind your father's

house from the window of my room."

"Yes," I said. "You take all our southward skyline."

She turned her face to me with the manner of a great lady adding a new

acquaintance to her collection. But her eyes met mine very steadily and

intimately. "Mr. Stratton," she said--it was the first time in her life

she had called me that--"when we come back to Surrey I want you to come

and see me and tell me of all the things you are going to do. Will you?"

§ 3

That meeting, that revival, must have been late in November or early in

December. Already by that time I had met your mother. I write to you,

little son, not to you as you are now, but to the man you are someday to

be. I write to understand myself, and, so far as I can understand, to

make you understand. So that I want you to go back with me for a time

into the days before your birth, to think not of that dear spirit of

love who broods over you three children, that wise, sure mother who

rules your life, but of a young and slender girl, Rachel More, younger

then than you will be when at last this story comes into your hands. For

unless you think of her as being a girl, if you let your present

knowledge of her fill out this part in our story, you will fail to

understand the proportions of these two in my life. So I shall write of

her here as Rachel More, as if she were someone as completely

dissociated from yourself as Lady Mary; as if she were someone in the

story of my life who had as little to do with yours.

I had met her in September. The house my father lived in is about twelve

miles away from your mother's home at Ridinghanger, and I was taken over

by Percy Restall in his motor-car. Restall had just become a convert to

this new mode of locomotion, and he was very active with a huge,

malignant-looking French car that opened behind, and had a kind of poke

bonnet and all sorts of features that have since disappeared from the

automobile world. He took everyone that he could lay hands upon for

rides,--he called it extending their range, and he called upon everyone

else to show off the car; he was responsible for more introduction and

social admixture in that part of Surrey than had occurred during the

previous century. We punctured in the Ridinghanger drive, Restall did

his own repairs, and so it was we stayed for nearly four hours and

instead of a mere caller I became a familiar friend of the family.

Your mother then was still not eighteen, a soft white slip of being,

tall, slender, brown-haired and silent, with very still deep dark eyes.

She and your three aunts formed a very gracious group of young women

indeed; Alice then as now the most assertive, with a gay initiative and

a fluent tongue; Molly already a sun-brown gipsy, and Norah still a

pig-tailed thing of lank legs and wild embraces and the pinkest of swift

pink blushes; your uncle Sidney, with his shy lank moodiness, acted the

brotherly part of a foil. There were several stray visitors, young men

and maidens, there were always stray visitors in those days at

Ridinghanger, and your grandmother, rosy and bright-eyed, maintained a

gentle flow of creature comforts and kindly but humorous observations. I

do not remember your grandfather on this occasion; probably he wasn't

there.

There was tea, and we played tennis and walked about and occasionally

visited Restall, who was getting dirtier and dirtier, and crosser and

crosser at his repairs, and spreading a continually more remarkable

assemblage of parts and instruments over the grass about him. He looked

at last more like a pitch in the Caledonian market than a decent country

gentleman paying an afternoon call. And then back to more tennis and

more talk. We fell into a discussion of Tariff Reform as we sat taking

tea. Two of the visitor youths were strongly infected by the new

teachings which were overshadowing the outlook of British Imperialism.

Some mean phrase about not conquering Africa for the German bagman, some

ugly turn of thought that at a touch brought down Empire to the level of

a tradesman's advantage, fell from one of them, and stirred me to sudden

indignation. I began to talk of things that had been gathering in my

mind for some time.

I do not know what I said. It was in the vein of my father's talk no

doubt. But I think that for once I may have been eloquent. And in the

midst of my demand for ideals in politics that were wider and deeper

than artful buying and selling, that looked beyond a vulgar aggression

and a churl's dread and hatred of foreign things, while I struggled to

say how great and noble a thing empire might be, I saw Rachel's face.

This, it was manifest, was a new kind of talk to her. Her dark eyes were

alight with a beautiful enthusiasm for what I was trying to say, and

for what in the light of that glowing reception I seemed to be.

I felt that queer shame one feels when one is taken suddenly at the full

value of one's utmost expressions. I felt as though I had cheated her,

was passing myself off for something as great and splendid as the Empire

of my dreams. It is hard to dissociate oneself from the fine things to

which one aspires. I stopped almost abruptly. Dumbly her eyes bade me go

on, but when I spoke again it was at a lower level....

That look in Rachel's eyes remained with me. My mind had flashed very

rapidly from the realization of its significance to the thought that if

one could be sure of that, then indeed one could pitch oneself high.

Rachel, I felt, had something for me that I needed profoundly, without

ever having known before that I needed it. She had the supreme gifts of

belief and devotion; in that instant's gleam it seemed she held them out

to me.

Never before in my life had it seemed credible to me that anyone could

give me that, or that I could hope for such a gift of support and

sacrifice. Love as I had known it had been a community and an alliance,

a frank abundant meeting; but this was another kind of love that shone

for an instant and promised, and vanished shyly out of sight as I and

Rachel looked at one another.

Some interruption occurred. Restall came, I think, blackened by

progress, to drink a cup of tea and negotiate the loan of a kitchen

skewer. A kitchen skewer it appeared was all that was needed to complete

his reconstruction in the avenue. Norah darted off for a kitchen skewer,

while Restall drank. And then there was a drift to tennis, and Rachel

and I were partners. All this time I was in a state of startled

attention towards her, full of this astounding impression that something

wonderful and unprecedented had flowed out from her towards my life,

full too of doubts now whether that shining response had ever occurred,

whether some trick of light and my brain had not deceived me. I wanted

tremendously to talk to her, and did not know how to begin in any

serious fashion. Beyond everything I wanted to see again that deep onset

of belief....

"Come again," said your grandmother to me, "come again!" after she had

tried in vain to make Restall stay for an informal supper. I was all for

staying, but Restall said darkly, "There are the Lamps."

"But they will be all right," said Mrs. More.

"I can't trust 'em," said Restall, with a deepening gloom. "Not after

_that_." The motor-car looked self-conscious and uncomfortable, but said

nothing by way of excuse, and Restall took me off in it like one whose

sun has set for ever. "I wouldn't be surprised," said Restall as we went

down the drive, "if the damned thing turned a somersault. It might

do--anything." Those were the brighter days of motoring.

The next time I went over released from Restall's limitations, and

stayed to a jolly family supper. I found remarkably few obstacles in my

way to a better acquaintance with Rachel. You see I was an entirely

eligible and desirable young man in Mrs. More's eyes....

§ 4

When I recall these long past emotions again, I am struck by the

profound essential difference between my feelings for your mother and

for Mary. They were so different that it seems scarcely rational to me

that they should be called by the same name. Yet each was love,

profoundly deep and sincere. The contrast lies, I think, in our relative

ages, and our relative maturity; that altered the quality of all our

emotions. The one was the love of a man of six-and-twenty, exceptionally

seasoned and experienced and responsible for his years, for a girl still

at school, a girl attractively beautiful, mysterious and unknown to him;

the other was the love of coevals, who had been playmates and intimate

companions, and of whom the woman was certainly as capable and wilful as

the man.

Now it is exceptional for men to love women of their own age, it is the

commoner thing that they should love maidens younger and often much

younger than themselves. This is true more particularly of our own

class; the masculine thirties and forties marry the feminine twenties,

all the prevailing sentiment and usage between the sexes rises naturally

out of that. We treat this seniority as though it were a virile

characteristic; we treat the man as though he were a natural senior, we

expect a weakness, a timid deference, in the girl. I and Mary had loved

one another as two rivers run together on the way to the sea, we had

grown up side by side to the moment when we kissed; but I sought your

mother, I watched her and desired her and chose her, very tenderly and

worshipfully indeed, to be mine. I do not remember that there was any

corresponding intention in my mind to be hers. I do not think that that

idea came in at all. She was something to be won, something playing an

inferior and retreating part. And I was artificial in all my attitudes

to her, I thought of what would interest her, what would please her, I

knew from the outset that what she saw in me to rouse that deep, shy

glow of exaltation in her face was illusion, illusion it was my business

to sustain. And so I won her, and long years had to pass, years of

secret loneliness and hidden feelings, of preposterous pretences and

covert perplexities, before we escaped from that crippling tradition of

inequality and looked into one another's eyes with understanding and

forgiveness, a woman and a man.

I made no great secret of the interest and attraction I found in Rachel,

and the Mores made none of their entire approval of me. I walked over on

the second occasion, and Ridinghanger opened out, a great flower of

genial appreciation that I came alone, hiding nothing of its dawning

perception that it was Rachel in particular I came to see.

Your grandmother's match-making was as honest as the day. There was the

same salad of family and visitors as on the former afternoon, and this

time I met Freshman, who was destined to marry Alice; there was tea,

tennis, and, by your grandmother's suggestion, a walk to see the sunset

from the crest of the hill. Rachel and I walked across the breezy

moorland together, while I talked and tempted her to talk.

What, I wonder, did we talk about? English scenery, I think, and African

scenery and the Weald about us, and the long history of the Weald and

its present and future, and at last even a little of politics. I had

never explored the mind of a girl of seventeen before; there was a

surprise in all she knew and a delight in all she didn't know, and about

herself a candor, a fresh simplicity of outlook that was sweeter than

the clear air about us, sweeter than sunshine or the rising song of a

lark. She believed so gallantly and beautifully, she was so perfectly,

unaffectedly and certainly prepared to be a brave and noble person--if

only life would let her. And she hadn't as yet any suspicion that life

might make that difficult....

I went to Ridinghanger a number of times in the spring and early summer.

I talked a great deal with Rachel, and still I did not make love to her.

It was always in my mind that I would make love to her, the heavens and

earth and all her family were propitious, glowing golden with consent

and approval, I thought she was the most wonderful and beautiful thing

in life, and her eyes, the intonation of her voice, her hurrying color

and a hundred little involuntary signs told me how she quickened at my

coming. But there was a shyness. I loved her as one loves and admires a

white flower or a beautiful child--some stranger's child. I felt that I

might make her afraid of me. I had never before thought that to make

love is a coarse thing. But still at high summer when I met Mary again

no definite thing had been said between myself and Rachel. But we knew,

each of us knew, that somewhere in a world less palpable, in fairyland,

in dreamland, we had met and made our vows.

§ 5

You see how far my imagination had gone towards readjustment when Mary

returned into my life. You see how strange and distant it was to meet

her again, changed completely into the great lady she had intended to

be, speaking to me with the restrained and practised charm of a woman

who is young and beautiful and prominent and powerful and secure. There

was no immediate sense of shock in that resumption of our broken

intercourse, it seemed to me that night simply that something odd and

curious had occurred. I do not remember how we parted that evening or

whether we even saw each other after dinner was over, but from that hour

forth Mary by insensible degrees resumed her old predominance in my

mind. I woke up in the night and thought about her, and next day I found

myself thinking of her, remembering things out of the past and recalling

and examining every detail of the overnight encounter. How cold and

ineffective we had been, both of us! We had been like people resuming a

disused and partially forgotten language. Had she changed towards me?

Did she indeed want to see me again or was that invitation a mere

demonstration of how entirely unimportant seeing me or not seeing me had

become?

Then I would find myself thinking with the utmost particularity of her

face. Had it changed at all? Was it altogether changed? I seemed to have

forgotten everything and remembered everything; that peculiar slight

thickness of her eyelids that gave her eyes their tenderness, that light

firmness of her lips. Of course she would want to talk to me, as now I

perceived I wanted to talk to her.

Was I in love with her still? It seemed to me then that I was not. It

had not been that hesitating fierceness, that pride and demand and

doubt, which is passionate love, that had made all my sensations strange

to me as I sat beside her. It had been something larger and finer,

something great and embracing, a return to fellowship. Here beside me,

veiled from me only by our transient embarrassment and the tarnish of

separation and silences, was the one person who had ever broken down the

crust of shy insincerity which is so incurably my characteristic and

talked intimately of the inmost things of life to me. I discovered now

for the first time how intense had been my loneliness for the past five

years. I discovered now that through all those years I had been hungry

for such talk as Mary alone could give me. My mind was filled with talk,

filled with things I desired to say to her; that chaos began to take on

a multitudinous expression at the touch of her spirit. I began to

imagine conversations with her, to prepare reports for her of those new

worlds of sensation and activity I had discovered since that boyish

parting.

But when at last that talk came it was altogether different from any of

those I had invented.

She wrote to me when she came down into Surrey and I walked over to

Martens the next afternoon. I found her in her own sitting-room, a

beautiful characteristic apartment with tall French windows hung with

blue curtains, a large writing-desk and a great litter of books. The

room gave upon a broad sunlit terrace with a balustrading of yellowish

stone, on which there stood great oleanders. Beyond was a flower garden

and then the dark shadows of cypresses. She was standing as I came in to

her, as though she had seen me coming across the lawns and had been

awaiting my entrance. "I thought you might come to-day," she said, and

told the manservant to deny her to other callers. Again she produced

that queer effect of being at once altogether the same and altogether

different from the Mary I had known. "Justin," she said, "is in Paris.

He comes back on Friday." I saw then that the change lay in her bearing,

that for the easy confidence of the girl she had now the deliberate

dignity and control of a married woman--a very splendidly and spaciously

married woman. Her manner had been purged of impulse. Since we had met

she had stood, the mistress of great houses, and had dealt with

thousands of people.

"You walked over to me?"

"I walked," I said. "It is nearly a straight path. You know it?"

"You came over the heather beyond our pine wood," she confirmed. And

then I think we talked some polite unrealities about Surrey scenery and

the weather. It was so formal that by a common impulse we let the topic

suddenly die. We stood through a pause, a hesitation. Were we indeed to

go on at that altitude of cold civility? She turned to the window as if

the view was to serve again.

"Sit down," she said and dropped into a chair against the light, looking

away from me across the wide green space of afternoon sunshine. I sat

down on a little sofa, at a loss also.

"And so," she said, turning her face to me suddenly, "you come back into

my life." And I was amazed to see that the brightness of her eyes was

tears. "We've lived--five years."

"You," I said clumsily, "have done all sorts of things. I hear of

you--patronizing young artists--organizing experiments in village

education."

"Yes," she said, "I've done all sorts of things. One has to. Forced,

unreal things for the most part. You I expect have done--all sorts of

things also.... But yours have been real things...."

"All things," I remarked sententiously, "are real. And all of them a

little unreal. South Africa has been wonderful. And now it is all over

one doubts if it really happened. Like that incredulous mood after a

storm of passion."

"You've come back for good?"

"For good. I want to do things in England."

"Politics?"

"If I can get into that."

Again a pause. There came the characteristic moment of deliberation that

I remembered so well.

"I never meant you," she said, "to go away.... You could have written.

You never answered the notes I sent."

"I was frantic," I said, "with loss and jealousy. I wanted to forget."

"And you forgot?"

"I did my best."

"I did my best," said Mary. "And now---- Have you forgotten?"

"Nothing."

"Nor I. I thought I had. Until I saw you again. I've thought of you

endlessly. I've wanted to talk to you. We had a way of talking together.

But you went away. You turned your back as though all that was

nothing--not worth having. You--you drove home my marriage, Stephen. You

made me know what a thing of sex a woman is to a man--and how little

else...."

She paused.

"You see," I said slowly. "You had made me, as people say, in love with

you.... I don't know--if you remember everything...."

She looked me in the eyes for a moment.

"I hadn't been fair," she said with an abrupt abandonment of accusation.

"But you know, Stephen, that night---- I meant to explain. And

afterwards.... Things sometimes go as one hasn't expected them to go,

even the things one has planned to say. I suppose--I treated

you--disgustingly."

I protested.

"Yes," she said. "I treated you as I did--and I thought you would stand

it. I _knew_, I knew then as well as you do now that male to my female

you wouldn't stand it, but somehow--I thought there were other things.

Things that could override that...."

"Not," I said, "for a boy of one-and-twenty."

"But in a man of twenty-six?"

I weighed the question. "Things are different," I said, and then, "Yes.

Anyhow now--if I may come back penitent,--to a friendship."

We looked at one another gravely. Faintly in our ears sounded the music

of past and distant things. We pretended to hear nothing of that, tried

honestly to hear nothing of it. I had not remembered how steadfast and

quiet her face could be. "Yes," she said, "a friendship."

"I've always had you in my mind, Stephen," she said. "When I saw I

couldn't marry you, it seemed to me I had better marry and be free of

any further hope. I thought we could get over that. 'Let's get it over,'

I thought. Now--at any rate--we have got over that." Her eyes verified

her words a little doubtfully. "And we can talk and you can tell me of

your life, and the things you want to do that make life worth living.

Oh! life has been _stupid_ without you, Stephen, large and expensive and

aimless....Tell me of your politics. They say--Justin told me--you think

of parliament?"

"I want to do that. I have been thinking---- In fact I am going to

stand." I found myself hesitating on the verge of phrases in the quality

of a review article. It was too unreal for her presence. And yet it was

this she seemed to want from me. "This," I said, "is a phase of great

opportunities. The war has stirred the Empire to a sense of itself, to a

sense of what it might be. Of course this Tariff Reform row is a squalid

nuisance; it may kill out all the fine spirit again before anything is

done. Everything will become a haggle, a chaffering of figures.... All

the more reason why we should try and save things from the commercial

traveller. If the Empire is anything at all, it is something infinitely

more than a combination in restraint of trade...."

"Yes," she said. "And you want to take that line. The high line."

"If one does not take the high line," I said, "what does one go into

politics for?"

"Stephen," she smiled, "you haven't lost a sort of simplicity---- People

go into politics because it looks important, because other people go

into politics, because they can get titles and a sense of influence

and--other things. And then there are quarrels, old grudges to serve."

"These are roughnesses of the surface."

"Old Stephen!" she cried with the note of a mother. "They will worry you

in politics."

I laughed. "Perhaps I'm not altogether so simple."

"Oh! you'll get through. You have a way of going on. But I shall have

to watch over you. I see I shall have to watch over you. Tell me of the

things you mean to do. Where are you standing?"

I began to tell her a little disjointedly of the probabilities of my

Yorkshire constituency....

§ 6

I have a vivid vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house,

down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep

valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing

but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and

the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of

Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was

moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always

loved. I wanted passionately to be as she desired, the friend she

demanded, that intimate brother and confederate, but all my heart cried

out for her, cried out for her altogether.

I would be her friend, I repeated to myself, I would be her friend. I

would talk to her often, plan with her, work with her. I could put my

meanings into her life and she should throw her beauty over mine. I

began already to dream of the talk of to-morrow's meeting....

§ 7

And now let me go on to tell at once the thing that changed life for

both of us altogether, that turned us out of the courses that seemed

set for us, our spacious, successful and divergent ways, she to the

tragedy of her death and I from all the prospects of the public career

that lay before me to the work that now, toilsomely, inadequately and

blunderingly enough, I do. It was to pierce and slash away the

appearances of life for me, it was to open my way to infinite

disillusionment, and unsuspected truths. Within a few weeks of our

second meeting Mary and I were passionately in love with one another; we

had indeed become lovers. The arrested attractions of our former love

released again, drew us inevitably to that. We tried to seem outwardly

only friends, with this hot glow between us. Our tormented secret was

half discovered and half betrayed itself. There followed a tragi-comedy

of hesitations and disunited struggle. Within four months the crisis of

our two lives was past....

It is not within my purpose to tell you, my son, of the particular

events, the particular comings and goings, the chance words, the chance

meetings, the fatal momentary misunderstandings that occurred between

us. I want to tell of something more general than that. This

misadventure is in our strain. It is our inheritance. It is a

possibility in the inheritance of all honest and emotional men and

women. There are no doubt people altogether cynical and adventurous to

whom these passions and desires are at once controllable and permissible

indulgences without any radiation of consequences, a secret and

detachable part of life, and there may be people of convictions so

strong and simple that these disturbances are eliminated, but we

Strattons are of a quality neither so low nor so high, we stoop and

rise, we are not convinced about our standards, and for many

generations to come, with us and with such people as the Christians, and

indeed with most of our sort of people, we shall be equally desirous of

free and intimate friendship and prone to blaze into passion and

disaster at that proximity.

This is one of the essential riddles in the adaptation of such human

beings as ourselves to that greater civilized state of which I dream. It

is the gist of my story. It is one of the two essential riddles that

confront our kind. The servitude of sex and the servitude of labor are

the twin conditions upon which human society rests to-day, the two

limitations upon its progress towards a greater social order, to that

greater community, those uplands of light and happy freedom, towards

which that Being who was my father yesterday, who thinks in myself

to-day, and who will be you to-morrow and your sons after you, by his

very nature urges and must continue to urge the life of mankind. The

story of myself and Mary is a mere incident in that gigantic, scarce

conscious effort to get clear of toils and confusions and encumbrances,

and have our way with life. We are like little figures, dots ascendant

upon a vast hillside; I take up our intimacy for an instant and hold it

under a lens for you. I become more than myself then, and Mary stands

for innumerable women. It happened yesterday, and it is just a part of

that same history that made Edmond Stratton of the Hays elope with

Charlotte Anstruther and get himself run through the body at Haddington

two hundred years ago, which drove the Laidlaw-Christians to Virginia in

'45, gave Stratton Street to the moneylenders when George IV. was

Regent, and broke the heart of Margaret Stratton in the days when

Charles the First was king. With our individual variations and under

changed conditions the old desires and impulses stirred us, the old

antagonisms confronted us, the old difficulties and sloughs and

impassable places baffled us. There are times when I think of my history

among all those widespread repeated histories, until it seems to me that

the human Lover is like a creature who struggles for ever through a

thicket without an end....

There are no universal laws of affection and desire, but it is

manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association,

and any real fellowship between men and women turns with an extreme

readiness to love. And that being so it follows that under existing

conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women

in society is a monstrous sham, a merely dangerous pretence of

encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a

woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one

man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil

impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have

one sole woman intimate. To all other women he must be a little blind, a

little deaf, politely inattentive. He must respect the transparent,

intangible, tacit purdah about them, respect it but never allude to it.

To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but it is reality. If you

live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social

disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to

us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what

they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity.

And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not

standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and

emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between

Mary and myself, as it breaks down in a thousand other cases, as it

breaks down everywhere. Our social life is honeycombed and rotten with

secret hidden relationships. The rigid, the obtuse and the

unscrupulously cunning escape; the honest passion sooner or later flares

out and destroys.... Here is a difficulty that no bullying imposition of

arbitrary rules on the one hand nor any reckless abandonment of law on

the other, can solve. Humanity has yet to find its method in sexual

things; it has to discover the use and the limitation of jealousy. And

before it can even begin to attempt to find, it has to cease its present

timid secret groping in shame and darkness and turn on the light of

knowledge. None of us knows much and most of us do not even know what is

known.

§ 8

The house is very quiet to-day. It is your mother's birthday, and you

three children have gone with her and Mademoiselle Potin into the forest

to celebrate the occasion. Presently I shall join you. The sunlit

garden, with its tall dreaming lilies against the trellised vines upon

the wall, the cedars and the grassy space about the sundial, have that

distinguished stillness, that definite, palpable and almost outlined

emptiness which is so to speak your negative presence. It is like a

sheet of sunlit colored paper out of which your figures have been cut.

There is a commotion of birds in the jasmine, and your Barker reclines

with an infinite tranquillity, a masterless dog, upon the lawn. I take

up this writing again after an interval of some weeks. I have been in

Paris, attending the Sabotage Conference, and dealing with those

intricate puzzles of justice and discipline and the secret sources of

contentment that have to be solved if sabotage is ever to vanish from

labor struggles again. I think a few points have been made clearer in

that curious riddle of reconciliations....

Now I resume this story. I turn over the sheets that were written and

finished before my departure, and come to the notes for what is to

follow.

Perhaps my days of work in Paris have carried my mind on beyond the

point at which I left the narrative. I sit as it were among a pile of

memories that are now all disordered and mixed up together, their proper

sequences and connexions lost. I cannot trace the phases through which

our mutual passion rode up through the restrained and dignified

intentions of our friendship. But I know that presently we were in a

white heat of desire. There must have been passages that I now

altogether forget, moments of tense transition. I am more and more

convinced that our swiftest, intensest, mental changes leave far less

vivid memories than impressions one receives when one is comparatively

passive. And of this phase in my life of which I am now telling I have

clear memories of a time when we talked like brother and sister, or like

angels if you will, and hard upon that came a time when we were planning

in all our moments together how and when and where we might meet in

secret and meet again.

Things drift with a phantom-like uncertainty into my mind and pass

again; those fierce motives of our transition have lost now all stable

form and feature, but I believe there was a curious tormenting urgency

in our jealousy of those others, of Justin on my part and of Rachel on

hers. At first we had talked quite freely about Rachel, had discussed my

conceivable marriage with her. We had indeed a little forced that topic,

as if to reassure ourselves of the honesty of our new footing. But the

force that urged us nearer pervaded all our being. It was hard enough to

be barred apart, to snatch back our hands from touching, to avoid each

other's eyes, to hurry a little out of the dusk towards the lit house

and its protecting servants, but the constant presence and suggestion of

those others from whom there were no bars, or towards whom bars could be

abolished at a look, at an impulse, exacerbated that hardship, roused a

fierce insatiable spirit of revolt within us. At times we grew angry

with each other's formalism, came near to quarrelling....

I associate these moods with the golden stillnesses of a prolonged and

sultry autumn, and with slowly falling leaves....

I will not tell you how that step was taken, it matters very little to

my story, nor will I tell which one of us it was first broke the

barriers down.

§ 9

But I do want to tell you certain things. I want to tell you them

because they are things that affect you closely. There was almost from

the first a difference between Mary and myself in this, that I wanted to

be public about our love, I wanted to be open and defiant, and

she--hesitated. She wanted to be secret. She wanted to keep me; I

sometimes think that she was moved to become my mistress because she

wanted to keep me. But she also wanted to keep everything else in her

life,--her position, her ample freedoms and wealth and dignity. Our love

was to be a secret cavern, Endymion's cave. I was ready enough to do

what I could to please her, and for a time I served that secrecy, lied,

pretended, agreed to false addresses, assumed names, and tangled myself

in a net-work of furtive proceedings. These are things that poison and

consume honest love.

You will learn soon enough as you grow to be a man that beneath the

respectable assumptions of our social life there is an endless intricate

world of subterfuge and hidden and perverted passion,--for all passion

that wears a mask is perversion--and that thousands of people of our

sort are hiding and shamming about their desires, their gratifications,

their true relationships. I do not mean the open offenders, for they are

mostly honest and gallant people, but the men and women who sin in the

shadows, the people who are not clean and scandalous, but immoral and

respectable. This underworld is not for us. I wish that I who have

looked into it could in some way inoculate you now against the

repetition of my misadventure. We Strattons are daylight men, and if I

work now for widened facilities of divorce, for an organized freedom and

independence of women, and greater breadth of toleration, it is because

I know in my own person the degradations, the falsity, the bitterness,

that can lurk beneath the inflexible pretentions of the established code

to-day.

And I want to tell you too of something altogether unforeseen that

happened to us, and that was this, that from the day that passion

carried us and we became in the narrower sense of the word lovers, all

the wider interests we had in common, our political intentions, our

impersonal schemes, began to pass out of our intercourse. Our situation

closed upon us like a trap and hid the sky. Something more intense had

our attention by the feet, and we used our wings no more. I do not think

that we even had the real happiness and beauty and delight of one

another. Because, I tell you, there is no light upon kiss or embrace

that is not done with pride. I do not know why it should be so, but

people of our race and quality are a little ashamed of mere

gratification in love. Always we seem in my memory to have been

whispering with flushed cheeks, and discussing

interminably--_situation_. Had something betrayed us, might something

betray, was this or that sufficiently cunning? Had we perhaps left a

footmark or failed to burn a note, was the second footman who was

detailed as my valet even now pausing astonished in the brushing of my

clothes with our crumpled secret in his hand? Between myself and the

clear vision of this world about me this infernal net-work of

precautions spread like a veil.

And it was not only a matter of concealments but of positive deceptions.

The figure of Justin comes back to me. It is a curious thing that in

spite of our bitter antagonism and the savage jealousy we were to feel

for one another, there has always been, and there remains now in my

thought of him, a certain liking, a regret at our opposition, a quality

of friendliness. His broad face, which the common impression and the

caricaturist make so powerful and eagle-like, is really not a brutal or

heavy face at all. It is no doubt aquiline, after the fashion of an

eagle-owl, the mouth and chin broad and the eyes very far apart, but

there is a minute puckering of the brows which combines with that queer

streak of brown discoloration that runs across his cheek and into the

white of his eyes, to give something faintly plaintive and pitiful to

his expression, an effect enhanced by the dark softness of his eyes.

They are gentle eyes; it is absurd to suppose them the eyes of a

violently forceful man. And indeed they do not belie Justin. It is not

by vehemence or pressure that his wealth and power have been attained;

it is by the sheer detailed abundance of his mind. In that queer big

brain of his there is something of the calculating boy and not a little

of the chess champion; he has a kind of financial gift, he must be rich,

and grows richer. What else is there for him to do? How many times have

I not tried to glance carelessly at his face and scrutinize that look in

his eyes, and ask myself was that his usual look, or was it lit by an

instinctive jealousy? Did he perhaps begin to suspect? I had become a

persistent visitor in the house, he might well be jealous of such minor

favors as she showed me, for with him she talked but little and shared

no thoughts. His manner with her was tinctured by an habituated despair.

They were extraordinarily polite and friendly with one another....

I tried a hundred sophistications of my treachery to him. I assured

myself that a modern woman is mistress and owner of herself; no chattel,

and so forth. But he did not think so, and neither she nor I were

behaving as though we thought so. In innumerable little things we were

doing our best tacitly to reassure him. And so you see me shaking hands

with this man, affecting an interest in his topics and affairs, staying

in his house, eating his food and drinking his wine, that I might be the

nearer to his wife. It is not the first time that has been done in the

world, there are esoteric codes to justify all I did; I perceive there

are types of men to whom such relationships are attractive by the very

reason of their illicit excitement. But we Strattons are honest people,

there is no secretive passion in our blood; this is no game for us;

never you risk the playing of it, little son, big son as you will be

when you read this story. Perhaps, but I hope indeed not, this may reach

you too late to be a warning, come to you in mid-situation. Go through

with it then, inheritor of mine, and keep as clean as you can, follow

the warped honor that is still left to you--and if you can, come out of

the tangle....

It is not only Justin haunts the memories of that furtive time, but

Rachel More. I see her still as she was then, a straight, white-dressed

girl with big brown eyes that regarded me now with perplexity, now with

a faint dismay. I still went over to see her, and my manner had changed.

I had nothing to say to her now and everything to hide. Everything

between us hung arrested, and nothing could occur to make an end.

I told Mary I must cease my visits to the Mores. I tried to make her

feel my own sense of an accumulating cruelty to Rachel. "But it explains

away so much," she said. "If you stop going there--everyone will talk.

Everything will swing round--and point here."

"Rachel!" I protested.

"No," she said, overbearing me, "you must keep on going to Ridinghanger.

You must. You must." ...

For a long time I had said nothing to Mary of the burthen these

pretences were to me; it had seemed a monstrous ingratitude to find the

slightest flaw in the passionate love and intimacy she had given me. But

at last the divergence of our purposes became manifest to us both. A

time came when we perceived it clearly and discussed it openly. I have

still a vivid recollection of a golden October day when we had met at

the edge of the plantation that overlooks Bearshill. She had come

through the gardens into the pine-wood, and I had jumped the rusty

banked stream that runs down the Bearshill valley, and clambered the

barbed wire fence. I came up the steep bank and through a fringe of

furze to where she stood in the shade; I kissed her hand, and discovered

mine had been torn open by one of the thorns of the wire and was

dripping blood. "Mind my dress," she said, and we laughed as we kissed

with my arm held aloof.

We sat down side by side upon the warm pine needles that carpeted the

sand, and she made a mothering fuss about my petty wound, and bound it

in my handkerchief. We looked together across the steep gorge at the

blue ridge of trees beyond. "Anyone," she said, "might have seen us this

minute."

"I never thought," I said, and moved a foot away from her.

"It's too late if they have," said she, pulling me back to her. "Over

beyond there, that must be Hindhead. Someone with a telescope----!"

"That's less credible," I said. And it occurred to me that the grey

stretch of downland beyond must be the ridge to the west of

Ridinghanger.

"I wish," I said, "it didn't matter. I wish I could come and go and

fear nobody--and spend long hours with you--oh! at our ease."

"Now," she said, "we spend short hours. I wonder if I would like----

It's no good, Stephen, letting ourselves think of things that can't be.

Here we are. Kiss that hand, my lover, there, just between wrist and

thumb--the little hollow. Yes, exactly there."

But thoughts had been set going in my mind. "Why," I said presently,

"should you always speak of things that can't be? Why should we take all

this as if it were all that there could be? I want long hours. I want

you to shine all the day through on my life. Now, dear, it's as if the

sun was shown ever and again, and then put back behind an eclipse. I

come to you half-blinded, I go away unsatisfied. All the world is dark

in between, and little phantom _yous_ float over it."

She rested her cheek on her hand and looked at me gravely.

"You are hard to satisfy, brother heart," she said.

"I live in snatches of brightness and all the rest of life is waiting

and thinking and waiting."

"What else is there? Haven't we the brightness?"

"I want you," I said. "I want _you_ altogether."

"After so much?"

"I want the more. Mary, I want you to come away with me. No, listen!

this life--don't think I'm not full of the beauty, the happiness, the

wonder---- But it's a suspense. It doesn't go on. It's just a dawn,

dear, a splendid dawn, a glory of color and brightness and freshness and

hope, and--no sun rises. I want the day. Everything else has stopped

with me and stopped with you. I do nothing with my politics now,--I

pretend. I have no plans in life except plans for meeting you and again

meeting you. I want to go on, I want to go on with you and take up work

and the world again--you beside me. I want you to come out of all this

life--out of all this immense wealthy emptiness of yours----"

"Stop," she said, "and listen to me, Stephen."

She paused with her lips pressed together, her brows a little knit.

"I won't," she said slowly. "I am going on like this. I and you are

going to be lovers--just as we are lovers now--secret lovers. And I am

going to help you in all your projects, hold your party together--for

you will have a party--my house shall be its centre----"

"But Justin----"

"He takes no interest in politics. He will do what pleases me."

I took some time before I answered. "You don't understand how men feel,"

I said.

She waited for what else I had to say. I lay prone, and gathered

together and shaped and reshaped a little heap of pine needles. "You

see---- I can't do it. I want you."

She gripped a handful of my hair, and tugged hard between each word.

"Haven't you got me?" she asked between her teeth. "What more _could_

you have?"

"I want you openly."

She folded her arms beneath her. "_No_," she said.

For a little while neither of us spoke.

"It's the trouble of the deceit?" she asked.

"It's--the deceit."

"We can stop all that," she said.

I looked up at her face enquiringly.

"By having no more to hide," she said, with her eyes full of tears. "If

it's nothing to you----"

"It's everything to me," I said. "It's overwhelming me. Oh Mary, heart

of my life, my dear, come out of this! Come with me, come and be my

wife, make a clean thing of it! Let me take you away, and then let me

marry you. I know it's asking you--to come to a sort of poverty----"

But Mary's blue eyes were alight with anger. "Isn't it a clean thing

_now_, Stephen?" she was crying. "Do you mean that you and I aren't

clean now? Will you never understand?"

"Oh clean," I answered, "clean as Eve in the garden. But can we keep

clean? Won't the shadow of our falsehoods darken at all? Come out of it

while we are still clean. Come with me. Justin will divorce you. We can

stay abroad and marry and come back."

Mary was kneeling up now with her hands upon her knees.

"Come back to what?" she cried. "Parliament?--after that? You _boy!_ you

sentimentalist! you--you duffer! Do you think I'd let you do it for your

own sake even? Do you think I want you--spoilt? We should come back to

mope outside of things, we should come back to fret our lives out. I

won't do it, Stephen, I won't do it. End _this_ if you like, break our

hearts and throw them away and go on without them, but to turn all our

lives into a scandal, to give ourselves over to the mean and the

malicious, a prey to old women--and _you_ damned out of everything! A

man partly forgiven! A man who went wrong for a woman! _No!_"

She sprang lightly to her feet and stood over me as I knelt before her.

"And I came here to be made love to, Stephen! I came here to be loved!

And you talk that nonsense! You remind me of everything--wretched!"

She lifted up her hands and then struck down with them, a gesture of

infinite impatience. Her face as she bent to me was alive with a

friendly anger, her eyes suddenly dark. "You _duffer_!" she repeated....

§ 10

Discovery followed hard upon that meeting. I had come over to Martens

with some book as a pretext; the man had told me that Lady Mary awaited

me in her blue parlor, and I went unannounced through the long gallery

to find her. The door stood a little ajar, I opened it softly so that

she did not hear me, and saw her seated at her writing-desk with her

back to me, and her cheek and eyebrow just touched by the sunlight from

the open terrace window. She was writing a note. I put my hand about her

shoulder, and bent to kiss her as she turned. Then as she came round to

me she started, was for a moment rigid, then thrust me from her and rose

very slowly to her feet.

I turned to the window and became as rigid, facing Justin. He was

standing on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid

and inexpressive and--very white. The sky behind him, appropriately

enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. So we

remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite _tableau vivant_. We two

seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first of us to

move.

He made a queer, incomplete gesture with one hand, as if he wanted to

undo the top button of his waistcoat and then thought better of it. He

came very slowly into the room. When he spoke his voice had neither rage

nor denunciation in it. It was simply conversational. "I felt this was

going on," he said. And then to his wife with the note of one who

remarks dispassionately on a peculiar situation. "Yet somehow it seemed

wrong and unnatural to think such a thing of you."

His face took on something of the vexed look of a child who struggles

with a difficult task. "Do you mind," he said to me, "will you go?"

I took a moment for my reply. "No," I said. "Since you know at last----

There are things to be said."

"No," said Mary, suddenly. "Go! Let me talk to him."

"No," I said, "my place is here beside you."

He seemed not to hear me. His eyes were fixed on Mary. He seemed to

think he had dismissed me, and that I was no longer there. His mind was

not concerned about me, but about her. He spoke as though what he said

had been in his mind, and no doubt it had been in his mind, for many

days. "I didn't deserve this," he said to her. "I've tried to make your

life as you wanted your life. It's astonishing to find--I haven't. You

gave no sign. I suppose I ought to have felt all this happening, but it

comes upon me surprisingly. I don't know what I'm to do." He became

aware of me again. "And _you_!" he said. "What am I to do? To think that

you--while I have been treating her like some sacred thing...."

The color was creeping back into his face. Indignation had come into

his voice, the first yellow lights of rising jealousy showed in his

eyes.

"Stephen," I heard Mary say, "will you leave me to talk to my husband?"

"There is only one thing to do," I said. "What is the need of talking?

We two are lovers, Justin." I spoke to both of them. "We two must go out

into the world, go out now together. This marriage of yours--it's no

marriage, no real marriage...."

I think I said that. I seem to remember saying that; perhaps with other

phrases that I have forgotten. But my memory of what we said and did,

which is so photographically clear of these earlier passages that I

believe I can answer for every gesture and nearly every word that I have

set down, becomes suddenly turbid. The high tension of our first

confrontation was giving place to a flood of emotional impulse. We all

became eager to talk, to impose interpretations and justifications upon

our situation. We all three became divided between our partial attention

to one another and our urgent necessity to keep hold of our points of

view. That I think is the common tragedy of almost all human conflicts,

that rapid breakdown from the first cool apprehension of an issue to

heat, confusion, and insistence. I do not know if indeed we raised our

voices, but my memory has an effect of raised voices, and when at last I

went out of the house it seemed to me that the men-servants in the hall

were as hushed as beasts before a thunderstorm, and all of them quite

fully aware of the tremendous catastrophe that had come to Martens. And

moreover, as I recalled afterwards with astonishment, I went past them

and out into the driving rain unprotected, and not one of them stirred

a serviceable hand....

What was it we said? I have a vivid sense of declaring not once only but

several times that Mary and I were husband and wife "in the sight of

God." I was full of the idea that now she must inevitably be mine. I

must have spoken to Justin at times as if he had come merely to confirm

my view of the long dispute there had been between us. For a while my

mind resisted his extraordinary attitude that the matter lay between him

and Mary, that I was in some way an interloper. It seemed to me there

was nothing for it now but that Mary should stand by my side and face

Justin with the world behind him. I remember my confused sense that

presently she and I would have to go straight out of Martens. And she

was wearing a tea-gown, easy and open, and the flimsiest of slippers.

Any packing, any change of clothing, struck me as an incredible

anti-climax. I had visions of our going forth, hand in hand. Outside was

the soughing of a coming storm, a chill wind drove a tumult of leaves

along the terrace, the door slammed and yawned open again, and then came

the rain. Justin, I remember, still talking, closed the door. I tried to

think how I could get to the station five miles away, and then what we

could do in London. We should seem rather odd visitors to an

hotel--without luggage. All this was behind my valiant demand that she

should come with me, and come now.

And then my mind was lanced by the thin edge of realization that she did

not intend to come now, and that Justin was resolved she should not do

so. After the first shock of finding herself discovered she had stood

pale but uncowed before her bureau, with her eyes rather on him than on

me. Her hands, I think, were behind her upon the edge of the writing

flap, and she was a little leaning upon them. She had the watchful alert

expression of one who faces an unanticipated but by no means

overwhelming situation. She cast a remark to me. "But I do not want to

come with you," she said. "I have told you I do not want to come with

you." All her mind seemed concentrated upon what she should do with

Justin. "You must send him away," he was saying. "It's an abominable

thing. It must stop. How can you dream it should go on?"

"But you said when you married me I should be free, I should own myself!

You gave me this house----"

"What! To disgrace myself!"

I was moved to intervene.

"You must choose between us, Mary," I cried. "It is impossible you

should stay here! You cannot stay here."

She turned upon me, a creature at bay. "Why shouldn't I stay here? Why

must I choose between two men? I want neither of you. I want myself. I'm

not a thing. I'm a human being. I'm not your thing, Justin--nor yours,

Stephen. Yet you want to quarrel over me--like two dogs over a bone. I

am going to stay here--in my house! It's my house. I made it. Every room

of it is full of me. Here I am!"

She stood there making this magnificently extravagant claim; her eyes

blazing blue, her hair a little dishevelled with a strand across her

cheek.

Both I and Justin spoke together, and then turned in helpless anger upon

one another. I remember that with the clumsiest of weak gestures he bade

me begone from the house, and that I with a now rather deflated

rhetoric answered I would go only with Mary at my side. And there she

stood, less like a desperate rebel against the most fundamental social

relations than an indignant princess, and demanded of us and high

heaven, "Why should I be fought for? Why should I be fought for?"

And then abruptly she gathered her skirts in her hand and advanced.

"Open that door, Stephen," she said, and was gone with a silken whirl

and rustle from our presence.

We were left regarding one another with blank expressions.

Her departure had torn the substance out of our dispute. For the moment

we found ourselves left with a new situation for which there is as yet

no tradition of behavior. We had become actors in that new human comedy

that is just beginning in the world, that comedy in which men still

dispute the possession and the manner of the possession of woman

according to the ancient rules, while they on their side are determining

ever more definitely that they will not be possessed....

We had little to say to one another,--mere echoes and endorsements of

our recent declarations. "She must come to me," said I. And he, "I will

save her from that at any cost."

That was the gist of our confrontation, and then I turned about and

walked along the gallery towards the entrance, with Justin following me

slowly. I was full of the wrath of baffled heroics; I turned towards him

with something of a gesture. Down the perspective of the white and empty

gallery he appeared small and perplexed. The panes of the tall French

windows were slashed with rain....

§ 11

I forget now absolutely what I may have expected to happen next. I

cannot remember my return to my father's house that day. But I know that

what did happen was the most unanticipated and incredible experience of

my life. It was as if the whole world of mankind were suddenly to turn

upside down and people go about calmly in positions of complete

inversion. I had a note from Mary on the morning after this discovery

that indeed dealt with that but was otherwise not very different from

endless notes I had received before our crisis. It was destroyed, so

that I do not know its exact text now, but it did not add anything

material to the situation, or give me the faintest shadow to intimate

what crept close upon us both. She repeated her strangely thwarting

refusal to come away and live with me. She seemed indignant that we had

been discovered--as though Justin had indulged in an excess of existence

by discovering us. I completed and despatched to her a long letter I had

already been writing overnight in which I made clear the hopeless

impossibility of her attitude, vowed all my life and strength to her,

tried to make some picture of the happiness that was possible for us

together, sketched as definitely as I could when and where we might meet

and whither we might go. It must have made an extraordinary jumble of

protest, persuasion and practicality. It never reached her; it was

intercepted by Justin.

I have gathered since that after I left Martens he sent telegrams to Guy

and Philip and her cousin Lord Tarvrille. He was I think amazed beyond

measure at this revelation of the possibilities of his cold and distant

wife, with a vast passion of jealousy awaking in him, and absolutely

incapable of forming any plan to meet the demands of his extraordinary

situation. Guy and Philip got to him that night, Tarvrille came down

next morning, and Martens became a debate. Justin did not so much

express views and intentions as have them extracted from him; it was

manifest he was prepared for the amplest forgiveness of his wife if only

I could be obliterated from their world. Confronted with her brothers,

the two men in the world who could be frankly brutal to her, Mary's

dignity suffered; she persisted she meant to go on seeing me, but she

was reduced to passionate tears.

Into some such state of affairs I came that morning on the heels of my

letter, demanding Lady Mary of a scared evasive butler.

Maxton and Tarvrille appeared: "Hullo, Stratton!" said Tarvrille, with a

fine flavor of an agreeable chance meeting. Philip had doubts about his

greeting me, and then extended his reluctant hand with a nervous grin to

excuse the delay.

"I want to see Lady Mary," said I, stiffly.

"She's not up yet," said Tarvrille, with a hand on my shoulder. "Come

and have a talk in the garden."

We went out with Tarvrille expanding the topic of the seasons. "It's a

damned good month, November, say what you like about it." Philip walked

grimly silent on my other hand.

"And it's a damned awkward situation you've got us into, Stratton," said

Tarvrille, "say what you like about it."

"It isn't as though old Justin was any sort of beast," he reflected,

"or anything like that, you know. He's a most astonishing decent chap,

clean as they make them."

"This isn't a beastly intrigue," I said.

"It never is," said Tarvrille genially.

"We've loved each other a long time. It's just flared out here."

"No doubt of that," said Tarvrille. "It's been like a beacon to all

Surrey."

"It's one of those cases where things have to be readjusted. The best

thing to do is for Mary and me to go abroad----"

"Yes, but does Mary think so?"

"Look here!" said Philip in a voice thick with rage. "I won't have Mary

divorced. I won't. See? I won't."

"What the devil's it got to do with _you_?" I asked with an answering

flash of fury.

Tarvrille's arm ran through mine. "Nobody's going to divorce Mary," he

said reassuringly. "Not even Justin. He doesn't want to, and nobody else

can, and there you are!"

"But we two----"

"You two have had a tremendously good time. You've got found out--and

there you are!"

"This thing has got to stop absolutely now," said Philip and echoed with

a note of satisfaction in his own phrasing, "absolutely _now_."

"You see, Stratton," said Tarvrille as if he were expanding Philip's

assertion, "there's been too many divorces in society. It's demoralizing

people. It's discrediting us. It's setting class against class.

Everybody is saying why don't these big people either set about

respecting the law or altering it. Common people are getting too

infernally clear-headed. Hitherto it's mattered so little.... But we

can't stand any more of it, Stratton, now. It's something more than a

private issue; it's a question of public policy. We can't stand any more

divorces."

He reflected. "We have to consider something more than our own personal

inclinations. We've got no business to be here at all if we're not a

responsible class. We owe something--to ourselves."

It was as if Tarvrille was as concerned as I was for this particular

divorce, as if he struggled with a lively desire to see me and Mary

happily married after the shortest possible interval. And indeed he

manifestly wasn't unsympathetic; he had the strongest proclivity for the

romantic and picturesque, and it was largely the romantic

picturesqueness of renunciation that he urged upon me. Philip for the

most part maintained a resentful silence; he was a clenched anger

against me, against Mary, against the flaming possibilities that

threatened the sister of Lord Maxton, that most promising and

distinguished young man.

Of course their plans must have been definitely made before this talk,

probably they had made them overnight, and probably it was Tarvrille had

given them a practicable shape, but he threw over the whole of our talk

so satisfying a suggestion of arrest and prolonged discussion that it

never occurred to me that I should not be able to come again on the

morrow and renew my demand to see Mary. Even when next day I turned my

face to Martens and saw the flag had vanished from the flagstaff, it

seemed merely a token of that household's perturbation. I thought the

house looked oddly blank and sleepy as I drew near, but I did not

perceive that this was because all the blinds were drawn. The door upon

the lawn was closed, and presently the butler came to open it. He was in

an old white jacket, and collarless. "Lady Mary!" he said. "Lady Mary

has gone, sir. She and Mr. Justin went yesterday after you called."

"Gone!" said I. "But where?"

"I _think_ abroad, sir."

"Abroad!"

"I _think_ abroad."

"But---- They've left an address?"

"Only to Mr. Justin's office," said the man. "Any letters will be

forwarded from there."

I paused upon the step. He remained stiffly deferential, but with an air

of having disposed of me. He reproved me tacitly for forgetting that I

ought to conceal my astonishment at this disappearance. He was indeed an

admirable man-servant. "Thank you," said I, and dropped away defeated

from the door.

I went down the broad steps, walked out up the lawn, and surveyed house

and trees and garden and sky. To the heights and the depths and the

uttermost, I knew now what it was to be amazed....

§ 12

I had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now I had very much the

feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in

mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished

behind him. By that mixture of force and persuasion which avails itself

of a woman's instinctive and cultivated dread of disputes and raised

voices and the betrayal of contention to strangers, by the sheer tiring

down of nerves and of sleepless body and by threats of an immediate

divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged

Mary to leave Martens and go with them to Southampton, and thence they

took her in Justin's yacht, the _Water-Witch_, to Waterford, and thence

by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at Mirk near Crogham in

Mayo. There for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. They took

away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a

telegraph office. This house they had taken furnished without seeing it

on the recommendation of a London agent, and in the name of Justin's

solicitor. Thither presently went Lady Ladislaw, and an announcement

appeared in the _Times_ that Justin and Lady Mary had gone abroad for a

time and that no letters would be forwarded.

I have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but I imagine

Mary astonished, her pride outraged, humiliated, helpless, perplexed and

maintaining a certain outward dignity. Moreover, as I was presently to

be told, she was ill. Guy and Philip were, I believe, the moving spirits

in the affair; Tarvrille was their apologetic accomplice, Justin took

the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly

ashamed to have these compulsions applied to his wife, but full now of a

gusty fury against myself. He loved Mary still with a love that was

shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that infinitely

stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, jealousy. He was

prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to

pieces in the struggle. He meant now to keep Mary. That settled, he was

prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....

Now here it may seem to you that we are on the very verge of romance.

Here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old

place, standing out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry

breakers of the west coast of Ireland. Here is the lover, baffled but

insistent. Here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband,

and you have but to make out that the marriage was compulsory, irregular

and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish

forth a theme for Marriott Watson in his most admirable and adventurous

vein. You can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the

hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the

story, the grim siege of the place--all as it were _sotto voce_ for fear

of scandal--the fight with Guy in the little cave, my attempted

assassination, the secret passage. Would to heaven life had those rich

simplicities, and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! My

siege of Mirk makes a very different story from that.

In the first place I had no trusted friend of so extravagant a

friendship as such aid would demand. I had no one whom it seemed

permissible to tell of our relations. I was not one man against three or

four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. I was one man against

something infinitely greater than that, I was one man against nearly all

men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social

order. Whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of

Mary was open social rebellion. And I was in a state of extreme

uncertainty how far Mary was a willing agent in this abrupt

disappearance. I was disposed to think she had consented far more than

she had done to this astonishing step. Carrying off an unwilling woman

was outside my imaginative range. It was luminously clear in my mind

that so far she had never countenanced the idea of flight with me, and

until she did I was absolutely bound to silence about her. I felt that

until I saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to

release her, that prohibition held. Yet how was I to get at her and hear

what she had to say? Clearly it was possible that she was under

restraint, but I did not know; I was not certain, I could not prove it.

At Guildford station I gathered, after ignominious enquiries, that the

Justins had booked to London. I had two days of nearly frantic

inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to London,

for fear that I should break out to my father. I came up revolving a

dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. I had to get into touch

with Mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. All through the twenty-four

hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the

letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and

come to me. The days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or

foggy London days of an appalling length and emptiness. If I sat at home

my imagination tortured me; if I went out I wanted to be back and see if

any communication had come. I tried repeatedly to see Tarvrille. I had

an idea of obtaining a complete outfit for an elopement, but I was

restrained by my entire ignorance of what a woman may need. I tried to

equip myself for a sudden crisis by the completest preparation of every

possible aspect. I did some absurd and ill-advised things. I astonished

a respectable solicitor in a grimy little office behind a queer little

court with trees near Cornhill, by asking him to give advice to an

anonymous client and then putting my anonymous case before him.

"Suppose," said I, "it was for the plot of a play." He nodded gravely.

My case as I stated it struck me as an unattractive one.

"Application for a Writ of Habeas Corpus," he considered with eyes that

tried to remain severely impartial, "by a Wife's Lover, who wants to

find out where she is.... It's unusual. You will be requiring the

husband to produce her Corpus.... I don't think--speaking in the same

general terms as those in which you put the circumstances, it would be

likely to succeed.... No."

Then I overcame a profound repugnance and went to a firm of private

detectives. It had occurred to me that if I could have Justin,

Tarvrille, Guy or Philip traced I might get a clue to Mary's

hiding-place. I remember a queer little office, a blusterous,

frock-coated creature with a pock-marked face, iron-grey hair, an

eyeglass and a strained tenor voice, who told me twice that he was a

gentleman and several times that he would prefer not to do business than

to do it in an ungentlemanly manner, and who was quite obviously ready

and eager to blackmail either side in any scandal into which spite or

weakness admitted his gesticulating fingers. He alluded vaguely to his

staff, to his woman helpers, "some personally attached to me," to his

remarkable underground knowledge of social life--"the illicit side."

What could he do for me? There was nothing, I said, illicit about me.

His interest waned a little. I told him that I was interested in

certain financial matters, no matter what they were, and that I wanted

to have a report of the movements of Justin and his brothers-in-law for

the past few weeks and for a little time to come. "You want them

watched?" said my private enquiry agent, leaning over the desk towards

me and betraying a slight squint. "Exactly," said I. "I want to know

what sort of things they are looking at just at present."

"Have you any inkling----?"

"None."

"If our agents have to travel----"

I expressed a reasonable generosity in the matter of expenses, and left

him at last with a vague discomfort in my mind. How far mightn't this

undesirable unearth the whole business in the course of his

investigations? And then what could he do? Suppose I went back forthwith

and stopped his enquiries before they began! I had a disagreeable

feeling of meanness that I couldn't shake off; I felt I was taking up a

weapon that Justin didn't deserve. Yet I argued with myself that the

abduction of Mary justified any such course.

As I was still debating this I saw Philip. He was perhaps twenty yards

ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down

outside Blake's. "Philip," I cried, following him up the steps and

overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door

for him. "Philip! What have you people done with Mary? Where is Mary?"

He turned a white face to me. "How dare you," he said with a catch of

the breath, "mention my sister?"

I spoke in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at

the door in order that the latter might not hear what I said. "I want

to see her," I expostulated. "I _must_ see her. What you are doing is

not playing the game. I've _got_ to see her."

"Let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly I felt a whirlwind of

rage answering the rage in his eyes. The pent-up exasperation of three

weeks rushed to its violent release. He struck me in the face with the

hand that was gripped about his umbrella. He meant to strike me in the

face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me

after his blow I had flung out at him, and had hit him under the

jawbone. My blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. I

hit with all my being. It was an amazing flare up of animal passion;

from the moment that I perceived he was striking at me to the moment

when both of us came staggering across the door-mat into the dignified

and spacious hall-way of Blake's, we were back at the ancestral ape, and

we did exactly what the ancestral ape would have done. The arms of the

commissionaire about my waist, the rush of the astonished porter from

his little glass box, two incredibly startled and delighted pages, and

an intervening member bawling out "Sir! Sir!" converged to remind us

that we were a million years or so beyond those purely arboreal days....

We seemed for a time to be confronted before an audience that hesitated

to interfere. "How dare you name my sister to me?" he shouted at me, and

brought to my mind the amazing folly of which he was capable. I

perceived Mary's name flung to the four winds of heaven.

"You idiot, Philip!" I cried. "I don't _know_ your sister. I've not seen

her--scarcely seen her for years. I ask you--I ask you for a match-box

or something and you hit me."

"If you dare to speak to her----!"

"You fool!" I cried, going nearer to him and trying to make him

understand. But he winced and recoiled defensively. "I'm sorry," I said

to the commissionaire who was intervening. "Lord Maxton has made a

mistake."

"Is he a member?" said someone in the background, and somebody else

suggested calling a policeman. I perceived that only a prompt retreat

would save the whole story of our quarrel from the newspapers. So far as

I could see nobody knew me there except Philip. I had to take the risks

of his behavior; manifestly I couldn't control it. I made no further

attempt to explain anything to anybody. Everyone was a little too

perplexed for prompt action, and so the advantage in that matter lay

with me. I walked through the door, and with what I imagined to be an

appearance of the utmost serenity down the steps. I noted an ascending

member glance at me with an expression of exceptional interest, but it

was only after I had traversed the length of Pall Mall that I realized

that my lip and the corner of my nostril were both bleeding profusely. I

called a cab when I discovered my handkerchief scarlet, and retreated to

my flat and cold ablutions. Then I sat down to write a letter to

Tarvrille, with a clamorous "Urgent, Please forward if away" above the

address, and tell him at least to suppress Philip. But within the club

that blockhead, thinking of nothing but the appearances of our fight and

his own credit, was varying his assertion that he had thrashed me, with

denunciations of me as a "blackguard," and giving half a dozen men a

highly colored, improvised, and altogether improbable account of my

relentless pursuit and persecution of Lady Mary Justin, and how she had

left London to avoid me. They listened, no doubt, with extreme avidity.

The matrimonial relations of the Justins had long been a matter for

speculative minds.

And while Philip was doing this, Guy, away in Mayo still, was writing a

tender, trusting, and all too explicit letter to a well-known and

extremely impatient lady in London to account for his continued absence

from her house. "So that is it!" said the lady, reading, and was at

least in the enviable position of one who had confirmatory facts to

impart....

And so quite suddenly the masks were off our situation and we were open

to an impertinent world. For some days I did not realize what had

happened, and lived in hope that Philip had been willing and able to

cover his lapse. I went about with my preoccupation still, as I

imagined, concealed, and with an increasing number of typed letters from

my private enquiry agent in my pocket containing inaccurate and

worthless information about the movements of Justin, which appeared to

have been culled for the most part from a communicative young policeman

stationed at the corner nearest to the Justins' house, or expanded from

_Who's Who_ and other kindred works of reference. The second letter, I

remember, gave some particulars about the financial position of the

younger men, and added that Justin's credit with the west-end tradesmen

was "limitless," points upon which I had no sort of curiosity

whatever....

I suppose a couple of hundred people in London knew before I did that

Lady Mary Justin had been carried off to Ireland and practically

imprisoned there by her husband because I was her lover. The thing

reached me at last through little Fred Riddling, who came to my rooms in

the morning while I was sitting over my breakfast. "Stratton!" said he,

"what is all this story of your shaking Justin by the collar, and

threatening to kill him if he didn't give up his wife to you? And why do

you want to fight a duel with Maxton? What's it all about? Fire-eater

you must be! I stood up for you as well as I could, but I heard you

abused for a solid hour last night, and there was a chap there simply

squirting out facts and dates and names. Got it all.... What have you

been up to?"

He stood on my hearthrug with an air of having called for an explanation

to which he was entitled, and he very nearly got one. But I just had

some scraps of reserve left, and they saved me. "Tell me first," I said,

delaying myself with the lighting of a cigarette, "the particulars ...

as you heard them."

Riddling embarked upon a descriptive sketch, and I got a minute or so to

think.

"Go on," I said with a note of irony, when he paused. "Go on. Tell me

some more. Where did you say they have taken her; let us have it right."

By the time his little store had run out I knew exactly what to do with

him. "Riddling," said I, and stood up beside him suddenly and dropped my

hand with a little added weight upon his shoulder, "Riddling, do you

know the only right and proper thing to do when you hear scandal about a

friend?"

"Come straight to him," said Riddling virtuously, "as I have done."

"No. Say you don't believe it. Ask the scandal-monger how he knows and

insist on his telling you--insist. And if he won't--be very, very rude

to him. Insist up to the quarrelling point. Now who were those people?"

"Well--that's a bit stiff.... One chap I didn't know at all."

"You should have pulled him up and insisted upon knowing who he was, and

what right he had to lie about me. For it's lying, Riddling. Listen! It

isn't true that I'm besieging Lady Mary Justin. So far from besieging

her I didn't even know where she was until you told me. Justin is a

neighbor of my father's and a friend of mine. I had tea with him and his

wife not a month ago. I had tea with them together. I knew they were

going away, but it was a matter of such slight importance to me, such

slight importance"--I impressed this on his collarbone--"that I was left

with the idea that they were going to the south of France. I believe

they are in the south of France. And there you are. I'm sorry to spoil

sport, but that's the bleak unromantic truth of the matter."

"You mean to say that there is nothing in it all?"

"Nothing."

He was atrociously disappointed. "But everybody," he said, "everybody

has got something."

"Somebody will get a slander case if this goes on. I don't care what

they've got."

"Good Lord!" he said, and stared at the rug. "You'll take your oath----"

He glanced up and met my eye. "Oh, of course it's all right what you

say." He was profoundly perplexed. He reflected. "But then, I say

Stratton, why did you go for Maxton at Blake's? _That_ I had from an

eye-witness. You can't deny a scrap like that--in broad daylight. Why

did you do that?"

"Oh _that's_ it," said I. "I begin to have glimmerings. There's a little

matter between myself and Maxton...." I found it a little difficult to

improvise a plausible story.

"But he said it was his sister," persisted Riddling. "He said so

afterwards, in the club."

"Maxton," said I, losing my temper, "is a fool and a knave and a liar.

His sister indeed! Lady Mary! If he can't leave his sister out of this

business I'll break every bone of his body." ... I perceived my temper

was undoing me. I invented rapidly but thinly. "As a matter of fact,

Riddling, it's quite another sort of lady has set us by the ears."

Riddling stuck his chin out, tucked in the corners of his mouth, made

round eyes at the breakfast things and, hands in pockets, rocked from

heels to toes and from toes to heels. "I see Stratton, yes, I see. Yes,

all this makes it very plain, of course. Very plain.... Stupid thing,

scandal is.... Thanks! no, I won't have a cigarette."

And he left me presently with an uncomfortable sense that he did see,

and didn't for one moment intend to restrain his considerable histrionic

skill in handing on his vision to others. For some moments I stood

savoring this all too manifest possibility, and then my thoughts went

swirling into another channel. At last the curtain was pierced. I was no

longer helplessly in the dark. I got out my Bradshaw, and sat with the

map spread out over the breakfast things studying the routes to Mayo.

Then I rang for Williams, the man I shared with the two adjacent

flat-holders, and told him to pack my kit-bag because I was suddenly

called away.

§ 13

Many of the particulars of my journey to Ireland have faded out of my

mind altogether. I remember most distinctly my mood of grim elation that

at last I had to deal with accessible persons again....

The weather was windy and violent, and I was sea-sick for most of the

crossing, and very tired and exhausted when I landed. Williams had

thought of my thick over-coat and loaded me with wraps and rugs, and I

sat in the corner of a compartment in that state of mental and bodily

fatigue that presses on the brows like a painless headache. I got to

some little junction at last where I had to wait an hour for a

branch-line train. I tasted all the bitterness of Irish hospitality, and

such coffee as Ireland alone can produce. Then I went on to a station

called Clumber or Clumboye, or some such name, and thence after some

difficulty I got a car for my destination. It was a wretched car in

which hens had been roosting, and it was drawn by a steaming horse that

had sores under its mended harness.

An immense wet wind was blowing as we came over the big hill that lies

to the south of Mirk. Everything was wet, the hillside above me was

either intensely green sodden turf or great streaming slabs of

limestone, seaward was a rocky headland, a ruin of a beehive shape, and

beyond a vast waste of tumbling waters unlit by any sun. Not a tree

broke that melancholy wilderness, nor any living thing but ourselves.

The horse went stumblingly under the incessant stimulation of the

driver's lash and tongue....

"Yonder it is," said my man, pointing with his whip, and I twisted

round to see over his shoulder, not the Rhine-like castle I had

expected, but a long low house of stone upon a headland, backed by a

distant mountain that vanished in a wild driven storm of rain as I

looked. But at the sight of Mirk my lassitude passed, my nerves

tightened, and my will began to march again. Now, thought I, we bring

things to an issue. Now we come to something personal and definite. The

vagueness is at an end. I kept my eyes upon the place, and thought it

more and more like a prison as we drew nearer. Perhaps from that window

Mary was looking for me now. Had she wondered why I did not come to her

before? Now at any rate I had found her. I sprang off the car, found a

bell-handle, and set the house jangling.

The door opened, and a little old man appeared with his fingers thrust

inside his collar as though he were struggling against strangulation. He

regarded me for a second, and spoke before I could speak.

"What might you be wanting?" said he, as if he had an answer ready.

"I want to see Lady Mary Justin," I said.

"You can't," he said. "She's gone."

"Gone!"

"The day before yesterday she went to London. You'll have to be getting

back there."

"She's gone to London."

"No less."

"Willingly?"

The little old man struggled with his collar. "Anyone would go

willingly," he said, and seemed to await my further commands. He eyed me

obliquely with a shadow of malice in his eyes.

It was then my heart failed, and I knew that we lovers were beaten. I

turned from the door without another word to the janitor. "Back," said I

to my driver, and got up behind him.

But it is one thing to decide to go back, and another to do it. At the

little station I studied time-tables, and I could not get to England

again without a delay of half a day. Somewhere I must wait. I did not

want to wait where there was any concourse of people. I decided to stay

in the inn by the station for the intervening six hours, and get some

sleep before I started upon my return, but when I saw the bedroom I

changed my plan and went down out of the village by a steep road towards

the shore. I wandered down through the rain and spindrift to the very

edge of the sea, and there found a corner among the rocks a little

sheltered from the wind, and sat, inert and wretched; my lips salt, my

hair stiff with salt, and my body wet and cold; a miserable defeated

man. For I had now an irrational and entirely overwhelming conviction of

defeat. I saw as if I ought always to have seen that I had been pursuing

a phantom of hopeless happiness, that my dream of ever possessing Mary

again was fantastic and foolish, and that I had expended all my strength

in vain. Over me triumphed a law and tradition more towering than those

cliffs and stronger than those waves. I was overwhelmed by a sense of

human weakness, of the infinite feebleness of the individual man against

wind and wave and the stress of tradition and the ancient usages of

mankind. "We must submit," I whispered, crouching close, "we must

submit." ...

Far as the eye could reach the waves followed one another in long

unhurrying lines, an inexhaustible succession, rolling, hissing,

breaking, and tossing white manes of foam, to gather at last for a

crowning effort and break thunderously, squirting foam two hundred feet

up the streaming faces of the cliffs. The wind tore and tugged at me,

and wind and water made together a clamor as though all the evil voices

in the world, all the violent passions and all the hasty judgments were

seeking a hearing above the more elemental uproar....

§ 14

And while I was in this phase of fatigue and despair in Mayo, the scene

was laid and all the other actors were waiting for the last act of my

defeat in London. I came back to find two letters from Mary and a little

accumulation of telegrams and notes, one written in my flat, from

Tarvrille.

Mary's letters were neither of them very long, and full of a new-born

despair. She had not realized how great were the forces against her and

against us both. She let fall a phrase that suggested she was ill. She

had given in, she said, to save herself and myself and others from the

shame and ruin of a divorce, and I must give in too. We had to agree not

to meet or communicate for three years, and I was to go out of England.

She prayed me to accept this. She knew, she said, she seemed to desert

me, but I did not know everything,--I did not know everything,--I must

agree; she could not come with me; it was impossible. _Now_ certainly it

was impossible. She had been weak, but I did not know all. If I knew all

I should be the readier to understand and forgive her, but it was part

of the conditions that I could not know all. Justin had been generous,

in his way.... Justin had everything in his hands, the whole world was

behind him against us, and I must give in. Those letters had a quality I

had never before met in her, they were broken-spirited. I could not

understand them fully, and they left me perplexed, with a strong desire

to see her, to question her, to learn more fully what this change in her

might mean.

Tarvrille's notes recorded his repeated attempts to see me, I felt that

he alone was capable of clearing up things for me, and I went out again

at once and telegraphed to him for an appointment.

He wired to me from that same house in Mayfair in which I had first met

Mary after my return. He asked me to come to him in the afternoon, and

thither I went through a November fog, and found him in the drawing-room

that had the plate glass above the fireplace. But now he was vacating

the house, and everything was already covered up, the pictures and their

frames were under holland, the fine furniture all in covers of faded

stuff, the chandeliers and statues wrapped up, the carpets rolled out of

the way. Even the window-curtains were tucked into wrappers, and the

blinds, except one he had raised, drawn down. He greeted me and

apologized for the cold inhospitality of the house. "It was convenient

here," he said. "I came here to clear out my papers and boxes. And

there's no chance of interruptions."

He went and stood before the empty fireplace, and plunged into the

middle of the matter.

"You know, my dear Stratton, in this confounded business my heart's with

you. It has been all along. If I could have seen a clear chance before

you--for you and Mary to get away--and make any kind of life of

it--though she's my cousin--I'd have helped you. Indeed I would. But

there's no sort of chance--not the ghost of a chance...."

He began to explain very fully, quite incontrovertibly, that entire

absence of any chance for Mary and myself together. He argued to the

converted. "You know as well as I do what that romantic flight abroad,

that Ouidaesque casa in some secluded valley, comes to in reality. All

round Florence there's no end of such scandalous people, I've been among

them, the nine circles of the repenting scandalous, all cutting one

another."

"I agree," I said. "And yet----"

"What?"

"We could have come back."

Tarvrille paused, and then leant forward. "No."

"But people have done so. It would have been a clean sort of divorce."

"You don't understand Justin. Justin would ruin you. If you were to take

Mary away.... He's a queer little man. Everything is in his hands.

Everything always is in the husband's hands in these affairs. If he

chooses. And keeps himself in the right. For an injured husband the law

sanctifies revenge....

"And you see, you've got to take Justin's terms. He's changed. He didn't

at first fully realize. He feels--cheated. We've had to persuade him.

There's a case for Justin, you know. He's had to stand--a lot. I don't

wonder at his going stiff at last. No doubt it's hard for you to see

that. But you have to see it. You've got to go away as he

requires--three years out of England, you've got to promise not to

correspond, not to meet afterwards----"

"It's so extravagant a separation."

"The alternative is--not for you to have Mary, but for you two to be

flung into the ditch together--that's what it comes to, Stratton.

Justin's got his case. He's set like--steel. You're up against the law,

up against social tradition, up against money--any one of those a man

may fight, but not all three. And she's ill, Stratton. You owe her

consideration. You of all people. That's no got-up story; she's truly

ill and broken. She can no longer fly with you and fight with you,

travel in uncomfortable trains, stay in horrible little inns. You don't

understand. The edge is off her pluck, Stratton."

"What do you mean?" I asked, and questioned his face.

"Just exactly what I say."

A gleam of understanding came to me....

"Why can't I see her?" I broke in, with my voice full of misery and

anger. "Why can't I see her? As if seeing her once more could matter so

very greatly now!"

He appeared to weigh something in his mind. "You can't," he said.

"How do I know that she's not being told some story of my abandonment of

her? How do I know she isn't being led to believe I no longer want her

to come to me?"

"She isn't," said Tarvrille, still with that arrested judicial note in

his voice. "You had her letters?" he said.

"Two."

"Yes. Didn't they speak?"

"I want to see her. Damn it, Tarvrille!" I cried with sudden tears in

my smarting eyes. "Let _her_ send me away. This isn't---- Not treating

us like human beings."

"Women," said Tarvrille and looked at his boot toes, "are different from

men. You see, Stratton----"

He paused. "You always strike me, Stratton, as not realizing that women

are weak things. We've got to take _care_ of them. You don't seem to

feel that as I do. Their moods--fluctuate--more than ours do. If you

hold 'em to what they say in the same way you hold a man--it isn't

fair...."

He halted as though he awaited my assent to that proposition.

"If you were to meet Mary now, you see, and if you were to say to her,

come--come and we'll jump down Etna together, and you said it in the

proper voice and with the proper force, she'd do it, Stratton. You know

that. Any man knows a thing like that. And she wouldn't _want_ to do

it...."

"You mean that's why I can't see her."

"That's why you can't see her."

"Because we'd become--dramatic."

"Because you'd become--romantic and uncivilized."

"Well," I said sullenly, realizing the bargain we were making, "I

won't."

"You won't make any appeal?"

"No."

He made no answer, and I looked up to discover him glancing over his

shoulder through the great glass window into the other room. I stood up

very quickly, and there in the further apartment were Guy and Mary,

standing side by side. Our eyes met, and she came forward towards the

window impulsively, and paused, with that unpitying pane between us....

Then Guy was opening the door for her and she stood in the doorway. She

was in dark furs wrapped about her, but in the instant I could see how

ill she was and how broken. She came a step or so towards me and then

stopped short, and so we stood, shyly and awkwardly under Guy and

Tarvrille's eyes, two yards apart. "You see," she said, and stopped

lamely.

"You and I," I said, "have to part, Mary. We---- We are beaten. Is that

so?"

"Stephen, there is nothing for us to do. We've offended. We broke the

rules. We have to pay."

"By parting?"

"What else is there to do?"

"No," I said. "There's nothing else." ...

"I tried," she said, "that you shouldn't be sent from England."

"That's a detail," I answered.

"But your politics--your work?"

"That does not matter. The great thing is that you are ill and

unhappy--that I can't help you. I can't do anything.... I'd go anywhere

... to save you.... All I can do, I suppose, is to part like this and

go."

"I shan't be--altogether unhappy. And I shall think of you----"

She paused, and we stood facing one another, tongue-tied. There was only

one word more to say, and neither of us would say it for a moment.

"Good-bye," she whispered at last, and then, "Don't think I deserted

you, Stephen my dear. Don't think ill of me. I couldn't come--I couldn't

come to you," and suddenly her face changed slowly and she began to

weep, my fearless playmate whom I had never seen weeping before; she

began to weep as an unhappy child might weep.

"Oh my Mary!" I cried, weeping also, and held out my arms, and we clung

together and kissed with tear-wet faces.

"No," cried Guy belatedly, "we promised Justin!"

But Tarvrille restrained his forbidding arm, and then after a second's

interval put a hand on my shoulder. "Come," he said....

And so it was Mary and I parted from one another.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

BEGINNING AGAIN

§ 1

In operas and romances one goes from such a parting in a splendid

dignity of gloom. But I am no hero, and I went down the big staircase of

Tarvrille's house the empty shuck of an abandoned desire. I was acutely

ashamed of my recent tears. In the centre of the hall was a marble

figure swathed about with yellow muslin. "On account of the flies," I

said, breaking our silence.

My words were far too unexpected for Tarvrille to understand. "The

flies," I repeated with an air of explanation.

"You're sure she'll be all right?" I said abruptly.

"You've done the best thing you can for her."

"I suppose I have. I have to go." And then I saw ahead of me a world

full of the tiresome need of decisions and arrangements and empty of all

interest. "Where the _devil_ am I to go, Tarvrille? I can't even get out

of things altogether...."

And then with a fresh realization of painful difficulties ahead: "I have

to tell this to my father. I've got to explain---- And he thought--he

expected----"

Tarvrille opened the half of the heavy front door for me, hesitated,

and came down the broad steps into the chilly grey street and a few

yards along the pavement with me. He wanted to say something that he

found difficult to say. When at last he did find words they were quite

ridiculous in substance, and yet at the time I took them as gravely as

he intended them. "It's no good quoting Marcus Aurelius," said

Tarvrille, "to a chap with his finger in the crack of a door."

"I suppose it isn't," I said.

"One doesn't want to be a flatulent ass of course," said Tarvrille,

"still----"

He resumed with an air of plunging. "It will sound just rot to you now,

Stratton, but after all it comes to this. Behind us is

a--situation--with half-a-dozen particular persons. Out here--I mean

here round the world--before you've done with them--there's a thousand

million people--men and women."

"Oh! what does that matter to me?" said I.

"Everything," said Tarvrille. "At least--it ought to."

He stopped and held out his hand. "Good-bye, Stratton--good luck to you!

Good-bye."

"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."

I turned away from him. The image of Mary crying as a child cries

suddenly blinded me and blotted out the world.

§ 2

I want to give you as clearly as I can some impression of the mental

states that followed this passion and this collapse. It seems to me one

of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative

attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no

description at all of most of the mental states that make up life.

Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it

is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of

pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it

begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon

ridiculous syntheses. Who with a sick soul would dream of going to a

psychologist?...

Now here was I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly

understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled

myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was

had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and

passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of

the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without

end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. I

had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a

friend. I kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. If some momentary

distraction released me for a time, back I would fall presently before I

knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse

the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably

overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging

defeat. I would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to Mary,

some violent return and attack upon the situation....

One very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain

values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense

of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no

training will ever altogether repudiate; I had a persuasion that out of

that I would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and

treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. And round these deep central

preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards

secondary people. There had been interventions, judgments upon

insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments,

that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.

I had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that I was still entitled

to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. I clung fiercely

to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be

dishonorable.... This state of mind I am describing is, I am convinced,

the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once

questionable and passionate. He seems free, but he is not free; he is

the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.

And we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for

ourselves, Philip, Guy, Justin, the friends involved, and all in the

measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic

realization. Even when we slept, the clenched fist of the attitudes we

had assumed gave a direction to our dreams.

You see the same string of events that had produced all this system of

intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption

of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. I had

had to leave England and all the political beginnings I had been

planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible

projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....

And then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that

hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! The desire for a

voice! The arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who

will listen in peace no more! From that lonely distress even rage, even

the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. From that pitiless

travail of emptiness I was ready to turn desperately to any offer of

excitement and distraction.

From all those things I was to escape at last unhelped, but I want you

to understand particularly these phases through which I passed; it falls

to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness

and malign obsession. Make the groove only a little deeper, a little

more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and

suicide stares you in the face. And things worse than suicide, that

suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices

and the utmost outrageous defiance of the dreaming noble self that has

been so despitefully used. Into these same inky pools I have dipped my

feet, where other men have drowned. I understand why they drown. And my

taste of misdeed and resentment has given me just an inkling of what men

must feel who go to prison. I know what it is to quarrel with a world.

§ 3

My first plan when I went abroad was to change my Harbury French, which

was poor stuff and pedantic, into a more colloquial article, and then go

into Germany to do the same thing with my German, and then perhaps to

remain in Germany studying German social conditions--and the quality of

the German army. It seemed to me that when the term of my exile was over

I might return to England and re-enter the army. But all these were very

anæmic plans conceived by a tired mind, and I set about carrying them

out in a mood of slack lassitude. I got to Paris, and in Paris I threw

them all overboard and went to Switzerland.

I remember very clearly how I reached Paris. I arrived about sunset--I

suppose at St. Lazare or the Gare du Nord--sent my luggage to the little

hotel in the Rue d'Antin where I had taken rooms, and dreading their

loneliness decided to go direct to a restaurant and dine. I remember

walking out into the streets just as shops and windows and street lamps

were beginning to light up, and strolling circuitously through the clear

bright stir of the Parisian streets to find a dinner at the Café de la

Paix. Some day you will know that peculiar sharp definite excitement of

Paris. All cities are exciting, and each I think in a different way. And

as I walked down along some boulevard towards the centre of things I saw

a woman coming along a side street towards me, a woman with something in

her body and something in her carriage that reminded me acutely of Mary.

Her face was downcast, and then as we converged she looked up at me, not

with the meretricious smile of her class but with a steadfast, friendly

look. Her face seemed to me sane and strong. I passed and hesitated. An

extraordinary impulse took me. I turned back. I followed this woman

across the road and a little way along the opposite pavement. I remember

I did that, but I do not remember clearly what was in my mind at the

time; I think it was a vague rush towards the flash of companionship in

her eyes. There I had seemed to see the glimmer of a refuge from my

desolation. Then came amazement and reaction. I turned about and went on

my way, and saw her no more.

But afterwards, later, I went out into the streets of Paris bent upon

finding that woman. She had become a hope, a desire.

I looked for her for what seemed a long time, half an hour perhaps or

two hours. I went along, peering at the women's faces, through the

blazing various lights, the pools of shadowy darkness, the flickering

reflections and transient glitter, one of a vast stream of slow-moving

adventurous human beings. I crossed streams of traffic, paused at

luminous kiosks, became aware of dim rows of faces looking down upon me

from above the shining enamel of the omnibuses.... My first intentness

upon one person, so that I disregarded any distracting intervention,

gave place by insensible degrees to a more general apprehension of the

things about me. That original woman became as it were diffused. I began

to look at the men and women sitting at the little tables behind the

panes of the cafés, and even on the terraces--for the weather was still

dry and open. I scrutinized the faces I passed, faces for the most part

animated by a sort of shallow eagerness. Many were ugly, many vile with

an intense vulgarity, but some in that throng were pretty, some almost

gracious. There was something pathetic and appealing for me in this

great sweeping together of people into a little light, into a weak

community of desire for joy and eventfulness. There came to me a sense

of tolerance, of fellowship, of participation. From an outer darkness

of unhappiness or at least of joylessness, they had all come hither--as

I had come.

I was like a creature that slips back again towards some deep waters out

of which long since it came, into the light and air. It was as if old

forgotten things, prenatal experiences, some magic of ancestral

memories, urged me to mingle again with this unsatisfied passion for

life about me....

Then suddenly a wave of feeling between self-disgust and fear poured

over me. This vortex was drawing me into deep and unknown things.... I

hailed a passing _fiacre_, went straight to my little hotel, settled my

account with the proprietor, and caught a night train for Switzerland.

All night long my head ached, and I lay awake swaying and jolting and

listening to the rhythms of the wheels, Paris clean forgotten so soon as

it was left, and my thoughts circling continually about Justin and

Philip and Mary and the things I might have said and done.

§ 4

One day late in February I found myself in Vevey. I had come down with

the break-up of the weather from Montana, where I had met some Oxford

men I knew and had learned to ski. I had made a few of those vague

acquaintances one makes in a winter-sport hotel, but now all these

people were going back to England and I was thrown back upon myself once

more. I was dull and angry and unhappy still, full of self-reproaches

and dreary indignations, and then very much as the sky will sometimes

break surprisingly through storm clouds there began in me a new series

of moods. They came to me by surprise. One clear bright afternoon I sat

upon the wall that runs along under the limes by the lake shore, envying

all these people who were going back to England and work and usefulness.

I thought of myself, of my career spoilt, my honor tarnished, my

character tested and found wanting. So far as English politics went my

prospects had closed for ever. Even after three years it was improbable

that I should be considered by the party managers again. And besides, it

seemed to me I was a man crippled. My other self, the mate and

confirmation of my mind, had gone from me. I was no more than a

mutilated man. My life was a thing condemned; I had joined the ranks of

loafing, morally-limping, English exiles.

I looked up. The sun was setting, a warm glow fell upon the dissolving

mountains of Savoy and upon the shining mirror of the lake. The

luminous, tranquil breadth of it caught me and held me. "I am done for."

The light upon the lake and upon the mountains, the downward swoop of a

bird over the water and something in my heart, gave me the lie.

"What nonsense!" I said, and felt as if some dark cloud that had

overshadowed me had been thrust back.

I stared across at Savoy as though that land had spoken. Why should I

let all my life be ruled by the blunders and adventures of one short

year of adventure? Why should I become the votary of a train of

consequences? What had I been dreaming of all this time? Over there were

gigantic uplands I had never seen and trodden; and beyond were great

plains and cities, and beyond that the sea, and so on, great spaces and

multitudinous things all round about the world. What did the things I

had done, the things I had failed to do, the hopes crushed out of me,

the tears and the anger, matter to _that_? And in some amazing way this

thought so took possession of me that the question seemed also to carry

with it the still more startling collateral, what then did they matter

to me? "Come out of yourself," said the mountains and all the beauty of

the world. "Whatever you have done or suffered is nothing to the

inexhaustible offer life makes you. We are you, just as much as the past

is you."

It was as though I had forgotten and now remembered how infinitely

multitudinous life can be. It was as if Tarvrille's neglected words to

me had sprouted in the obscurity of my mind and borne fruit....

I cannot explain how that mood came, I am doing my best to describe it,

and it is not easy even to describe. And I fear that to you who will

have had I hope no experience of such shadows as I had passed through,

it is impossible to convey its immense elation.... I remember once I

came in a boat out of the caves of Han after two hours in the darkness,

and there was the common daylight that is nothing wonderful at all, and

its brightness ahead there seemed like trumpets and cheering, like

waving flags and like the sunrise. And so it was with this mood of my

release.

There is a phrase of Peter E. Noyes', that queer echo of Emerson whom

people are always rediscovering and forgetting again, a phrase that

sticks in my mind,--"Every living soul is heir to an empire and has

fallen into a pit." It's an image wonderfully apt to describe my change

of mental attitude, and render the contrast between those intensely

passionate personal entanglements that had held me tight and that wide

estate of life that spreads about us all, open to all of us in just the

measure that we can scramble out of our individual selves--to a more

general self. I seemed to be hanging there at the brim of my stale and

painful den, staring at the unthought-of greatness of the world, with an

unhoped-for wind out of heaven blowing upon my face.

I suppose the intention of the phrase "finding salvation," as religious

people use it, is very much this experience. If it is not the same thing

it is something very closely akin. It is as if someone were scrambling

out of a pit into a largeness--a largeness that is attainable by every

man just in the measure that he realizes it is there.

I leave these fine discriminations to the theologian. I know that I went

back to my hotel in Vevey with my mind healed, with my will restored to

me, and my ideas running together into plans. And I know that I had come

out that day a broken and apathetic man.

§ 5

The next day my mood declined again; it was as if that light, that sense

of release that had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had escaped

me. I sought earnestly to recover it. But I could not do so, and I found

my old narrow preoccupations calling urgently to me again.

I thought that perhaps I might get back those intimations of outlook and

relief if I clambered alone into some high solitude and thought. I had

a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise,

communing with the sky. It was the worst season for climbing, and on the

spur of the moment I could do nothing but get up the Rochers de Naye on

the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery

nor wet. I did not succeed. In one place I slipped down a wet bank for

some yards and held at last by a root; if I had slipped much further I

should not be writing here now; and I came back a very weary and bruised

climber, without any meditation....

Three nights after when I was in bed I became very lucidly awake--it

must have been about two or three in the morning--and the vision of life

returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination.

It was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the

world of sense did in some way communicate with me. It bade me rouse my

spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring

and proliferating in my mind when I had returned to England from the

Cape. "Dismiss your passion." But I urged that that I could not do;

there was the thought of Mary subjugated and weeping, the smarting

memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge and discovery, the

aching separation. No matter, the stillness answered, in the end all

that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... I cannot forget, I

insisted. Do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither;

this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. You

are not only Stephen Stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences

he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are

Man--Everyman--in this round world in which your lot has fallen. But

Mary, I urged, to forget Mary is a treason, an ingratitude, seeing that

she loved me. But the stillness did not command me to forget her, but

only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind. And

that work? That work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand,

to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself

that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which

together saturate your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with

life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so

painfully out of the deadness of matter....

"But who are you?" I cried out suddenly to the night. "Who are you?"

I sat up on the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning to break up

the featureless blackness of the small hours. "This is just some odd

corner of my brain," I said....

Yet---- How did I come to have this odd corner in my brain? What _is_

this lucid stillness?...

§ 6

Let me tell you rather of my thoughts than of my moods, for there at

least one comes to something with a form that may be drawn and a

substance that is measurable; one ceases to struggle with things

indefinable and the effort to convey by metaphors and imaginary voices

things that are at once bodiless and soundless and lightless and yet

infinitely close and real. And moreover with that mysterious and subtle

change of heart in me there came also a change in the quality and range

of my ideas. I seemed to rise out of a tangle of immediacies and

misconceptions, to see more largely and more freely than I had ever done

before.

I have told how in my muddled and wounded phase I had snatched at the

dull project of improving my languages, and under the cloak of that

spying a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set such

petty romanticism on one side. It had recovered the strength to look on

the whole of life and on my place in it. It could resume the ideas that

our storm of passion had for a time thrust into the background of my

thoughts. I took up again all those broad generalizations that had

arisen out of my experiences in South Africa, and which I had been not

so much fitting into as forcing into the formulæ of English politics; I

recalled my disillusionment with British Imperialism, my vague but

elaborating apprehension of a profound conflict between enterprise and

labor, a profound conflict between the life of the farm and the life of

trade and finance and wholesale production, as being something far truer

to realities than any of the issues of party and patriotism upon which

men were spending their lives. So far as this rivalry between England

and Germany, which so obsessed the imagination of Europe, went, I found

that any faith I may have had in its importance had simply fallen out of

my mind. As a danger to civilization, as a conceivable source of

destruction and delay, it was a monstrous business enough, but that in

the long run it mattered how or when they fought and which won I did not

believe. In the development of mankind the thing was of far less

importance than the struggle for Flanders or the wars of France and

Burgundy. I was already coming to see Europe as no more than the

dog's-eared corner of the page of history,--like most Europeans I had

thought it the page--and my recovering mind was eager and open to see

the world beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that lay

outside our insularities. What is humanity as a whole doing? What is the

nature of the world process of which I am a part? Why should I drift

from cradle to grave wearing the blinkers of my time and nationality, a

mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale

antagonisms, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while

I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had

fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity glared. For me the

alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking

towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I

still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of

that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe....

All this I say came into my mind as if it were a part of that recovery

of my mind from its first passionate abjection. And it seemed a simple

and obvious part of the same conversion to realize that I was ignorant

and narrow, and that, too, in a world which is suffering like a beast in

a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook, and that

it was my manifest work and purpose to make myself less ignorant and to

see and learn with all my being. It came to me as a clear duty that I

should get out of the land of hotels and leisure and go seeking the

facts and clues to human inter-relationship nearer the earthy roots of

things, and I turned my thoughts to India and China, those vast enigmas

of human accumulation, in a spirit extraordinarily like that of some

mystic who receives a call. I felt I must go to Asia and from Asia

perhaps round the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me.

I wanted to see the East not as a spectacle but as the simmering vat in

which the greater destiny of man brews and brews....

§ 7

It was necessary to tell my father of my intentions. I made numerous

beginnings. I tore up several letters and quarrelled bitterly with the

hotel pens. At first I tried to describe the change that had happened to

my mind, to give him some impression of the new light, the release that

had come to me. But how difficult this present world is with its tainted

and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings! Here was I

writing for the first time in my life of something essentially religious

and writing it to him whose profession was religion, and I could find no

words to convey my meaning to him that did not seem to me fraught with

the possibilities of misinterpretation. One evening I made a desperate

resolve to let myself go, and scrawled my heart out to him as it seemed

that night, a strange, long letter. It was one of the profoundest

regrets that came to me when I saw him dead last winter that I did not

risk his misunderstanding and post that letter. But when I re-read it in

the next morning's daylight it seemed to me so rhetorical, so full

of--what shall I call it?--spiritual bombast, it so caricatured and

reflected upon the deep feelings sustaining me, that I could not post it

for shamefacedness, and I tore it up into little pieces and sent

instead the briefest of notes.

"I am doing no good here in Switzerland," I wrote. "Would you mind if I

went east? I want to see something of the world outside Europe. I have a

fancy I may find something to do beyond there. Of course, it will cost

rather more than my present allowance. I will do my best to economize.

Don't bother if it bothers you--I've been bother enough to you...."

He replied still more compactly. "By all means. I will send you some

circular notes, Poste Restante, Rome. That will be on your way. Good

wishes to you, Stephen. I'm glad you want to go east instead of just

staying in Switzerland."

I sit here now and wonder, little son, what he thought, what he

supposed, what he understood.

I loved my father, and I began to perceive he loved me wonderfully. I

can imagine no man I would have sooner had for a priest than him; all

priestcraft lays hands if it can, and with an excellent wisdom, upon the

titles and dignity of fatherhood; and yet here am I left to guessing--I

do not know whether my father ever worshipped, whether he ever prayed

with his heart bared to God. There are times when the inexpressiveness

of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all

asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand

munching slowly in a field. Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk

together?... We fear bathos too much, are shyly decent to the pitch of

mania. We have neither the courage of our bodies nor of our souls....

I went almost immediately to Rome. I stayed in Rome some days, getting

together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city of the

dead in whose embrace the modern city lies. I was now becoming

interested in things outside my grooves, though my grooves were still

there, deep and receptive, and I went about the place at last almost

eagerly, tracing the outlines of that great departed city on whose

colossal bones the churches and palaces of the middle ages cluster like

weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden. I found myself

one day in the Forum, thinking of that imperialism that had built the

Basilica of Julius Cæsar, and comparing its cramped vestiges with that

vaster second administrative effort which has left the world the

monstrous arches of Constantine. I sat down over against these last

among the ruins of the Vestals' House, and mused on that later

reconstruction when the Empire, with its science aborted and its

literature and philosophy shrivelled to nothing, its social fabric

ruined by the extravagances of financial adventure and its honor and

patriotism altogether dead, united itself, in a desperate effort to

continue, with all that was most bickeringly intolerant and destructive

in Christianity--only to achieve one common vast decay. All Europe to

this day is little more than the sequel to that failure. It is the Roman

Empire in disintegration. The very churches whose domes rise to the

northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look

like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through

those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the

fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds

and nothing clearer....

I discovered I was putting all this into the form of a letter to Mary.

I was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. And

I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill musing over the idea

of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort

of diary of impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, I might

be able to put into her hands.

One does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier

to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little

hope of its delivery; yet for many years I kept up an impalpable

correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer

came--until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering

interests of a new rôle in life diverted it to other ends.

§ 8

One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn

because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another solitary

passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky

coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe

me.

"That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at

hand.

"Crete!" said I.

"Yes," he said, "Crete."

He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis,

"is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most

wonderful."

"Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me

to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the

best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had

bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable

sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to

serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or

screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of

gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any

money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing,

too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is.

Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons.

And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up

to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's

a tired sea...."

That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a

year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."

"In our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these

worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the

whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. It hit me first down in

Yucatan that that wasn't so. Why! the world's littered with the remains

of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism!--there's always been

Americanism. This Mediterranean is just a Museum of old Americas. I

guess Tyre and Sidon thought they were licking creation all the time.

It's set me thinking. What's _really_ going on? Why--anywhere,--you're

running about among ruins--anywhere. And ruins of something just as good

as anything we're doing to-day. Better--in some ways. It takes the heart

out of you...."

It was Gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. I remember very

vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched Crete pass away

northward and I listened to his talk.

"I was coming out of New York Harbor a month ago and looking back at the

skyscrapers," he said, "and suddenly it hit me in the mind;--'That's

just the next ruin,' I thought."

I remember that much of our first talk, but the rest of it now is

indistinct.

We had however struck up an acquaintance, we were both alone, and until

he left me on his way to Abydos we seem now to have been conversing all

the time. And almost all the time we were discussing human destiny and

the causes of effort and decay, and whether the last few ascendant

centuries the world has seen have in them anything more persistent than

the countless beginnings that have gone before.

"There's Science," said I a little doubtfully.

"At Cnossus there they had Dædalus, sir, fifty centuries ago. Dædalus!

He was an F.R.S. all right. I haven't a doubt he flew. If they hadn't

steel they had brass. We're too conceited about our little modern

things."

§ 9

I found something very striking and dramatic in the passage from Europe

to Asia. One steams slowly through a desert that comes up close to the

ship; the sand stretches away, hillock and mound beyond hillock and

mound; one sees camels in the offing stringing out to some ancient

destination; one is manifestly passing across a barrier,--the canal has

changed nothing of that. Suez is a first dab of tumultuous Orientalism,

noisy and vivid. And then, after that gleam of turmoil, one opens out

into the lonely dark blue waters of the Red Sea. Right and left the

shore is a bitter, sun-scorched desolation; eastward frowns a great

rampart of lowering purple mountains towering up to Sinai. It is like no

European landscape. The boat goes slowly as if uncharted dangers lurked

ahead. It is a new world with a new atmosphere. Then comes wave upon

wave of ever more sultry air, and the punkahs begin to swing and the

white clothes appear. Everyone casts off Europe, assumes an Asiatic

livery. The very sun, rushing up angrily and abruptly after a heated

night, is unfamiliar, an Asiatic sun.

And so one goes down that reef-fringed waterway to Aden; it is studded

with lonely-looking lighthouses that burn, it seems, untended, and

sometimes in their melancholy isolation swing great rhythmic arms of

light. And then, land and the last lateen sails of Aden vanishing

together, one stands out into the hot thundery monotonies of the Indian

Ocean; into imprisonment in a blue horizon across whose Titan ring the

engines seem to throb in vain. How one paces the ship day by day, and

eats and dozes and eats again, and gossips inanely and thanks Heaven

even for a flight of flying fish or a trail of smoke from over the

horizon to take one's mind a little out of one's oily quivering

prison!... A hot portentous delay; a sinister significant pause; that is

the voyage from Europe to India still.

I suppose by the time that you will go to India all this prelude will

have vanished, you will rattle through in a train-de-luxe from Calais,

by way of Baku or Constantinople; you will have none of this effect of

a deliberate sullen approach across limitless miles of sea. But that is

how I went to India. Everything seemed to expand; I was coming out of

the frequent landfalls, the neighborly intimacies and neighborly

conflicts of the Mediterranean into something remoter; into larger seas

and greater lands, rarer communications and a vaster future....

To go from Europe to Asia is like going from Norway to Russia, from

something slight and "advanced" to something massive and portentous. I

felt that nearly nine years ago; to-day all Asia seems moving forward to

justify my feelings....

And I remember too that as I went down the Red Sea and again in the

Indian Ocean I had a nearly intolerable passion of loneliness. A wound

may heal and still leave pain. I was coming out of Europe as one comes

out of a familiar house into something larger and stranger, I seemed but

a little speck of life, and behind me, far away and silent and receding,

was the one other being to whom my thoughts were open. It seemed very

cruel to me that I could not write to her.

Such moods were to come to me again and again, and particularly during

the inactivities of voyages and in large empty spaces and at night when

I was weary. At other times I could banish and overcome them by forcing

myself to be busy and by going to see novel and moving things.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

THIS SWARMING BUSINESS OF MANKIND

§ 1

I do not think I could now arrange into a consecutive history my

travellings, my goings and returnings in my wandering effort to see and

comprehend the world. And certainly even if I could arrange my facts I

should still be at a loss to tell of the growth of ideas that is so much

more important than any facts, to trace the increasing light to its

innumerable sources, to a chink here, to a glowing reflection there, to

a leap of burning light from some long inert darkness close at hand. But

steadily the light grew, and this vast world of man, in which our world,

little son, is the world of a limited class in a small island, began to

take on definite forms, to betray broad universal movements; what seemed

at first chaotic, a drift and tangle of passions, traditions, foolish

ideas, blundering hostilities, careless tolerances, became confusedly

systematic, showed something persistent and generalized at work among

its multitudinous perplexity.

I wonder now if I can put before you very briefly the main

generalizations that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the

simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and

sounds and--smells, for every part of the world has its distinctive

olfactory palette as much as its palette of colors--that rained daily

and nightly upon my mind.

Before, my eyes again as I sit here in this quiet walled French garden,

the great space before the Jumna Musjid at Delhi reappears, as I saw it

in the evening stillness against a glowing sky of gold, and the memory

of countless worshippers within, praying with a devotion no European

displays. And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and

temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun,

swarming with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also

swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of extravagantly

splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here

these places are alive with happening. It is just past midday here; at

this moment the sun sinks in the skies of India, the Jumna Musjid

flushes again with the glow of sunset, the smoke of evening fires

streams heavenward against its subtle lines, and upon those steps at

Benares that come down the hillside between the conquering mosque of

Aurangzeb and the shining mirror of the Ganges a thousand silent seated

figures fall into meditation. And other memories recur and struggle with

one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and

houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to

twinkle with a thousand lights. They are ablaze in Osaka and Yokohama

and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with

a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese

temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls

of the Tartar city at Pekin with squat pagoda-guarded gates. How those

great outlines lowered at me in the twilight, full of fresh memories and

grim anticipations of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here

recalling it--feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall

that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen!

going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at

last it seems to me that there emerges--something understandable.

I think I have got something understandable out of it all.

What a fantastically courageous thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts

seem to me at once presumptuous and inevitable. I do not know why it is

that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to

comprehend. But we who think are everyone impelled to this amazing

effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not

reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards

explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements

that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and

be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent

stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and

insufficiency--like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has

seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate

feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By

them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival.

Some forgotten man in our ancestry--for every begetting man alive was in

my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago--first dared

to think of the world as round,--an astounding temerity. He rolled up

the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons

that stretched beyond his ken, that seemed to commonsense to go on

certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange."

Magnificent feat of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draught of the

sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one falters at the deed.

You are not yet seven as I write and already you are serenely aware that

you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who

are sociologists and economists, publicists and philosophers and what

not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern

human intercourse, the whole indeed of history and archæology, into some

similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be

able to grasp.

I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape

of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be

conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in

recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a

shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since

there was any real emergence from theological assumptions and pure

romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was,

probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction

of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new interpretations

which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic

reigns and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How

impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of

Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of

sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and

futility vanishes directly one's vision penetrates the immediate

surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a

schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them

for the mere scum upon the stream.

And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a

time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase

corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between

discs and domes and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand

years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind

hovered about the stimulating theories of Socialism and particularly

about those more systematic forms of Socialist teaching that centre

about Karl Marx. He rose quite naturally out of those early economists

who saw all the world in terms of production and saving. He was a

necessary step for me at least, on the way to understanding. For a time

I did so shape the world in my mind that it seemed to me no more than a

vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation of labor. For a

time I thought human life was essentially a labor problem, that working

and controlling work and lending and selling and "speculating" made the

essential substance of human life, over which the forms of politics ran

as the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over its living muscles. I

followed my period in thinking that. You will find in Ferrero's "Roman

Decline," which was published early in this century, and which waits for

you in the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation that was

recommending itself to me in 1904 and 1905.

Well, the labor problem concerns a great--_substantial_, shall I

say?--in human society. It is only I think the basis and matter of

society, not its shape and life and reality, but it had to be

apprehended before I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly the

idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to

men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German

Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril

and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were

fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have

faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of

Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The

world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become a vast if as

yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed.

It makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind as a history of

Labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts of an intelligent minority

to get things done by other people. It does not explain how that

aggression of the minority arose nor does it give any conception of a

primordial society which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities

of primitive communities. One begins rather in the air with a human

society that sells and barters and sustains contracts and permits land

to be privately owned, and having as hastily as possible got away from

that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the large areas of the

world which remain under a pacific and unprogressive agriculture to this

day, the rest of the story becomes extremely convincing and

illuminating. It does indeed give a sustaining explanation to a large

part of recorded history, this generalization about the proclivity of

able and energetic people to make other people do things. One ignores

what is being done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon

the use and enslavement of men.

One sees that enslavement to labor progressing from crude directness to

the most subtly indirect methods. The first expedient of enterprise was

the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners

of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese South

Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering

and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of

our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip. We have fallen

into methods at once more subtle and more effective. We stand

benevolently in front of our fellow man, offering, almost as if it were

food and drink and shelter and love, the work we want him to do; and

behind him, we are acutely aware, is necessity, sometimes quite of our

making, as when we drive him to work by a hut-tax or a poll tax or a

rent, that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes not so obviously of

our making, sometimes so little of our making that it is easy to believe

we have no power to remove it. Instead of flicking the whip, we groan at

last with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable laws of political economy

that condemn us to comfort and direction, and those others to toil and

hardship and indignity....

And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that

I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of

imperfect and unwilling apprehension, of innocently assumed advantages,

of wilfully disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems

of motive, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us

long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and

undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems

of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether

in that position, making _them_ at last only questions of contrivance

and management on the way to greater ends.

I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by

the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of

expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious

driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of

those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger

appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human

development. With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world

purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has

been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over

the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine.

There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not

need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer

essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of

the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of

release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible to

every human being. Is possible. And it is there one halts seeing that

splendid possibility of aspiration and creation before mankind--and

seeing mankind for the most part still downcast, quite unaware or

incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves of ancient and

superseded assumptions and subjections....

But here I will not trace in any detail the growth of my conviction

that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard and continually

throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders. Suffice it

that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of

rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and

difficult indeed, but credibly solvable. During my Indian and Chinese

journey I was still at the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking

at labor, watching its organization and direction, seeing great

interests and enterprises replace the diffused life of an earlier phase;

the disputes and discussions in the Transvaal which had first opened my

mind to these questions came back to me, and steadily I lost my interest

in those mere political and national issues with their paraphernalia of

kings and flags and governments and parties that had hitherto blinded me

to these more fundamental interactions.

§ 2

It happened that in Bombay circumstances conspired to bring the crude

facts of labor enslavement vividly before me. I found a vigorous

agitation raging in the English press against the horrible sweating that

was going on in the cotton mills, I met the journalist most intimately

concerned in the business on my second day in India, and before a week

was out I was hard at work getting up the question and preparing a

memorandum with him on the possibility of immediate legislative

intervention. The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a

spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and

jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and

various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then

exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence,

Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population,--is for me a reminder

of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary

tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible

throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric

light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the

steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming

with emaciated overworked brown children--for even the adults, spare and

small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.

I plunged into this heated dreadful business with a passionate interest

and went back to the Yacht Club only when the craving for air and a good

bath and clean clothes and space and respect became unendurable. I waded

deep in labor, in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing

my facts through throbbing quivering sheds reeking of sweat and

excrement under the tall black-smoking chimneys,--chasing them in very

truth, because when we came prying into the mills after the hour when

child-labor should cease, there would be a shrill whistle, a patter of

feet and a cuffing and hiding of the naked little creatures we were

trying to rescue. They would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, in the most

impossible places, and we dragged them out scared and lying. Many of

them were perhaps seven years old at most; and the adults--men and women

of fourteen that is to say--we could not touch at all, and they worked

in that Indian heat, in a noisome air drenched with steam for fourteen

and fifteen hours a day. And essential to that general impression is a

memory of a slim Parsi mill-manager luminously explaining the inherited

passion for toil in the Indian weaver, and a certain bulky Hindu with a

lemon-yellow turban and a strip of plump brown stomach showing between

his clothes, who was doing very well, he said, with two wives and five

children in the mills.

That is my Bombay, that and the columns of crossed circles marking

plague cases upon the corners of houses and a peculiar acrid smell, and

the polychromatic stir of crowded narrow streets between cliffs of

architecture with carved timbers and heavy ornamentations, into which

the sun strikes obliquely and lights a thousand vivid hues....

Bombay, the gateway of what silly people were still calling in those

days "the immemorial East," Bombay, which is newer than Boston or New

York, Bombay which has grown beneath the Englishman's shadow out of a

Portuguese fort in the last two hundred years....

§ 3

I came out of these dark corners presently into the sunblaze of India. I

was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment and

engaged in preparing matter for my first book, "Enterprise and India,"

and therein you may read how I went first to Assam and then down to

Ceylon following up this perplexing and complicated business of human

enslavement to toil, exercised by this great spectacle of human labor,

and at once attracted by and stimulated by and dissatisfied with those

socialist generalizations that would make all this vast harsh spectacle

of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and outrage upon humanity.

And behind and about the things I was looking for were other things for

which I was not looking, that slowly came into and qualified the

problem. It dawned upon me by degrees that India is not so much one

country as a vast spectacle of human development at every stage, in

infinite variety. One ranges between naked savages and the most

sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries about great modern

enterprises, about railway labor, canal labor, tea-planting, across vast

stretches of country where men still lived, illiterate, agricultural,

unprogressive and simple, as men lived before the first stirrings of

recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those mud-built villages

groups of women with brass vessels who are identical in pose and figure

and quality with the women modelled in Tanagra figures, and the droning

wall-wheel is the same that irrigated the fields of ancient Greece, and

the crops and beasts and all the life is as it was in Greece and Italy,

Phoenicia and Judea before the very dawn of history.

By imperceptible degrees I came to realize that this matter of

expropriation and enslavement and control, which bulks so vastly upon

the modern consciousness, which the Socialists treat as though it was

the comprehensive present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect

of an overlife that struggles out of a massive ancient and traditional

common way of living, struggles out again and again--blindly and always

so far with a disorderly insuccess....

I began to see in their proper proportion the vast enduring normal human

existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and

essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those

excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of

productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time

great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads,

empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In

India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular.

There the peasant goes about his work according to the usage of fifty

thousand years. He has a primitive version of religion, a moral

tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by countless years of trial

and survival to his needs, and the whole land is littered with the

vestiges and abandoned material of those newer, bolder, more

experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.

It was when I was going through the panther-haunted palaces of Akbar at

Fatehpur Sikri that I first felt how tremendously the ruins of the past

may face towards the future; the thing there is like a frozen wave that

rose and never broke; and once I had caught that light upon things, I

found the same quality in all the ruins I saw, in Amber and Vijayanagar

and Chitor, and in all that I have seen or heard of, in ancient Rome and

ancient Verona, in Pæstum and Cnossus and ancient Athens. None of these

places was ever really finished and done with; the Basilicas of Cæsar

and Constantine just as much as the baths and galleries and halls of

audience at Fatehpur Sikri express not ends achieved but thwarted

intentions of permanence. They embody repulse and rejection. They are

trials, abandoned trials, towards ends vaguely apprehended, ends felt

rather than known. Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of

Pekin, in the vast pretensions of its Forbidden City, which are like a

cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a wail. I saw the place

in 1905 in that slack interval after the European looting and before the

great awakening that followed the Russo-Japanese war. Pekin in a century

or so may be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors.

Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places

have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it seemed to me I felt the

first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb and

cessation at the very crest of things, that voice which opposes to all

the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness of men: "It is not here, it

is not yet."

Only the other day as I came back from Paris to this quiet place and

walked across the fields from the railway station to this house, I saw

an old woman, a grandmother, a bent old crone with two children playing

about her as she cut grass by the wayside, and she cut it, except that

her sickle was steel, exactly as old women were cutting grass before

there was writing, before the dawn of history, before men laid the first

stones one upon the other of the first city that ever became a ruin....

You see Civilization has never yet existed, it has only continually and

obstinately attempted to be. Our Civilization is but the indistinct

twilight before the dawn. It is still only a confused attempt, a

flourish out of barbarism, and the normal life of men, the toiling

earthy life of the field and the byre, goes on still like a stream that

at once supports and carries to destruction the experimental ships of

some still imperfect inventor. India gives it all from first to last,

and now the modern movement, the latest half-conscious struggle of the

New Thing in mankind, throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish

pustules upon the face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with

hideous iron lattice-work and smears the sky of the dusty ruin-girdled

city of Delhi,--each ruin is the vestige of an empire,--with the black

smoke of factory chimneys.

Altogether scattered over that sun-burnt plain there are the remains of

five or six extinguished Delhis, that played their dramas of frustration

before the Delhi of the Great Mogul. This present phase of human

living--its symbol at Delhi is now, I suppose, a scaffold-bristling pile

of neo-Georgian building--is the latest of the constructive synthetic

efforts to make a newer and fuller life for mankind. Who dares call it

the last? I question myself constantly whether this life we live to-day,

whether that too, is more than a trial of these blind constructive

forces, more universal perhaps, more powerful perhaps than any

predecessor but still a trial, to litter the world with rusting material

when the phase of recession recurs.

But yet I can never quite think that is so. This time, surely, it is

different. This time may indeed be the beginning of a permanent change;

this time there are new elements, new methods and a new spirit at work

upon construction that the world has never known before. Mankind may be

now in the dawn of a fresh phase of living altogether. It is possible.

The forces of construction are proportionally gigantic. There was never

so much clear and critical thought in the world as there is now, never

so large a body of generally accessible knowledge and suggestion, never

anything like the same breadth of outlook, the same universality of

imaginative freedom. That is so in spite of infinite turmoil and

confusion. Moreover the effort now is less concentrated, less dramatic.

There is no one vital center to the modern movement which disaster can

strike or decay undermine. If Paris or New York slacken and grow dull

and materialist, if Berlin and London conspire for a mutual destruction,

Tokio or Baku or Valparaiso or Christiania or Smyrna or Delhi will

shelter and continue the onward impetus.

And this time too it is not any one person, any one dynasty, any one

cult or race which carries our destiny. Human thought has begun to free

itself from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and

accidental standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will

towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or kingdoms or

peoples, a mind and will to which we all contribute and which none of us

may command nor compromise by our private errors. It ceases to be

aristocratic; it detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us

all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find ourselves,

in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and

conflicts, helping and serving in the making of a new world-city, a new

greater State above our legal States, in which all human life becomes a

splendid enterprise, free and beautiful, whose aptest symbol in all our

world is a huge Gothic Cathedral lit to flame by the sun, whose scheme

is the towering conquest of the universe, whose every little detail is

the wrought-out effort of a human soul....

Such were the ideas that grew together in my mind as I went about India

and the East, across those vast sunlit plains, where men and women still

toil in their dusty fields for a harsh living and live in doorless

hovels on floors of trampled cow-dung, persecuted by a hundred hostile

beasts and parasites, caught and eaten by tigers and panthers as cats

eat mice, and grievously afflicted by periodic famine and pestilence,

even as men and women lived before the dawn of history, for untold

centuries, for hundreds of thousands of years.

§ 4

How strange we English seem in India, a little scattered garrison. Are

we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy

who has brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization

through the gates of the East? Are we makers or just a means, casually

taken up and used by the great forces of God?

I do not know, I have never been able to tell. I have never been able to

decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.

I think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once

gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and

disciplined people who are yet neither subdued nor subordinated....

These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render

the paradox of the English character and this spectacle of a handful of

mute, snobbish, not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated

men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred

millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in

India I would find myself in little circles of the official

English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out"

people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and

gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as

mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me.

And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat

of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of

deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as if out of a thickly rusted

sheath one had pulled a sword and found it--flame....

I recall one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between

Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. The

theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit

by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for

the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the

great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family,

officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at

hand. Behind were English of a more dubious social position, also

connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian family or so, very dressy

and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and then I think various Portuguese

and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men,

some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that

crystallization of liberal Victorian snobbery, _Caste_, and I remember

there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who

played--what _is_ the name of the hero's friend? I forget--had in the

haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on

and an eyeglass that would not keep in.

Everybody was acting very badly, nobody was word-perfect and a rasping

prompter would not keep ahead as he ought to have done; the scenery and

the make-ups were daubs, and I was filled with amazement that having

quite wantonly undertaken to do this thing these people could then do it

so slackly. Then a certain sudden warmth in the applause about me

quickened my attention, and I realized the satirical purport of drunken

old father Eccles, and the moral intention of his son-in-law, the

plumber. Between them they expressed the whole duty of the workingman as

the prosperous Victorians conceived it. He was to work hard always at

any job he could find for any wages he could get, and if he didn't he

was a "drunken shirker" and the dupe of "paid agitators." A comforting

but misleading doctrine. And here were these people a decade on in the

twentieth century, with Time, Death, and Judgment close upon them, still

eagerly applauding, eager to excuse their minds with this one-sided,

ungracious, old-fashioned nonsense, that has done so much to intensify

the deepening class antagonisms that strain us now at home almost to the

breaking point!

How amazingly, it seemed, those people didn't understand and wouldn't

understand any class but their own, any race but their own, any usage

other than their use! Covertly I surveyed the colonel's profile. It

expressed nothing but entire satisfaction with these disastrous

interpretations. What a weather-worn thought-free face that grizzled

veteran showed the world!

I was seized with a sudden curiosity to see how the private soldiers

behind me were taking old Eccles. I turned round to discover cropped

heads and faces as expressionless as masks, and behind them dusky faces

watching very alertly, and then other dusky faces, Eurasians, inferiors,

servants, natives.

Then at a sharp edge the glare of our lighting ceased and the canvas

walls of our narrow world of illusion opened into a vast blue twilight.

At the opening stood two white-clad Sikhs, very, very still and

attentive, watching the performance, and beyond them was a great space

of sky over a dim profile of trees and roofs and a minaret, a sky

darkling down to the flushed red memory--such a short memory it is in

India--of a day that had gone for ever.

I remained staring at that for some time.

"Isn't old Eccles _good_?" whispered the colonel's wife beside me, and

recalled me to the play....

Somehow that picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of immensities

has become my symbol for the whole life of the governing English, the

English of India and Switzerland and the Riviera and the West End and

the public services....

But they are not England, they are not the English reality, which is a

thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and

wise and adventurous--Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson,

Bacon, Shelley--English names every one--like the piercing light of

lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.

§ 5

I went again to Ceylon to look into the conditions of Coolie

importation, and then I was going back into Assam once more, still in

the wake of indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had

my first and only experience of big game shooting in the Garo Hills, I

was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and I

got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly

torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound. I had an evil

uncomfortable time. My injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it

seemed likely I should be permanently lamed. I had to keep to vehicles

and reasonably good roads. I wound up my convalescence with a voyage to

Singapore, and from thence I went on rather disconnectedly to a number

of exploratory journeys--excursions rather than journeys--into China. I

got to Pekin and then suddenly faced back to Europe, returning overland

through Russia.

I wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism at its

sources, and my disablement did but a little accelerate a return already

decided upon. I had got my conception of the East as a whole and of the

shape of the historical process. I no longer felt adrift in a formless

chaos of forces. I perceived now very clearly that human life is

essentially a creative struggle out of the usage of immemorial years,

that the synthesis of our contemporary civilization is this creative

impulse rising again in its latest and greatest effort, the creative

impulse rising again, as a wave rises from the trough of its

predecessors, out of the ruins of our parent system, imperial Rome. But

this time, and for the first time, the effort is world-wide, and China

and Iceland, Patagonia and Central Africa all swing together with us to

make--or into another catastrophic failure to make--the Great State of

mankind. All this I had now distinctly in my mind. The new process I

perceive had gone further in the west; was most developed in the west.

The lighter end lifts first. So back I came away from the great body of

mankind, which is Asia, to its head. And since I was still held by my

promise from returning to England I betook myself first to the Pas de

Calais and then to Belgium and thence into industrial Germany, to study

the socialistic movement at its sources.

And I was beginning to see too very clearly by the time of my return

that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really not one

problem at all, but two. There is the old problem, the problem as old as

Zimbabwe and the pyramids, the declining problem, the problem of

organizing masses of unskilled labor to the constructive ends of a Great

State, and there is the new modification due to machinery, which has

rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of skill almost

unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind and water, the elementary

school and the printing-press to our sources of power, and superseded

the ancient shepherding and driving of men by the possibility of their

intelligent and willing co-operation. The two are still mixed in every

discussion, even as they are mixed in the practice of life, but

inevitably they will be disentangled. We break free from slavery, open

or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement....

I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human

society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties. There is

enough for everyone, and only a fool can be found to deny it. But our

methods of getting and making are still ruled by legal and social

traditions from the time before we had tapped these new sources of

power, before there was more than enough for everyone, and when a bare

supply was only secured by jealous possession and unremitting toil. We

have no longer to secure enough by a stern insistence. We have come to a

plenty. The problem now is to make that plenty go round, and _keep it

enough_ while we do.

Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid

arguments against a great-spirited Socialism but this, that people will

not. Indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of

authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy for our pride and vanity,

jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon

whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism

and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large

reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of

generosity that will yet turn human life--of which our individual lives

are but the momentary parts--into a glad, beautiful and triumphant

co-operation all round this sunlit world.

If but humanity could have its imagination touched----

I was already beginning to see the great problem of mankind as indeed

nothing other than a magnification of the little problem of myself, as a

problem in escape from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions,

precautions and ancient angers, a problem of escape from these spiritual

beasts that prowl and claw, to a new generosity and a new breadth of

view.

For all of us, little son, as for each of us, salvation is that. We have

to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire and

an unending life, ours and yet not our own.

§ 6

It is a queer experience to be even for a moment in the grip of a great

beast. I had been put into the fork of a tree, so that I could shoot

with the big stem behind my back. The fork wasn't, I suppose, more than

a score of feet from the ground. It was a safe enough place from a

tiger, and that is what we expected. We had been misled by our tracker,

who had mistaken the pugs of a big leopard for a tiger's,--they were

over rocky ground for the most part and he had only the spoor of a

chance patch of half-dried mud to go upon. The beast had killed a goat

and was beaten out of a thicket near by me in which he had been lying

up. The probability had seemed that he would go away along a tempting

ravine to where Captain Crosby, who was my host, awaited him; I, as the

amateur, was intended to be little more than a spectator. But he broke

back towards the wing of the line of beaters and came across the sunlit

rocks within thirty yards of my post.

Seen going along in that way, flattened almost to the ground, he wasn't

a particularly impressive beast, and I shot at his shoulder as one might

blaze away at a rabbit,--perhaps just a little more carefully, feeling

as a Lord of Creation should who dispenses a merited death. I expected

him either to roll over or bolt.

Then instantly he was coming in huge bounds towards me....

He came so rapidly that he was covered by the big limb of the tree on

which I was standing until he was quite beneath me, and my second shot,

which I thought in the instant must have missed him, was taken rapidly

as he crouched to spring up the trunk.

Then you know came a sort of astonishment, and I think,--because

afterwards Crosby picked up a dropped cartridge at the foot of the

tree--that I tried to reload. I believe I was completely incredulous

that the beast was going to have me until he actually got me. The thing

was too completely out of my imaginative picture. I don't believe I

thought at all while he was coming up the tree. I merely noted how

astonishingly he resembled an angry cat. Then he'd got my leg, he was

hanging on to it first by two claws and then by one claw, and the whole

weight of him was pulling me down. It didn't seem to be my leg. I wasn't

frightened, I felt absolutely nothing, I was amazed. I slipped, tried to

get a hold on the tree trunk, felt myself being hauled down, and then

got my arm about the branch. I still clung to my unloaded gun as an

impoverished aristocrat might cling to his patent of nobility. That was,

I felt, my answer for him yet.

I suppose the situation lasted a fraction of a second, though it seemed

to me to last an interminable time. Then I could feel my leggings rip

and his claw go scoring deeply down my calf. That hurt in a kind of

painless, impersonal interesting way. Was my leg coming off? Boot? The

weight had gone, that enormous weight!

He'd missed his hold altogether! I heard his claws tear down the bark of

the tree and then his heavy, soft fall upon the ground.

I achieved a cat-like celerity. In another second I was back in my fork

reloading, my legs tucked up as tightly as possible.

I peered down through the branches ready for him. He wasn't there. Not

up the tree again?... Then I saw him making off, with a halting gait,

across the scorching rocks some thirty yards away, but I could not get

my gun into a comfortable position before he was out of sight behind a

ridge.... I wondered why the sunlight seemed to be flickering like an

electric light that fails, was somehow aware of blood streaming from my

leg down the tree-stem; it seemed a torrent of blood, and there was a

long, loose ribbon of flesh very sickening to see; and then I fainted

and fell out of the tree, bruising my arm and cheek badly and

dislocating my shoulder in the fall.... Some of the beaters saw me fall,

and brought Crosby in sufficient time to improvise a _torniquet_ and

save my life.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW WORLD

§ 1

I met Rachel again in Germany through the devices of my cousin the

Fürstin Letzlingen. I had finished seeing what I wanted to see in

Westphalia and I was preparing to go to the United States. There I

thought I should be able to complete and round off that large view of

the human process I had been developing in my mind. But my departure was

delayed by an attack of influenza that I picked up at a Socialist

Congress in Munich, and the dear Durchlaucht, hearing of this and having

her own views of my destiny, descended upon me while I was still in bed

there, made me get up and carried me off in her car, to take care of me

herself at her villa at Boppard, telling me nothing of any fellow-guests

I might encounter.

She had a villa upon the Rhine under a hill of vineyards, where she

devoted herself--she was a widow--to matchmaking and belated regrets for

the childlessness that necessitated a perpetual borrowing of material

for her pursuit. She had a motor-car, a steam-launch, several rowing

boats and canoes, a tennis-lawn, a rambling garden, a devious house and

a rapid mind, and in fact everything that was necessary for throwing

young people together. She made her surprise seem easy and natural, and

with returning health I found myself already back upon my old footing of

friendly intimacy with Rachel.

I found her a new and yet a familiar Rachel. She had grown up, she was

no longer a schoolgirl, crystalline clear with gleams of emotion and

understanding, and what she had lost in transparency she had gained in

depth. And she had become well-informed, she had been reading very

widely and well, I could see, and not simply reading but talking and

listening and thinking. She showed a vivid interest in the current of

home politics,--at that time the last government of Mr. Balfour was

ebbing to its end and my old Transvaal friends, the Chinese coolies,

were to avenge themselves on their importers. The Tariff Reformers my

father detested were still struggling to unseat the Premier from his

leadership of Conservatism....

It was queer to hear once more, after my Asiatic wanderings and

dreamings, those West-End dinner-table politics, those speculations

about "Winston's" future and the possibility of Lloyd George or Ramsay

Macdonald or Macnamara taking office with the Liberals and whether there

might not ultimately be a middle party in which Haldane and Balfour,

Grey and the Cecils could meet upon common ground. It seemed now not

only very small but very far off. She told me too of the huge popularity

of King Edward. He had proved to be interested, curious, understanding

and clever, an unexpectedly successful King. She described how he was

breaking out of the narrow official limits that had kept his mother in a

kind of social bandbox, extending his solvent informality of

friendliness to all sorts of men. He had won the heart of Will Crooks,

the labor member for Poplar, for example, made John Burns a social

success and warmed all France for England.

I surveyed this novel picture of the English throne diffusing

amiability.

"I suppose it's what the throne ought to do," said Rachel. "If it can't

be inspiration, at any rate it can tolerate and reconcile and take the

ill-bred bitterness out of politics."

"My father might have said that."

"I got that from your father," she said; and added after a momentary

pause, "I go over and talk to him."

"You talk to my father!"

"I like to. Or rather I listen and take it in. I go over in the

afternoon. I go sometimes twice or three times a week."

"That's kind of you."

"Not at all. You see---- It sounds impudent, I know, for a girl to say

so, but we've so many interests in common."

§ 2

I was more and more interested by Rachel as the days went on. A man must

be stupid who does not know that a woman is happy in his presence, and

for two years now and more I had met no one with a very strong personal

feeling for me. And quite apart from that, her mind was extraordinarily

interesting to me because it was at once so active and so clear and so

limited by her entirely English circumstances. She had the prosperous

English outlook. She didn't so much see the wide world as get glimpses

of it through the tangle of Westminster and of West End and week-end

limitations. She wasn't even aware of that greater unprosperous England,

already sulking and darkling outside her political world, that greater

England which was presently to make its first audible intimations of

discontent in that remarkable anti-climax to King George's Coronation,

the Railway Strike. India for her was the land of people's cousins,

Germany and the German Dreadnoughts bulked far larger, and all the

tremendous gathering forces of the East were beyond the range of her

imagination. I set myself to widen her horizons.

I told her something of the intention and range of my travels, and

something of the views that were growing out of their experiences.

I have a clear little picture in my mind of an excursion we made to that

huge national Denkmal which rears its head out of the amiable vineyards

of Assmannshausen and Rudesheim over against Bingen. We landed at the

former place, went up its little funicular to eat our lunch and drink

its red wine at the pleasant inn above, and then strolled along through

the woods to the monument.

The Fürstin fell behind with her unwilling escort, a newly arrived

medical student from England, a very pleasant youngster named Berwick,

who was all too obviously anxious to change places with me. She devised

delays, and meanwhile I, as yet unaware of the state of affairs, went on

with Rachel to that towering florid monument with its vast gesticulating

Germania, which triumphs over the conquered provinces.

We fell talking of war and the passions and delusions that lead to war.

Rachel's thoughts were strongly colored by those ideas of a natural

rivalry between Germany and England and of a necessary revenge for

France which have for nearly forty years diverted the bulk of European

thought and energy to the mere waste of military preparations. I jarred

with an edifice of preconceptions when I scoffed and scolded at these

assumptions.

"Our two great peoples are disputing for the leadership of the world," I

said, "and meanwhile the whole world sweeps past us. We're drifting into

a quarrelsome backwater."

I began to tell of the fermentation and new beginnings that were

everywhere perceptible throughout the East, of the vast masses of human

ability and energy that were coming into action in China and India, of

the unlimited future of both North and South America, of the mere

accidentalness of the European advantage. "History," I said, "is already

shifting the significance out of Western Europe altogether, and we

English cannot see it; we can see no further than Berlin, and these

Germans can think of nothing better than to taunt the French with such

tawdry effigies as _this_! Europe goes on to-day as India went on in the

eighteenth century, making aimless history. And the sands of opportunity

run and run...."

I shrugged my shoulders and we stood for a little while looking down on

the shining crescent of the Rhine.

"Suppose," said Rachel, "that someone were to say that--in the House."

"The House," I said, "doesn't hear things at my pitch. Bat outcries. Too

shrill altogether."

"It might. If _you_----"

She halted, hesitated for a moment on the question and asked abruptly:

"When are you coming back to England, Mr. Stratton?"

"Certainly not for six months," I said.

A movement of her eyes made me aware of the Fürstin and Berwick emerging

from the trees. "And then?" asked Rachel.

I didn't want to answer that question, in which the personal note

sounded so clearly. "I am going to America to see America," I said, "and

America may be rather a big thing to see."

"You must see it?"

"I want to be sure of it--as something comprehensive. I want to get a

general effect of it...."

Rachel hesitated, looked back to measure the distance of the Fürstin and

her companion and put her question again, but this time with a

significance that did not seem even to want to hide itself. "_Then_ will

you come back?" she said.

Her face flamed scarlet, but her eyes met mine boldly. Between us there

was a flash of complete understanding.

My answer, if it was lame and ungallant to such a challenge, was at

least perfectly honest. "I can't make up my mind," I said. "I've been

near making plans--taking steps.... Something holds me back...."

I had no time for an explanation.

"I can't make up my mind," I repeated.

She stood for a moment rather stiffly, staring away towards the blue

hills of Alsace.

Then she turned with a smiling and undisturbed countenance to the

Fürstin. Her crimson had given place to white. "The triumph of it," she

said with a slight gesture to the flamboyant Teutonism that towered

over us, and boldly repeating words I had used scarcely five minutes

before, "makes me angry. They conquered--ungraciously...."

She had overlooked something in her effort to seem entirely

self-possessed. She collapsed. "My dear!" she cried,--"I forgot!"

"Oh! I'm only a German by marriage!" cried the Fürstin. "And I can

assure you I quite understand--about the triumph of it...." She surveyed

the achievement of her countrymen. "It is--ungracious. But indeed it's

only a sort of artlessness if you see the thing properly.... It's not

vulgarity--it's childishness.... They've hardly got over it yet--their

intense astonishment at being any good at war.... That large throaty

Victory! She's not so militant as she seems. She's too plump.... Of

course what a German really appreciates is nutrition. But I quite agree

with you both.... I'm beginning to want my tea, Mr. Stratton....

Rachel!"

Her eyes had been on Rachel as she chattered. The girl had turned to the

distant hills again, and had forgotten even to pretend to listen to the

answer she had evoked. Now she came back sharply to the sound of her

name.

"Tea?" said the Fürstin.

"Oh!" cried Rachel. "Yes. Yes, certainly. Rather. Tea."

§ 3

It was clear to me that after that I must as people say "have things

out" with Rachel. But before I could do anything of the sort the

Fürstin pounced upon me. She made me sit up that night after her other

guests had gone to their rooms, in the cosy little turret apartment she

called her study and devoted to the reading of whatever was most

notorious in contemporary British fiction. "Sit down," said she, "by the

fire in that chair there and tell me all about it. It's no good your

pretending you don't know what I mean. What are you up to with her, and

why don't you go straight to your manifest destiny as a decent man

should?"

"Because manifestly it isn't my destiny," I said.

"Stuff," said the Fürstin.

"You know perfectly well why I am out of England."

"Everybody knows--except of course quite young persons who are being

carefully brought up."

"Does _she_ know?"

"She doesn't seem to."

"Well, that's what I want to know."

"Need she know?"

"Well, it does seem rather essential----"

"I suppose if you think so----"

"Will you tell her?"

"Tell her yourself, if she must be told. Down there in Surrey, she

_must_ have seen things and heard things. But I don't see that she wants

a lot of ancient history."

"If it is ancient history!"

"Oh! two years and a half,--it's an Era."

I made no answer to that, but sat staring into the fire while my cousin

watched my face. At length I made my confession. "I don't think it is

ancient history at all," I said. "I think if I met Mary again now----"

"You mean Lady Mary Justin?"

"Of course."

"It would be good for your mind if you remembered to call her by her

proper name.... You think if you met her again you two would begin to

carry on. But you see,--you aren't going to meet her. Everybody will see

that doesn't happen."

"I mean that I---- Well----"

"You'd better not say it. Besides, it's nonsense. I doubt if you've

given her a thought for weeks and weeks."

"Until I came here perhaps that was almost nearly true. But you've

stirred me up, sweet cousin, and old things, old memories and habits

have come to the surface again. Mary wrote herself over my life--in all

sorts of places.... I can't tell you. I've never talked of her to

anyone. I'm not able, very well, to talk about my feelings.... Perhaps a

man of my sort--doesn't love twice over."

I disregarded a note of dissent from my cousin. "That was all so magic,

all my youth, all my hope, all the splendid adventure of it. Why should

one pretend?... I'm giving none of that to Rachel. It isn't there any

more to give...."

"One would think," remarked the Fürstin, "there was no gift of healing."

She waited for me to speak, and then irritated by my silence struck at

me sharply with that wicked little tongue of hers.

"Do you think that Lady Mary Justin thinks of you--as you think of her?

Do you think she hasn't settled down?"

I looked up at her quickly.

"She's just going to have a second child," the Fürstin flung out.

Yes, that did astonish me. I suppose my face showed it.

"That girl," said the Fürstin, "that clean girl would have sooner

died--ten thousand deaths.... And she's never--never been anything to

you."

I think that for an instant she had been frightened at her own words.

She was now quite angry and short of breath. She had contrived a rapid

indignation against Mary and myself.

"I didn't know Mary had had any child at all," I said.

"This makes two," said the Fürstin, and held up a brace of fingers,

"with scarcely a year and a half between them. Not much more anyhow....

It was natural, I suppose. A natural female indecency. I don't blame

her. When a woman gives in she ought to do it thoroughly. But I don't

see that it leaves _you_ much scope for philandering, Stephen, does

it?... And there you are, and here is Rachel. And why don't you make a

clean job of your life?..."

"I didn't understand."

"I wonder what you imagined."

I reflected. "I wonder what I did. I suppose I thought of Mary--just as

I had left her--always."

I remained with my mind filled with confused images of Mary, memories,

astonishment....

I perceived the Fürstin was talking.

"Maundering about," she was saying, "like a huntsman without a horse....

You've got work to do--blood in your veins. I'm not one of your ignorant

women, Stephen. You ought to have a wife...."

"Rachel's too good," I said, at the end of a pause and perceiving I had

to say something, "to be that sort of wife."

"No woman's too good for a man," said the Fürstin von Letzlingen with

conviction. "It's what God made her for."

§ 4

My visit to Boppard was drawing to an end before I had a clear

opportunity to have things out with Rachel. It was in a little garden,

under the very shadow of that gracious cathedral at Worms, the sort of

little garden to which one is admitted by ringing a bell and tipping a

custodian. I think Worms is in many respects one of the most beautiful

cathedrals I have ever seen, so perfectly proportioned, so delicately

faded, so aloof, so free from pride or presumption, and it rises over

this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit,

easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in

the evening glow under a press of canvas. We looked up at it for a time

and then went on with the talk to which we had been coming slowly since

the Fürstin had packed us off for it, while she went into the town with

Berwick to buy toys for her gatekeeper's children. I had talked about

myself, and the gradual replacement of my ambition to play a part in

imperial politics by wider intentions. "You know," I asked abruptly,

"why I left England?"

She thought through the briefest of pauses. "No," she decided at last.

"I made love," I said, "to Lady Mary Justin, and we were found out. We

couldn't go away together----"

"Why not?" she interjected.

"It was impossible."

For some moments neither of us spoke. "Something," she said, and then,

"Some vague report," and left these fragments to be her reply.

"We were old playmates; we were children together. We

have--something--that draws us to each other. She--she made a mistake in

marrying. We were both very young and the situation was difficult. And

then afterwards we were thrown together.... But you see that has made a

great difference to my life; it's turned me off the rails on which men

of my sort usually run. I've had to look to these other things....

They've become more to me than to most people if only because of

that...."

"You mean these ideas of yours--learning as much as you can about the

world, and then doing what you can to help other people to a better

understanding."

"Yes," I said.

"And that--will fill your life."

"It ought to."

"I suppose it ought. I suppose--you find--it does."

"Don't you think it ought to fill my life?"

"I wondered if it did."

"But why shouldn't it?"

"It's so--so cold."

My questioning silence made her attempt to explain.

"One wants life more beautiful than that," she said. "One wants----

There are things one needs, things nearer one."

We became aware of a jangling at the janitor's bell. Our opportunity for

talk was slipping away. And we were both still undecided, both

blunderingly nervous and insecure. We were hurried into clumsy phrases

that afterwards we would have given much to recall.

"But how could life be more beautiful," I said, "than when it serves big

human ends?"

Her brows were knit. She seemed to be listening for the sound of the

unlocking gate.

"But," she said, and plunged, "one wants to be loved. Surely one needs

that."

"You see, for me--that's gone."

"Why should it be gone?"

"It is. One doesn't begin again. I mean--myself. _You_--can. You've

never begun. Not when you've loved--loved really." I forced that on her.

I over emphasized. "It was real love, you know; the real thing.... I

don't mean the mere imaginative love, blindfold love, but love that

sees.... I want you to understand that. I loved--altogether...."

Across the lawn under its trim flowering-trees appeared Berwick loaded

with little parcels, and manifestly eager to separate us, and the

Fürstin as manifestly putting on the drag.

"There's a sort of love," I hurried, "that doesn't renew itself ever.

Don't let yourself believe it does. Something else may come in its

place, but that is different. It's youth,--a wonderful newness.... Look

at that youngster. _He_ can love you like that. I've watched him. He

does. You know he does...."

"Yes," she said, as hurriedly; "but then, you see, I don't love him."

"You don't?"

"I can't."

"But he's such a fresh clean human being----"

"That's not all," said Rachel. "That's not all.... You don't

understand."

The two drew near. "It is so hard to explain," she said. "Things that

one hardly sees for oneself. Sometimes it seems one cannot help oneself.

You can't choose. You are taken...." She seemed about to say something

more, and stopped and bit her lip.

In another moment I was standing up, and the Fürstin was calling to us

across ten feet of space. "Such amoosin' little toyshops. We've got a

heap of things. Just look at him!"

He smiled over his load with anxious eyes upon our faces.

"Ten separate parcels," he said, appealing for Rachel's sympathy. "I'm

doing my best not to complain."

And rather adroitly he contrived to let two of them slip, and captured

Rachel to assist him.

He didn't relinquish her again.

§ 5

The Fürstin and I followed them along the broad, pleasant, tree-lined

street towards the railway station.

"A boy of that age ought not to marry a girl of that age," said the

Fürstin, breaking a silence.

I didn't answer.

"Well?" she said, domineering.

"My dear cousin," I said, "I know all that you have in your mind. I

admit--I covet her. You can't make me more jealous than I am. She's

clean and sweet--it is marvellous how the God of the rest of the world

can have made a thing so brave and honest and wonderful. She's better

than flowers. But I think I'm going away to-night, nevertheless."

"You don't mean you're going to carry chivalry to the point of giving

that boy a chance--for he hasn't one while you're about."

"No. You see--I want to give Rachel a chance. You know as well as I

do--the things in my mind."

"That you've got to forget."

"That I don't forget."

"That you're bound in honor to forget. And who could help you better?"

"I'm going," I said and then, wrathfully, "If you think I want to use

Rachel as a sort of dressing--for my old sores----"

I left the sentence unfinished.

"Oh _nonsense_!" cried the Fürstin, and wouldn't speak to me again until

we got to that entirely Teutonic "art" station that is not the least

among the sights of Worms.

"Sores, indeed!" said the Fürstin presently, as we walked up the end of

the platform.

"There's nothing," said the Fürstin, with an unusual note of petulance,

"she'd like better."

"I can't think what men are coming to," she went on. "You're in love

with her, or you wouldn't be so generous. And she's head over heels with

you. And here you are! I'll give you one more chance----"

"I won't take it," I interrupted. "It isn't fair. I tell you I won't

take it. I'll go two days earlier to prevent you. Unless you promise

me---- Of course I see how things are with her. She's not a sphinx. But

it isn't fair. It isn't. Not to her, or to him--or myself. _He's_ got

some claims. He's got more right to her than I...."

"A boy like that! No man has any rights about women--until he's thirty.

And as for me and all the pains _I've_ taken---- Oh! I _hate_ Worms.

Dust and ashes! Well here thank heaven! comes the train. If nothing else

could stir you, Stephen, at least I could have imagined some decent

impulse of gratitude to me. Stephen, you're disgusting. You've

absolutely spoilt this trip for me--absolutely. When only a little

reasonableness on your part---- Oh!"

She left her sentence unfinished.

Berwick and I had to make any conversation that was needed on the way

back to Boppard. Rachel did not talk and the Fürstin did not want to.

§ 6

Directly I had parted from Rachel's questioning eyes I wanted to go back

to them. It seems to me now that all the way across to America, in that

magnificent German liner I joined at Hamburg, I was thinking in confused

alternations of her and of Mary. There are turns of thought that still

bring back inseparably with them the faint echo of the airs of the

excellent but industrious band that glorified our crossing.

I had been extraordinarily shocked and concerned at the thought of Mary

bearing children. It is a grotesque thing to confess but I had never let

myself imagine the possibility of such a thing for her who had been so

immensely mine....

We are the oddest creatures, little son, beasts and barbarians and

brains, neither one nor the other but all confusedly, and here was I who

had given up Mary and resigned her and freed myself from her as I

thought altogether, cast back again into my old pit by the most obvious

and necessary consequence of her surrender and mine. And it's just there

and in that relation that we men and women are so elaborately insecure.

We try to love as equals and behave as equals and concede a level

freedom, and then comes a crisis,--our laboriously contrived edifice of

liberty collapses and we perceive that so far as sex goes the woman

remains to the man no more than a possession--capable of loyalty or

treachery.

There, still at that barbaric stage, the situation stands. You see I had

always wanted to own Mary, and always she had disputed that. That is our

whole story, the story of an instinctive subjugation struggling against

a passionate desire for fellowship. She had denied herself to me, taken

herself away; that much I could endure; but now came this blazing fact

that showed her as it seemed in the most material and conclusive

way--overcome. I had storms of retrospective passion at the thoroughness

of her surrender.... Yes, and that's in everyone of us,--in everyone. I

wonder if in all decent law-abiding London there lives a single healthy

adult man who has not at times longed to trample and kill....

For once I think the Fürstin miscalculated consequences. I think I

should have engaged myself to Rachel before I went to America if it had

not been for the Fürstin's revelation, but this so tore me that I could

no longer go on falling in love again, naturally and sweetly. No man

falls in love if he has just been flayed.... I could no longer think of

Rachel except as a foil to Mary. I was moved to marry her by a new set

of motives; to fling her so to speak in Mary's face, and from the fierce

vulgarity of that at least I recoiled--and let her go as I have told

you.

§ 7

I had thought all that was over.

I remember my struggles to recover my peace.

I remember how very late one night I went up to the promenade deck to

smoke a cigar before turning in. It was a warm moonlight night. The

broad low waves of ebony water that went seething past below, foamed

luminous and were streaked and starred with phosphorescence. The

recumbent moon, past its full and sinking westward, seemed bigger than I

had ever seen it before, and the roundness of the watery globe was

manifest about the edge of the sky. One had that sense so rare on land,

so common in the night at sea, of the world as a conceivable sphere, and

of interstellar space as of something clear and close at hand.

There came back to me again that feeling I had lost for a time in

Germany of being not myself but Man consciously on his little planet

communing with God.

But my spirit was saying all the time, "I am still in my pit, in my pit.

After all I am still in my pit."

And then there broke the answer on my mind, that all our lives we must

struggle out of our pits, that to struggle out of our pit is this life,

there is no individual life but that, and that there comes no escape

here, no end to that effort, until the release of death. Continually or

frequently we may taste salvation, but never may we achieve it while we

are things of substance. Each moment in our lives we come to the test

and are lost again or saved again. To be assured of one's security is to

forget and fall away.

And standing at the rail with these thoughts in my mind, suddenly I

prayed....

I remember how the engine-throbs beat through me like the beating of a

heart, and that far below, among the dim lights that came up from the

emigrants in the steerage, there was a tinkling music as I prayed and a

man's voice singing a plaintive air in some strange Slavonic tongue.

That voice of the invisible singer and the spirit of the unknown

song-maker and the serenity of the sky, they were all, I perceived, no

more and no less than things in myself that I did not understand. They

were out beyond the range of understanding. And yet they fell into the

completest harmony that night with all that I seemed to understand....

§ 8

The onset of New York was extraordinarily stimulating to me. I write

onset. It is indeed that. New York rides up out of the waters, a cliff

of man's making; its great buildings at a distance seem like long

Chinese banners held up against the sky. From Sandy Hook to the great

landing stages and the swirling hooting traffic of the Hudson River

there fails nothing in that magnificent crescendo of approach.

And New York keeps the promise of its first appearance. There is no

such fulness of life elsewhere in all the world. The common man in the

streets is a bigger common man than any Old World city can show,

physically bigger; there is hope in his eyes and a braced defiance. New

York may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from

the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the Americans of

all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men.

I went to America curious, balancing between hope and scepticism. The

European world is full of the criticism of America, and for the matter

of that America too is full of it; hostility and depreciation

prevail,--overmuch, for in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of

blatant, oh! quite asinine folly, the United States of America remains

the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is

the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most

valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.

Here was the antithesis of India; here were no peasants whatever, no

traditional culture, no castes, no established differences (except for

the one schism of color); this amazing place had never had a famine,

never a plague; here were no temples and no priesthoods dominating the

lives of the people,--old Trinity church embedded amidst towering

sky-scrapers was a symbol for as much as they had of all that; and here

too there was no crown, no affectations of an ancient loyalty, no

visible army, no traditions of hostility, for the old defiance of

Britain is a thing now ridiculous and dead; and everyone I met had an

air as if he knew that to-morrow must be different from to-day and

different and novel and remarkable by virtue of himself and such as

himself.

I went about New York, with the incredulous satisfaction of a man who

has long doubted, to find that after all America was coming true. The

very clatter pleased me, the crowds, the camp-like slovenliness, a

disorder so entirely different from the established and accepted

untidiness of China or India. Here was something the old world had never

shown me, a new enterprise, a fresh vigor. In the old world there is

Change, a mighty wave now of Change, but it drives men before it as if

it were a power outside them and not in them; they do not know, they do

not believe; but here the change is in the very blood and spirit of

mankind. They breathe it in even before the launch has brought their

feet to Ellis Island soil. In six months they are Americanized. Does it

matter that a thing so gigantic should be a little coarse and blundering

in detail, if this stumbling giant of the new time breaks a gracious

relic or so in his eager clutch and treads a little on the flowers?

§ 9

And in this setting of energy and activity, towering city life and

bracing sea breezes, I met Gidding again, whom I had last seen departing

into Egypt to look more particularly at the prehistoric remains and the

temples of the first and second dynasty at Abydos. It was at a

dinner-party, one of those large gatherings that welcome interesting

visitors. It wasn't, of course, I who was the centre of interest, but a

distinguished French portrait painter; I was there as just any guest. I

hadn't even perceived Gidding until he came round to me in that

precious gap of masculine intercourse that ensues upon the departure of

the ladies. That gap is one of the rare opportunities for conversation

men get in America.

"I don't know whether you will remember me," he said, "but perhaps you

remember Crete--in the sunrise."

"And no end of talk afterwards," I said, grasping his hand, "no end--for

we didn't half finish. Did you have a good time in Egypt?"

"I'm not going to talk to you about Egypt," said Gidding. "I'm through

with ruins. I'm going to ask you--you know what I'm going to ask you."

"What I think of America. It's the same inevitable question. I think

everything of it. It's the stepping-off place. I've come here at last,

because it matters most."

"That's what we all want to believe," said Gidding. "That's what we want

you to tell us."

He reflected. "It's immense, isn't it, perfectly immense? But---- I am

afraid at times we're too disposed to forget just what it's all about.

We've got to be reminded. That, you know, is why we keep on asking."

He went on to question me where I had been, what I had done, what I made

of things. He'd never, he said, forgotten our two days' gossip in the

Levant, and all the wide questions about the world and ourselves that we

had broached then and left so open. I soon found myself talking very

freely to him. I am not a ready or abundant talker, but Gidding has the

knack of precipitating my ideas. He is America to my Europe, and at his

touch all that has been hanging in concentrated solution in my mind

comes crystallizing out. He has to a peculiar degree that directness

and simplicity which is the distinctive American quality. I tried to

explain to his solemnly nodding head and entirely intelligent eyes just

exactly what I was making of things, of the world, of humanity, of

myself....

It was an odd theme for two men to attempt after dinner, servants

hovering about them, their two faces a little flushed by wine and good

eating, their keen interest masked from the others around them by a

gossiping affectation, their hands going out as they talked for matches

or cigarette, and before we had gone further than to fling out a few

intimations to each other our colloquy was interrupted by our host

standing up and by the general stir that preluded our return to feminine

society. "We've got more to say than this," said Gidding. "We've got to

_talk_." He brought out a little engagement book that at once drew out

mine in response. And a couple of days after, we spent a morning and

afternoon together and got down to some very intimate conversation. We

motored out to lunch at a place called Nyack, above the Palisades, we

crossed on a ferry to reach it, and we visited the house of Washington

Irving near Yonkers on our way.

I've still a vivid picture in my mind of the little lawn at Irvington

that looks out upon the rushing steel of Hudson River, where Gidding

opened his heart to me. I can see him now as he leant a little forward

over the table, with his wrists resting upon it, his long clean-shaven

face very solemn and earnest and grey against the hard American sunlight

in the greenery about us, while he told me in that deliberate American

voice of his and with the deliberate American solemnity, of his desire

to "do some decent thing with life."

He was very anxious to set himself completely before me, I remember, on

that occasion. There was a peculiar mental kinship between us that even

the profound differences of our English and American trainings could not

mask. And now he told me almost everything material about his life. For

the first time I learnt how enormously rich he was, not only by reason

of his father's acquisitions, but also because of his own almost

instinctive aptitude for business. "I've got," he said, "to begin with,

what almost all men spend their whole lives in trying to get. And it

amounts to nothing. It leaves me with life like a blank sheet of paper,

and nothing in particular to write on it."

"You know," he said, "it's--exasperating. I'm already half-way to

three-score and ten, and I'm still wandering about wondering what to do

with this piece of life God has given me...."

He had "lived" as people say, he had been in scrapes and scandals,

tasted to the full the bitter intensities of the personal life; he had

come by a different route to the same conclusions as myself, was as

anxious as I to escape from memories and associations and feuds and that

excessive vividness of individual feeling which blinds us to the common

humanity, the common interest, the gentler, larger reality, which lies

behind each tawdrily emphatic self....

"It's a sort of inverted homoeopathy I want," he said. "The big thing to

cure the little thing...."

But I will say no more of that side of our friendship, because the ideas

of it are spread all through this book from the first page to the

last.... What concerns me now is not our sympathy and agreement, but

that other aspect of our relations in which Gidding becomes impulse and

urgency. "Seeing we have these ideas," said he,--"and mind you there

must be others who have them or are getting to them, for nobody thinks

all alone in this world,--seeing we have these ideas what are we going

to _do_?"

§ 10

That meeting was followed by another before I left New York, and

presently Gidding joined me at Denver, where I was trying to measure the

true significance of a labor paper called _The Appeal to Reason_ that,

in spite of a rigid boycott by the ordinary agencies for news

distribution went out in the middle west to nearly half a million

subscribers, and was filled with such a fierceness of insurrection

against labor conditions, such a hatred, blind and impassioned, as I had

never known before. Gidding remained with me there and came back with me

to Chicago, where I wanted to see something of the Americanization of

the immigrant, and my survey of America, the social and economic problem

of America, resolved itself more and more into a conference with him.

There is no more fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life

would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. Yet I cannot

help but wonder how far I might have travelled along the lines of my

present work if I had gone to America and not met Gidding, or if I had

met him without visiting America. The man and his country are

inextricably interwoven in my mind. Yet I do think that his simplicity

and directness, his force of initiative that turned me from a mere

enquirer into an active writer and organizer, are qualities less his in

particular than America's in general. There is in America a splendid

crudity, a directness that cleared my spirit as a bracing wind will

sweep the clouds from mountain scenery. Compared with our older

continents America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things

are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional

aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a

litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable

peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at

all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one

triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean

all America, Spanish-speaking as well as English-speaking; they have

this detachment from tradition in common. See how the United States, for

example, stands flatly on that bare piece of eighteenth-century

intellectualism the Constitution, and is by virtue of that a structure

either wilful and intellectual or absurd. That sense of incurable

servitude to fate and past traditions, that encumbrance with ruins,

pledges, laws and ancient institutions, that perpetual complication of

considerations and those haunting memories of preceding human failures

which dwarf the courage of destiny in Europe and Asia, vanish from the

mind within a week of one's arrival in the New World. Naturally one

begins to do things. One is inspired to do things. One feels that one

has escaped, one feels that the time is _now_. All America, North and

South alike, is one tremendous escape from ancient obsessions into

activity and making.

And by the time I had reached America I had already come to see that

just as the issues of party politics at home and international politics

abroad are mere superficialities above the greater struggle of an

energetic minority to organize and exploit the labor of the masses of

mankind, so that struggle also is only a huge incident in the still more

than half unconscious impulse to replace the ancient way of human living

by a more highly organized world-wide social order, by a world

civilization embodying itself in a World State. And I saw now how that

impulse could neither cease nor could it on the other hand realize

itself until it became conscious and deliberate and merciful, free from

haste and tyranny, persuasive and sustained by a nearly universal

sympathy and understanding. For until that arrives the creative forces

must inevitably spend themselves very largely in blind alleys, futile

rushes and destructive conflicts. Upon that our two minds were agreed.

"We have," said Gidding, "to understand and make understanding. That is

the real work for us to do, Stratton, that is our job. The world, as you

say, has been floundering about, half making civilization and never

achieving it. Now _we_, I don't mean just you and me, Stratton,

particularly, but every intelligent man among us, have got to set to and

make it thorough. There is no other sane policy for a man outside his

private passions but that. So let's get at it----"

I find it now impossible to trace the phases by which I reached these

broad ideas upon which I rest all my work, but certainly they were

present very early in my discussions with Gidding. We two men had been

thinking independently but very similarly, and it is hard to say just

what completing touches either of us gave to the other's propositions.

We found ourselves rather than arrived at the conception of ourselves

as the citizens neither of the United States nor of England but of a

state that had still to come into being, a World State, a great unity

behind and embracing the ostensible political fabrics of to-day--a unity

to be reached by weakening antagonisms, by developing understandings and

toleration, by fostering the sense of brotherhood across the ancient

bounds.

We believed and we believe that such a creative conception of a human

commonweal can be fostered in exactly the same way that the idea of

German unity was fostered behind the dukedoms, the free cities and

kingdoms of Germany, a conception so creative that it can dissolve

traditional hatreds, incorporate narrower loyalties and replace a

thousand suspicions and hostilities by a common passion for collective

achievement, so creative that at last the national boundaries of to-day

may become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying good-will of men as

the imaginary line that severs Normandy from Brittany, or Berwick from

Northumberland.

And it is not only a great peace about the earth that this idea of a

World State means for us, but social justice also. We are both convinced

altogether that there survives no reason for lives of toil, for

hardship, poverty, famine, infectious disease, for the continuing

cruelties of wild beasts and the greater multitude of crimes, but

mismanagement and waste, and that mismanagement and waste spring from no

other source than ignorance and from stupid divisions and jealousies,

base patriotisms, fanaticisms, prejudices and suspicions that are all no

more than ignorance a little mingled with viciousness. We have looked

closely into this servitude of modern labor, we have seen its injustice

fester towards syndicalism and revolutionary socialism, and we know

these things for the mere aimless, ignorant resentments they are;

punishments, not remedies. We have looked into the portentous threat of

modern war, and it is ignorant vanity and ignorant suspicion, the

bargaining aggression of the British prosperous and the swaggering

vulgarity of the German junker that make and sustain that monstrous

European devotion to arms. And we are convinced there is nothing in

these evils and conflicts that light may not dispel. We believe that

these things can be dispelled, that the great universals, Science which

has limitations neither of race nor class, Art which speaks to its own

in every rank and nation, Philosophy and Literature which broaden

sympathy and banish prejudice, can flood and submerge and will yet flow

over and submerge every one of these separations between man and man.

I will not say that this Great State, this World Republic of civilized

men, is our dream, because it is not a dream, it is a manifestly

reasonable possibility. It is our intention. It is what we are

deliberately making and what in a little while very many men and women

will be making. We are secessionists from all contemporary nationalities

and loyalties. We have set ourselves with all the capacity and energy at

our disposal to create a world-wide common fund of ideas and knowledge,

and to evoke a world-wide sense of human solidarity in which the

existing limitations of political structure must inevitably melt away.

It was Gidding and his Americanism, his inborn predisposition to

innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas

into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is

here that we of the old European stocks, who still grow upon the old

wood, differ most from those vigorous grafts of our race in America and

Africa and Australia on the one hand and from the renascent peoples of

the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have

not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of

things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably

magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all

knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the

habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a

fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the

most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work

out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so

entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from

the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to

the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion,

intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists

might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.

"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me

half fantasy; "Let's _do_ it."

There are moments still when it seems to me that this life of mine has

become the most preposterous of adventures. We two absurd human beings

are spending our days and nights in a sustained and growing attempt to

do what? To destroy certain obsessions and to give the universal human

mind a form and a desire for expression. We have put into the shape of

one comprehensive project that force of released wealth that has already

dotted America with universities, libraries, institutions for research

and enquiry. Already there are others at work with us, and presently

there will be a great number. We have started an avalanche above the old

politics and it gathers mass and pace....

And there never was an impulse towards endeavor in a human heart that

wasn't preposterous. Man is a preposterous animal. Thereby he ceases to

be a creature and becomes a creator, he turns upon the powers that made

him and subdues them to his service; by his sheer impudence he

establishes his claim to possess a soul....

But I need not write at all fully of my work here. This book is not

about that but about my coming to that. Long before this manuscript

reaches your hands--if ultimately I decide that it shall reach your

hands--you will be taking your share, I hope, in this open conspiracy

against potentates and prejudices and all the separating powers of

darkness.

§ 11

I would if I could omit one thing that I must tell you here, because it

goes so close to the very core of all this book has to convey. I wish I

could leave it out altogether. I wish I could simplify my story by

smoothing out this wrinkle at least and obliterating a thing that was at

once very real and very ugly. You see I had at last struggled up to a

sustaining idea, to a conception of work and duty to which I could

surely give my life. I had escaped from my pit so far. And it was

natural that now with something to give I should turn not merely for

consolation and service but for help and fellowship to that dear human

being across the seas who had offered them to me so straightly and

sweetly. All that is brave and good and as you would have me, is it not?

Only, dear son, that is not all the truth.

There was still in my mind, for long it remained in my mind, a

bitterness against Mary. I had left her, I had lost her, we had parted;

but from Germany to America and all through America and home again to my

marriage and with me after my marriage, it rankled that she could still

go on living a life independent of mine. I had not yet lost my desire to

possess her, to pervade and dominate her existence; my resentment that

though she loved me she had first not married me and afterwards not

consented to come away with me was smouldering under the closed hatches

of my mind. And so while the better part of me was laying hold of this

work because it gave me the hope of a complete distraction and escape

from my narrow and jealous self, that lower being of the pit was also

rejoicing in the great enterprises before me and in the marriage upon

which I had now determined, because it was a last trampling upon my

devotion to Mary, because it defied and denied some lurking claims to

empire I could suspect in her. I want to tell you that particularly

because so I am made, so you are made, so most of us are made. There is

scarcely a high purpose in all the world that has no dwarfish footman at

its stirrup, no base intention over which there does not ride at least

the phantom of an angel.

Constantly in those days, it seems to me now, I was haunted by my own

imagination of Mary amiably reconciled to Justin, bearing him children,

forgetful of or repudiating all the sweetness, all the wonder and beauty

we had shared.... It was an unjust and ungenerous conception, I knew it

for a caricature even as I entertained it, and yet it tormented me. It

stung me like a spur. It kept me at work, and if I strayed into

indolence brought me back to work with a mind galled and bleeding....

§ 12

And I suppose it is mixed up with all this that I could not make love

easily and naturally to Rachel. I could not write love-letters to her.

There is a burlesque quality in these scruples, I know, seeing that I

was now resolved to marry her, but that is the quality, that is the

mixed texture of life. We overcome the greater things and are

conscience-stricken by the details.

I wouldn't, even at the price of losing her--and I was now passionately

anxious not to lose her--use a single phrase of endearment that did not

come out of me almost in spite of myself. At any rate I would not cheat

her. And my offer of marriage when at last I sent it to her from Chicago

was, as I remember it, almost business-like. I atoned soon enough for

that arid letter in ten thousand sweet words that came of themselves to

my lips. And she paid me at any rate in my own coin when she sent me her

answer by cable, the one word "Yes."

And indeed I was already in love with her long before I wrote. It was

only a dread of giving her a single undeserved cheapness that had held

me back so long. It was that and the perplexity that Mary still gripped

my feelings; my old love for her was there in my heart in spite of my

new passion for Rachel, it was blackened perhaps and ruined and changed

but it was there. It was as if a new crater burnt now in the ampler

circumference of an old volcano, which showed all the more desolate and

sorrowful and obsolete for the warm light of the new flames....

How impatiently I came home! Thoughts of England I had not dared to

think for three long years might now do what they would in me. I dreamt

of the Surrey Hills and the great woods of Burnmore Park, of the

changing skies and stirring soft winds of our grey green Motherland.

There was fog in the Irish Sea, and we lost the better part of a day

hooting our way towards Liverpool while I fretted about the ship with

all my luggage packed, staring at the grey waters that weltered under

the mist. It was the longest day in my life. My heart was full of

desire, my eyes ached for the little fields and golden October skies of

England, England that was waiting to welcome me back from my exile with

such open arms. I was coming home,--home.

I hurried through London into Surrey and in my father's study, warned by

a telegram, I found a bright-eyed, resolute young woman awaiting me,

with the quality about her of one who embarks upon a long premeditated

adventure. And I found too a family her sisters and her brother all

gladly ready for me, my father too was a happy man, and on the eighth of

November in 1906 Rachel and I were married in the little church at

Shere. We stayed for a week or so in Hampshire near Ringwood, the season

was late that year and the trees still very beautiful; and then we went

to Portofino on the Ligurian coast.

There presently Gidding joined us and we began to work out the schemes

we had made in America, the schemes that now fill my life.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

MARY WRITES

§ 1

It was in the early spring of 1909 that I had a letter from Mary.

By that time my life was set fully upon its present courses, Gidding and

I had passed from the stage of talking and scheming to definite

undertakings. Indeed by 1909 things were already organized upon their

present lines. We had developed a huge publishing establishment with one

big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were

studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment

of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under

the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the

broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its

streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm

had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully

edited and revised editions as we could, the whole of the English,

Spanish and French literature, and we were only waiting for the release

of machinery to attack German, Russian and Italian, and were giving each

language not only its own but a very complete series of good

translations of the classical writers in every other tongue. We had a

little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at

each important literary centre. We had, for example, more than a score

of men at work translating Bengali fiction and verse into English,--a

lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent

Englishman--and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in

Arabic. We meant to give so good and cheap a book, and to be so

comprehensive in our choice of books, excluding nothing if only it was

real and living, on account of any inferiority of quality, obscurity of

subject or narrowness of demand, that in the long run anybody, anywhere,

desiring to read anything would turn naturally and inevitably to our

lists.

Ours was to be in the first place a world literature. Then afterwards

upon its broad currents of distribution and in the same forms we meant

to publish new work and new thought. We were also planning an

encyclopædia. Behind our enterprise of translations and reprints we were

getting together and putting out a series of guide-books, gazetteers,

dictionaries, text-books and books of reference, and we were organizing

a revising staff for these, a staff that should be constantly keeping

them up to date. It was our intention to make every copy we printed bear

the date of its last revision in a conspicuous place, and we hoped to

get the whole line of these books ultimately upon an annual basis, and

to sell them upon repurchasing terms that would enable us to issue a new

copy and take back and send the old one to the pulping mill at a narrow

margin of profit. Then we meant to spread our arms wider, and

consolidate and offer our whole line of text-books, guide-books and

gazetteers, bibliographies, atlases, dictionaries and directories as a

new World Encyclopædia, that should also annually or at longest

biennially renew its youth.

So far we had gone in the creation of a huge international organ of

information, and of a kind of gigantic modern Bible of world literature,

and in the process of its distribution we were rapidly acquiring an

immense detailed knowledge of the book and publishing trade, finding

congestions here, neglected opportunities there, and devising and

drawing up a hundred schemes for relief, assistance, amalgamation and

rearrangement. We had branches in China, Japan, Peru, Iceland and a

thousand remote places that would have sounded as far off as the moon to

an English or American bookseller in the seventies. China in particular

was a growing market. We had a subsidiary company running a flourishing

line of book shops in the east-end of London, and others in New Jersey,

Chicago, Buenos Ayres, the South of France, and Ireland. Incidentally we

had bought up some thousands of miles of Labrador forest to ensure our

paper supply, and we could believe that before we died there would not

be a corner of the world in which any book of interest or value whatever

would not be easily attainable by any intelligent person who wanted to

read it. And already we were taking up the more difficult and ambitious

phase of our self-appointed task, and considering the problem of using

these channels we were mastering and deepening and supplementing for the

stimulation and wide diffusion of contemporary thought.

There we went outside the province of Alphabet and Mollentrave and into

an infinitely subtler system of interests. We wanted to give sincere and

clear-thinking writers encouragement and opportunity, to improve the

critical tribunal and make it independent of advertising interests, so

that there would be a readier welcome for luminous thinking and writing

and a quicker explosion of intellectual imposture. We sought to provide

guides and intelligencers to contemporary thought. We had already set up

or subsidized or otherwise aided a certain number of magazines and

periodicals that seemed to us independent-spirited, out-spoken and well

handled, but we had still to devise our present scheme of financing

groups of men to create magazines and newspapers, which became their own

separate but inalienable property after so many years of success.

But all this I hope you will already have become more or less familiar

with when this story reaches your hands, and I hope by the time it does

so we shall be far beyond our present stage of experiment and that you

will have come naturally to play your part in this most fascinating

business of maintaining an onward intellectual movement in the world, a

movement not simply independent of but often running counter to all

sorts of political and financial interests. I tell you this much here

for you to understand that already in 1909 and considering the business

side of my activities alone, I was a hard worker and very strenuously

employed. And in addition to all this huge network of enterprises I had

developed with Gidding, I was still pretty actively a student. I

wasn't--I never shall be--absolutely satisfied with my general ideas. I

was enquiring keenly and closely into those problems of group and crowd

psychology from which all this big publishing work has arisen, and

giving particular attention to the war-panics and outbreaks of

international hostility that were then passing in deepening waves

across Europe. I had already accumulated a mass of notes for the book

upon "Group Jealousy in Religious Persecution, Racial Conflicts and War"

which I hope to publish the year after next, and which therefore I hope

you will have read long before this present book can possibly come to

you. And moreover Rachel and I had established our home in London--in

the house we now occupy during the winter and spring--and both you and

your little sister had begun your careers as inhabitants of this earth.

Your little sister had indeed but just begun.

And then one morning at the breakfast-table I picked a square envelope

out of a heap of letters, and saw the half-forgotten and infinitely

familiar handwriting of Lady Mary Justin.... The sight of it gave me an

odd mixture of sensations. I was startled, I was disturbed, I was a

little afraid. I hadn't forgiven her yet; it needed but this touch to

tell me how little I had forgotten....

§ 2

I sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before I opened it,

hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic

situation. Then I pushed my chair a little back from the table and

ripped the envelope.

It was a far longer letter than Mary had ever written me in the old

days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. I

have it still, and here I open its worn folds and, except for a few

trifling omissions, copy it out for you.... A few trifling omissions, I

say,--just one there is that is not trifling, but that I must needs

make....

You will never see any of these letters because I shall destroy them so

soon as this copy is made. It has been difficult--or I should have

destroyed them before. But some things can be too hard for us....

This first letter is on the Martens note-paper; its very heading was

familiar to me. The handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little

stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two scribbled obliterations;

it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her

usual and characteristic ease....

And as I read, slowly my long-cherished anger evaporated, and the real

Mary, outspoken and simple, whom I had obscured by a cloud of fancied

infidelities, returned to me....

"My dear Stephen," she begins, "About six weeks ago I saw in the _Times_

that you have a little daughter. It set me thinking, picturing you with

a mite of a baby in your arms--what _little_ things they are,

Stephen!--and your old face bent over it, so that presently I went to my

room and cried. It set me thinking about you so that I have at last

written you this letter.... I love to think of you with wife and

children about you Stephen,--I heard of your son for the first time

about a year ago, but--don't mistake me,--something wrings me too....

"Well, I too have children. Have you ever thought of me as a mother? I

am. I wonder how much you know about me now. I have two children and the

youngest is just two years old. And somehow it seems to me that now that

you and I have both given such earnests of our good behavior, such

evidence that _that_ side of life anyhow is effectually settled for us,

there is no reason remaining why we shouldn't correspond. You are my

brother, Stephen, and my friend and my twin and the core of my

imagination, fifty babies cannot alter that, we can live but once and

then die, and, promise or no promise, I will not be dead any longer in

your world when I'm not dead, nor will I have you, if I can help it, a

cold unanswering corpse in mine....

"Too much of my life and being, Stephen, has been buried, and I am in

rebellion. This is a breach of the tomb if you like, an irregular

private premature resurrection from an interment in error. Out of my

alleged grave I poke my head and say Hello! to you. Stephen, old friend!

dear friend! how are you getting on? What is it like to you? How do you

feel? I want to know about you.... I'm not doing this at all furtively,

and you can write back to me, Stephen, as openly as your heart desires.

I have told Justin I should do this. I rise, you see, blowing my own

Trump. Let the other graves do as they please....

"Your letters will be respected, Stephen.... If you choose to rise also

and write me a letter.

"Stephen, I've been wanting to do this for--for all the time. If there

was thought-reading you would have had a thousand letters. But formerly

I was content to submit, and latterly I've chafed more. I think that as

what they call passion has faded, the immense friendliness has become

more evident, and made the bar less and less justifiable. You and I have

had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day--it was in a

report in the _Times_, I think--was calling _Materia Matrimoniala_. And

of course I hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts

of ways--whatever you have done about me I've had a woman's sense of

honor about you and I've managed to learn a great deal without asking

forbidden questions. I've pricked up my ears at the faintest echo of

your name.

"They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort

of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all

rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I

should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I

never see any advertisement of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what

it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd

and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest

appearance of being animated by you. And equally perplexing is your

being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace

Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so forth. It's

so--Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports

of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the _Fortnightly_. I

can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching

into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean,

Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English

politics--speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning,

taking up that work you dropped--it's six years now ago. I've been

accumulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our

side,"--this you will remember was in 1909--"still steers our devious

party courses, and the Tariff Reformers have still to capture us. Weston

Massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the

Clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good

seaman in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the poop,

white and shrieking with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists

armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons

were fixed.... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only

for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?

"We are in it so far as I can contrive. But I contrive very little. We

are pillars of the Conservative party--on that Justin's mind is firmly

settled--and every now and then I clamor urgently that we must do more

for it. But Justin's ideas go no further than writing cheques--doing

more for the party means writing a bigger cheque--and there are moments

when I feel we shall simply bring down a peerage upon our heads and bury

my ancient courtesy title under the ignominy of a new creation. He would

certainly accept it. He writes his cheque and turns back at the earliest

opportunity to his miniature gardens and the odd little freaks of

collecting that attract him. Have you ever heard of chintz oil jars?

'No,' you will say. Nor has anyone else yet except our immediate circle

of friends and a few dealers who are no doubt industriously increasing

the present scanty supply. We possess three. They are matronly shaped

jars about two feet or a yard high, of a kind of terra-cotta with wooden

tops surmounted by gilt acorns, and they have been covered with white

paint and on this flowers and birds and figures from some very rich old

chintz have been stuck very cunningly, and then everything has been

varnished--and there you are. Our first and best was bought for

seven-and-sixpence, brought home in the car, put upon a console table

on the second landing and worshipped. It's really a very pleasant mellow

thing to see. Nobody had ever seen the like. Guests, sycophantic people

of all sorts were taken to consider it. It was looked at with heads at

every angle, one man even kept his head erect and one went a little

upstairs and looked at it under his arm. Also the most powerful lenses

have been used for a minute examination, and one expert licked the

varnish and looked extremely thoughtful and wise at me as he turned the

booty over his gifted tongue. And now, God being with us, we mean to

possess every specimen in existence--before the Americans get hold of

the idea. Yesterday Justin got up and motored sixty miles to look at an

alleged fourth....

"Oh my dear! I am writing chatter. You perceive I've reached the

chattering stage. It is the fated end of the clever woman in a good

social position nowadays, her mind beats against her conditions for the

last time and breaks up into this carping talk, this spume of

observation and comment, this anecdotal natural history of the

restraining husband, as waves burst out their hearts in a foam upon a

reef. But it isn't chatter I want to write to you.

"Stephen, I'm intolerably wretched. No creature has ever been gladder to

have been born than I was for the first five and twenty years of my

life. I was full of hope and I was full, I suppose, of vanity and rash

confidence. I thought I was walking on solid earth with my head reaching

up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the

smiling. And I am nothing and worse than nothing, I am the ineffectual

mother of two children, a daughter whom I adore--but of her I may not

tell you--and a son,--a son who is too like his father for any fury of

worship, a stolid little creature.... That is all I have done in the

world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue Persian who is scarcely

two years old, has already had nine kittens. My husband and I have never

forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other;

that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our rôle;

I have done my duty to the great new line of Justin by giving it the

heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen

between us. We hardly speak except in company. I have not been so much

married, Stephen, I find, as collected, and since our tragic

misadventure--but there were beautiful moments, Stephen, unforgettable

glimpses of beauty in that--thank God, I say impenitently for that--the

door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is

not locked, is very discreetly--watched. I have no men friends, no

social force, no freedom to take my line. My husband is my official

obstacle. We barb the limitations of life for one another. A little

while ago he sought to chasten me--to rouse me rather--through jealousy,

and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of

artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous

interest. I was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired.

'This,' I said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for _me_, Justin,'--and

the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible

celerity. I hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with

by a minion, but I become more and more aware of my ignorance of a

great financier's methods as I become more and more aware of them....

"Stephen, my dear, my brother, I am intolerably unhappy. I do not know

what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. I am like

a prisoner in a magic cage and I do not know the word that will release

me. How is it with you? Are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not;

and if you are not, what are you doing with life? Have you found any

secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? Write to me,

write to me at least and tell me that.... Please write to me.

"Do you remember how long ago you and I sat in the old Park at Burnmore,

and how I kept pestering you and asking you what is all this _for_? And

you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge

he could cross but doesn't want to. Well, Stephen, you've had

nearly--how many years is it now?--to get an answer ready. What _is_ it

all for? What do you make of it? Never mind my particular case, or the

case of Women with a capital _W_, tell me _your_ solution. You are

active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. Is publishing

a way of peace for the heart? I am prepared to believe even that. But

justify yourself. Tell me what you have got there to keep your soul

alive."

§ 3

I read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about

me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things

upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former Strattons that came to

me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. And

Rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young

mother, fragile and tender-eyed. The clash of these two systems of

reality was amazing. It was as though I had not been parted from Mary

for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter

jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room.

Indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if I had been sitting at a

desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a

book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.

And then I looked at the page of my life before me and became again a

character in the story.

I met the enquiry in Rachel's eyes. "It's a letter from Mary Justin," I

said.

She did not answer for a few moments. She became interested in the flame

of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. She finished what

she had to do with that and then remarked, "I thought you two were not

to correspond."

"Yes," I said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding."

There was a little interval of silence, and then I got up and went to

the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.

"I suppose," said Rachel, "she wants to hear from you again."

"She thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can

consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to

hear--about me.... Apart from everything else--we were very great

friends."

"Of course," said Rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. You must

have been great friends. And it's natural for her to write."

"I suppose," she added, "her husband knows."

"She's told him, she says...."

Her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a

second, and it was as if hastily she snatched away a thought from my

observation. I had a moment of illuminating embarrassment. So far we had

contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought

to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an

entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. If

perhaps I had been largely silent to her about Mary it was not so much

that I sought to hide things from her as that I myself sought to forget.

It is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any

such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. But we had maintained a

convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each

other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our

friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.

I wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read--and to do so was

manifestly impossible. Something had arisen between us that made out of

our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. Here were

things I knew and understood completely and that I could not even

describe to Rachel. What would she make of Mary's "Write to me. Write to

me"? A mere wish to resume.... I would not risk the exposure of Mary's

mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....

That letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that

region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted

convention of our complete mutual understanding. In my memory it seems

to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the

evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.

Then I put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy assumption of

carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.

"It will be curious," I said, "to write to her again.... To tell her

about things...."

And then with immense interest, "Are these Chichester sausages you've

got here, Rachel, or some new kind?"

Rachel roused herself to respond with an equal affectation, and we made

an eager conversation about bacon and sausages--for after that startling

gleam of divergence we were both anxious to get back to the

superficialities of life again.

§ 4

I did not answer Mary's letter for seven or eight days.

During that period my mind was full of her to the exclusion of every

other interest. I re-read all that she had to say many times, and with

each reading the effect of her personality deepened. It was all so

intensely familiar, the flashes of insight, the blazing frankness, the

quick turns of thought, and her absurd confidence in a sort of sane

stupidity that she had always insisted upon my possessing. And her

unembarrassed affectionateness. Her quick irregular writing seemed to

bring back with it the changing light in her eyes, the intonations of

her voice, something of her gesture....

I didn't go on discussing with myself whether we two ought to

correspond; that problem disappeared from my thoughts. Her challenge to

me to justify myself took possession of my mind. That thrust towards

self-examination was the very essence of her ancient influence. How did

I justify myself? I was under a peculiar compulsion to answer that to

her satisfaction. She had picked me up out of my work and accumulating

routines with that demand, made me look at myself and my world again as

a whole.... I had a case. I have a case. It is a case of passionate

faith triumphing over every doubt and impossibility, a case real enough

to understand for those who understand, but very difficult to state. I

tried to convey it to her.

I do not remember at all clearly what I wrote to her. It has disappeared

from existence. But it was certainly a long letter. Throughout this book

I have been trying to tell you the growth of my views of life and its

purpose, from my childish dreams and Harbury attitudes to those ideas of

human development that have made me undertake the work I do. It is not

glorious work I know, as the work of great artists and poets and leaders

is glorious, but it is what I find best suits my gifts and my want of

gifts. Greater men will come at last to build within my scaffoldings. In

some summary phrasing I must have set out the gist of this. I must have

explained my sense of the supreme importance of mental clarification in

human life. All this is manifest in her reply. And I think too I did my

best to tell her plainly the faith that was in me, and why life seemed

worth while to me....

Her second letter came after an interval of only a few days from the

despatch of mine. She began abruptly.

"I won't praise your letter or your beliefs. They are fine and

large--and generous--like you. Just a little artificial (but you will

admit that), as though you had felt them _give_ here and there and had

made up your mind they shouldn't. At times it's oddly like looking at

the Alps, the real Alps, and finding that every now and then the

mountains have been eked out with a plank and canvas Earl's Court

background.... Yes, I like what you say about Faith. I believe you are

right. I wish I could--perhaps some day I shall--light up and _feel_ you

are right. But--but---- That large, _respectable_ project, the increase

of wisdom and freedom and self-knowledge in the world, the calming of

wars, the ending of economic injustice and so on and so on----

"When I read it first it was like looking at a man in profile and

finding him solid and satisfactory, and then afterwards when I thought

it all over and looked for the particular things that really matter to

me and tried to translate it into myself--nothing is of the slightest

importance in the world that one cannot translate into oneself--then I

began to realize just how amazingly deficient you are. It was like

walking round that person in profile and finding his left side wasn't

there--with everything perfect on the right, down to the buttons. A kind

of intellectual Lorelei--sideways. You've planned out your

understandings and tolerances and enquiries and clearings-up as if the

world were all just men--or citizens--and nothing doing but racial and

national and class prejudices and the exacting and shirking of labor,

and you seem to ignore altogether that man is a sexual animal

first--first, Stephen, first--that he has that in common with all the

animals, that it made him indeed because he has it more than they

have--and after that, a long way after that, he is the

labor-economizing, war-and feud-making creature you make him out to be.

A long way after that....

"Man is the most sexual of all the beasts, Stephen. Half of him,

womankind, rather more than half, isn't simply human at all, it's

specialized, specialized for the young, not only naturally and

physically as animals are, but mentally and artificially. Womankind

isn't human, it's reduced human. It's 'the sex' as the Victorians used

to say, and from the point of view of the Lex Julia and the point of

view of Mr. Malthus, and the point of view of biologists and saints and

artists and everyone who deals in feeling and emotion--and from the

point of view of all us poor specialists, smothered up in our clothes

and restrictions--the future of the sex is the centre of the whole

problem of the human future, about which you are concerned. All this

great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us

if you ignore us, we women are going to be the Goths and Huns of another

Decline and Fall. We are going to sit in the conspicuous places of the

world and _loot_ all your patient accumulations. We are going to abolish

your offspring and turn the princes among you into undignified slaves.

Because, you see, specialized as we are, we are not quite specialized,

we are specialized under duress, and at the first glimpse of a chance we

abandon our cradles and drop our pots and pans and go for the vast and

elegant side possibilities--of our specialization. Out we come, looking

for the fun the men are having. Dress us, feed us, play with us! We'll

pay you in excitement,--tremendous excitement. The State indeed! All

your little triumphs of science and economy, all your little

accumulations of wealth that you think will presently make the struggle

for life an old story and the millennium possible--_we spend_. And all

your dreams of brotherhood!--we will set you by the ears. We hold

ourselves up as my little Christian nephews--Philip's boys--do some

coveted object, and say _Quis?_ and the whole brotherhood shouts

'_Ego!_' to the challenge.... Back you go into Individualism at the word

and all your Brotherhood crumbles to dust again.

"How are you going to remedy it, how are you going to protect that Great

State of your dreams from this anti-citizenship of sex? You give no

hint.

"You are planning nothing, Stephen, nothing to meet this. You are

fighting with an army all looting and undisciplined, frantic with the

private jealousies that centre about _us_, feuds, cuts, expulsions,

revenges, and you are giving out orders for an army of saints. You treat

us as a negligible quantity, and we are about as negligible as a fire in

the woodwork of a house that is being built....

"I read what I have written, Stephen, and I perceive I have the makings

of a fine scold in me. Perhaps under happier conditions----... I should

certainly have scolded you, constantly, continually.... Never did a man

so need scolding.... And like any self-respecting woman I see that I use

half my words in the wrong meanings in order to emphasize my point. Of

course when I write woman in all that has gone before I don't mean

woman. It is a woman's privilege to talk or write incomprehensibly and

insist upon being understood. So that I expect you already to understand

that what I mean isn't that men are creative and unselfish and brotherly

and so forth and that women are spoiling and going to spoil the

game--although and notwithstanding that is exactly what I have

written--but that humans are creative and unselfish et cetera and so

forth, and that it is their sexual, egotistical, passionate side (which

is ever so much bigger relatively in a woman than in a man, and that is

why I wrote as I did) which is going to upset your noble and beautiful

apple-cart. But it is not only that by nature we are more largely and

gravely and importantly sexual than men but that men have shifted the

responsibility for attraction and passion upon us and made us pay in

servitude and restriction and blame for the common defect of the

species. So that you see really I was right all along in writing of this

as though it was women when it wasn't, and I hope now it is unnecessary

for me to make my meaning clearer than it is now and always has been in

this matter. And so, resuming our discourse, Stephen, which only my

sense of your invincible literalness would ever have interrupted, what

are you going to do with us?

"I gather from a hint rather than accept as a statement that you propose

to give us votes.

"Stephen!--do you really think that we are going to bring anything to

bear upon public affairs worth having? I know something of the

contemporary feminine intelligence. Justin makes no serious objection to

a large and various circle of women friends, and over my little

sitting-room fire in the winter and in my corners of our various gardens

in the summer and in walks over the heather at Martens and in Scotland

there are great talks and confessions of love, of mental freedom, of

ambitions, and belief and unbelief--more particularly of unbelief. I

have sometimes thought of compiling a dictionary of unbelief, a great

list of the things that a number of sweet, submissive,

value-above-rubies wives have told me they did not believe in. It would

amaze their husbands beyond measure. The state of mind of women about

these things, Stephen, is dreadful--I mean about all these

questions--you know what I mean. The bold striving spirits do air their

views a little, and always in a way that makes one realize how badly

they need airing--but most of the nicer women are very chary of talk,

they have to be drawn out, a hint of opposition makes them start back or

prevaricate, and I see them afterwards with their husbands, pretty

silken furry feathery jewelled _silences_. All their suppression doesn't

keep them orthodox, it only makes them furtive and crumpled and creased

in their minds--in just the way that things get crumpled and creased if

they are always being shoved back into a drawer. You have only to rout

about in their minds for a bit. They pretend at first to be quite

correct, and then out comes the nasty little courage of the darkness.

Sometimes there is even an apologetic titter. They are quite

emancipated, they say; I have misunderstood them. Their emancipation is

like those horrid white lizards that grow in the Kentucky caves out of

the sunlight. They tell you they don't see why they shouldn't do this or

that--mean things, underhand things, cheap, vicious, sensual things....

Are there, I wonder, the same dreadful little caverns in men? I doubt

it. And then comes a situation that really tries their quality.... Think

of the quandary I got into with you, Stephen. And for my sex I'm rather

a daring person. The way in which I went so far--and then ran away. I

had a kind of excuse--in my illness. That illness! Such a queer untimely

feminine illness....

"We're all to pieces, Stephen. That's what brought down Rome. The women

went to pieces then, and the women are going to pieces to-day. What's

the good of having your legions in the Grampians and marching up to

Philae, while the wives are talking treason in your houses? It's no good

telling us to go back to the Ancient Virtues. The Ancient Virtues

haven't _kept_. The Ancient Virtues in an advanced state of decay is

what was the matter with Rome and what is the matter with us. You can't

tell a woman to go back to the spinning-wheel and the kitchen and the

cradle, when you have power-looms, French cooks, hotels, restaurants and

modern nurseries. We've overflowed. We've got to go on to a lot of New

Virtues. And in all the prospect before me--I can't descry one clear

simple thing to do....

"But I'm running on. I want to know, Stephen, why you've got nothing to

say about all this. It must have been staring you in the face ever since

I spent my very considerable superfluous energies in wrecking your

career. Because you know I wrecked it, Stephen. I _knew_ I was wrecking

it and I wrecked it. I knew exactly what I was doing all the time. I had

meant to be so fine a thing for you, a mothering friend, to have that

dear consecutive kindly mind of yours steadying mine, to have seen you

grow to power over men, me helping, me admiring. It was to have been so

fine. So fine! Didn't I urge you to marry Rachel, make you talk of her.

Don't you remember that? And one day when I saw you thinking of Rachel,

saw a kind of pride in your eyes!--suddenly I couldn't stand it. I went

to my room after you had gone and thought of you and her until I wanted

to scream. I couldn't bear it. It was intolerable. I was violent to my

toilet things. I broke a hand-glass. Your dignified, selfish,

self-controlled Mary _smashed_ a silver hand-mirror. I never told you

that. You know what followed. I pounced on you and took you. Wasn't I--a

soft and scented hawk? Was either of us better than some creature of

instinct that does what it does because it must? It was like a gust of

madness--and I cared, I found, no more for your career than I cared for

any other little thing, for honor, for Rachel, for Justin, that stood

between us....

"My dear, wasn't all that time, all that heat and hunger of desire, all

that secret futility of passion, the very essence of the situation

between men and women now? We are all trying most desperately to be

human beings, to walk erect, to work together--what was your

phrase?--'in a multitudinous unity,' to share what you call a common

collective thought that shall rule mankind, and this tremendous force

which seizes us and says to us: 'Make that other being yours, bodily

yours, mentally yours, wholly yours--at any price, no matter the price,'

bars all our unifications. It splits the whole world into couples

watching each other. Until all our laws, all our customs seem the

servants of that. It is the passion of the body swamping the brain; it's

an ape that has seized a gun, a beautiful modern gun. Here am I,

Justin's captive, and he mine, he mine because at the first escapade of

his I get my liberty. Here are we two, I and you, barred for ever from

the sight of one another, and I and you writing--I at any rate--in spite

of the ill-concealed resentment of my partner. We're just two, peeping

through our bars, of a universal multitude. Everywhere this prison of

sex. Have you ever thought just all that it means when every woman in

the world goes dressed in a costume to indicate her sex, her cardinal

fact, so that she dare not even mount a bicycle in knickerbockers, she

has her hair grown long to its longest because yours is short, and

everything conceivable is done to emphasize and remind us (and you) of

the fundamental trouble between us? As if there was need of reminding!

Stephen, is there no way out of this? Is there no way at all? Because if

there is not, then I had rather go back to the hareem than live as I do

now imprisoned in glass--with all of life in sight of me and none in

reach. I had rather Justin beat me into submission and mental

tranquillity and that I bore him an annual--probably deciduous--child. I

can understand so well now that feminine attitude that implies, 'Well,

if I must have a master, then the more master the better.' Perhaps that

is the way; that Nature will not let us poor humans get away from sex,

and I am merely--what is it?--an abnormality--with whiskers of enquiry

sprouting from my mind. Yet I don't feel like that....

"I'm pouring into these letters, Stephen, the concentrated venom of

years of brooding. My heart is black with rebellion against my lot and

against the lot of woman. I have been given life and a fine position in

the world, I made one fatal blunder in marrying to make these things

secure, and now I can do nothing with it all and I have nothing to do

with it. It astounds me to think of the size of our establishments,

Stephen, of the extravagant way in which whole counties and great

countries pay tribute to pile up the gigantic heap of wealth upon which

we two lead our lives of futile entanglement. In this place alone there

are fourteen gardeners and garden helps, and this is not one of our

garden places. Three weeks ago I spent a thousand pounds on clothes in

one great week of shopping, and our yearly expenditure upon personal

effect, upon our magnificence and our margins cannot be greatly less

than forty-five thousand pounds. I walk about our house and gardens, I

take one of the carriages or one of the automobiles and go to some large

pointless gathering of hundreds and thousands and thousands of pounds,

and we walk about and say empty little things, and the servants don't

laugh at us, the butlers don't laugh at us, the people in the street

tolerate us.... It has an effect of collective insanity.... You know the

story of one of those dear Barons of the Cinque Ports--a decent

plumber-body from Rye or Winchelsea--one of the six--or eight--who

claimed the privilege of carrying the canopy over the King"--she is

speaking of King Edward's coronation of course--"how that he was

discovered suddenly to be speaking quite audibly to the sacred presence

so near to him: 'It is very remarkable--we should be here, your

majesty--very remarkable.' And then he subsided--happily unheard--into

hopeless embarrassment. That is exactly how I feel, Stephen. I feel I

can't stand it much longer, that presently I shall splutter and spoil

the procession....

"Perhaps I don't properly estimate our position in the fabric, but I

can't get away from the feeling that everything in social life leads up

to this--to us,--the ridiculous canopy. If so, then the universe

means--_nothing_; it's blowing great forms and shapes as a swamp blows

bubbles; a little while ago it was megatheriums and plesiosauriums--if

that's the name for them--and now it is country-houses and motor-cars

and coronation festivals. And in the end--it is all nonsense, Stephen.

It is utter nonsense.

"If it isn't nonsense, tell me what it is. For me at any rate it's

nonsense, and for every intelligent woman about me--for I talk to some

of them, we indulge in seditious whisperings and wit--and there isn't

one who seems to have been able to get to anything solider than I have

done. Each of us has had her little fling at maternity--about as much as

a washerwoman does in her odd time every two or three years--and that is

our uttermost reality. All the rest,--trimmings! We go about the world,

Stephen, dressing and meeting each other with immense ceremony, we have

our seasonal movements in relation to the ritual of politics and sport,

we travel south for the Budget and north for the grouse, we play games

to amuse the men who keep us--not a woman would play a game for its own

sake--we dabble with social reform and politics, for which few of us

care a rap except as an occupation, we 'discover' artists or musicians

or lecturers (as though we cared), we try to believe in lovers or, still

harder, try to believe in old or new religions, and most of us--I

don't--do our best to give the gratifications and exercise the

fascinations that are expected of us....

"Something has to be done for women, Stephen. We are the heart of life,

birth and begetting, the home where the future grows, and your schemes

ignore us and slide about over the superficialities of things. We are

spoiling the whole process of progress, we are turning all the

achievements of mankind to nothingness. Men invent, create, do miracles

with the world, and we translate it all into shopping, into a glitter of

dresses and households, into an immense parade of pride and excitement.

We excite men, we stir them to get us and keep us. Men turn from their

ideas of brotherhood to elaborate our separate cages....

"I am Justin's wife; not a thing in my heavens or my earth that is not

subordinated to that.

"Something has to be done for women, Stephen, something--urgently--and

nothing is done until that is done, some release from their intolerable

subjection to sex, so that for us everything else in life, respect,

freedom, social standing, is entirely secondary to that. But what has to

be done? We women do not know. Our efforts to know are among the most

desolating of spectacles. I read the papers of those suffrage women; the

effect is more like agitated geese upon a common than anything human has

a right to be.... That's why I turn to you. Years ago I felt, and now I

know, there is about you a simplicity of mind, a foolishness of faith,

that is stronger and greater than the cleverness of any woman alive. You

are one of those strange men who take high and sweeping views--as larks

soar. It isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... No, but still

I turn to you. In the old days I used to turn to you and shake your mind

and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about

without my clamor. Once do you remember at Martens I shook you by the

ears.... And when I made you think, you thought, as I could never do.

Think now--about women.

"Stephen, there are moments when it seems to me that this futility of

women, this futility of men's effort _through_ women, is a fated

futility in the very nature of things. We may be saddled with it as we

are with all the animal infirmities we have, with appendixes and

suchlike things inside of us, and the passions and rages of apes and a

tail--I believe we have a tail curled away somewhere, haven't we?

Perhaps mankind is so constituted that badly as they get along now they

couldn't get along at all if they let women go free and have their own

way with life. Perhaps you can't have _two_ sexes loose together. You

must shut up one. I've a horrible suspicion that all these anti-suffrage

men like Lord Cromer and Sir Ray Lankester must know a lot about life

that I do not know. And that other man Sir Something-or-other Wright,

who said plainly that men cannot work side by side with women because

they get excited.... And yet, you know, women have had glimpses of a

freedom that was not mischievous. I could have been happy as a Lady

Abbess--I must have space and dignity, Stephen--and those women had

things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day.

They came to the House of Lords. But they lost all that. Was there some

sort of natural selection?...

"Stephen, you were made to answer my mind, and if you cannot do it

nobody can. What is your outlook for women? Are we to go back to

seclusion or will it be possible to minimize sex? If you are going to

minimize sex how are you going to do it? Suppression? There is plenty of

suppression now. Increase or diminish the pains and penalties? My

nephew, Philip's boy, Philip Christian, was explaining to me the other

day that if you boil water in an open bowl it just boils away, and that

if you boil it in a corked bottle it bangs everything to pieces, and

you have, he says, 'to look out.' But I feel that's a bad image.

Boiling-water isn't frantically jealous, and men and women are. But

still suppose, suppose you trained people not to make such an awful fuss

about things. _Now_ you train them to make as much fuss as possible....

"Oh bother it all, Stephen! Where's your mind in these matters? Why

haven't you tackled these things? Why do you leave it to _me_ to dig

these questions into you--like opening a reluctant oyster? Aren't they

patent? You up and answer them, Stephen--or this correspondence will

become abusive...."

§ 5

It was true that I did ignore or minimize sexual questions as much as I

could. I was forced now to think why I did this. That carried me back to

those old days of passion, memories I had never stirred for many years.

And I wrote to Mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable

fear, that in fact I had dismissed them because they had been beyond my

patience and self-control, because I could not think very much about

them without an egotistical reversion to the bitterness of my own case.

And in avoiding them I was only doing what the great bulk of men in

business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do. They train

themselves not to think of the rights and wrongs of sexual life, not to

tolerate liberties even in their private imaginations. They know it is

like carrying a torch into a powder magazine. They feel they cannot

trust their own minds beyond the experience, tested usages, and

conventions of the ages, because they know how many of those who have

ventured further have been blinded by mists and clouds of rhetoric, lost

in inexplicable puzzles and wrecked disastrously. There in those half

explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands, lurk desires that sting

like adders and hatreds cruel as hell....

And then I went on--I do not clearly remember now the exact line of

argument I adopted--to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not

necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one

soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an

absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went on living and working

for social construction with the cardinal riddles of social order, so

far as they affected her, unsolved. Wasn't I at any rate preparing

apparatus for that huge effort at solution that mankind must ultimately

make? Wasn't this dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought

about the best that we could hope to do at the present time, seeing that

to launch a keel of speculation prematurely was only to strand oneself

among hopeless reefs and confusions? Better prepare for a voyage

to-morrow than sail to destruction to-day.

Whatever I put in that forgotten part of my letter was put less

strikingly than my first admissions, and anyhow it was upon these that

Mary pounced to the disregard of any other point. "There you are," she

wrote, with something like elation, "there is a tiger in the garden and

you won't talk or think about it for fear of growing excited. That is my

grievance against so much historical and political and social

discussion; its hopeless futility because of its hopeless omissions. You

plan the world's future, taking the women and children for granted, with

Egotistical Sex, as you call it, a prowling monster upsetting

everything you do...."

But I will not give you that particular letter in its order, nor its

successors. Altogether she wrote me twenty-two letters, and I one or two

more than that number to her, and--a thing almost inevitable in a

discussion by correspondence--there is a lot of overlapping and

recapitulation. Those letters spread over a space of nearly two and a

half years. Again and again she insists upon the monstrous exaggeration

of the importance of sex in human life and of the need of some reduction

of its importance, and she makes the boldest experimental suggestions

for the achievement of that end. But she comes slowly to recognize that

there is a justification for an indirect attack, that sex and the

position of women do not constitute the primary problem in that

bristling system of riddles that lies like a hostile army across the

path of mankind. And she realized too that through art, through science

and literature and the whole enquiring and creative side of man's

nature, lies the path by which those positions are to be outflanked, and

those eternal-looking impossibles and inconceivables overcome. Here is a

fragment--saturated with the essence of her thought. Three-quarters of

her earlier letters are variations on this theme....

"What you call 'social order,' Stephen, all the arrangements seem to me

to be _built_ on subjection to sex even more than they are built (as you

say) on labor subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is

an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women.

Just as much. 'Wild hopes' indeed! The workers' hopes are nothing to the

women's! It is not only the workers who are saying let us go free,

manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from

this intolerable burthen of constant toil, but the women also are saying

let us go free. They are demanding release just as much from their

intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads

who won't work, the swindler and the exploiter who contrive not to work,

the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and

sixpences as you say but because their way of living is no longer

tolerable to them, and we women, who don't bear children or work or

help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General

Strike. I have been a striker all my life. We are doing nothing--by the

hundred thousand. Your old social machine is working without us and in

spite of us, it carries us along with it and we are sand in the

bearings. I'm not a wheel, Stephen, I'm grit. What you say about the

reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the complaints of

labor and crush out its struggles to be free, is exactly true about the

reactionaries and suppressionists who would stifle the discussion of the

woman's position and crush out her hopes of emancipation...."

And here is a page of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of

her as the quick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic

touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at

last to the tragedy of her death....

"Have you ever thought, Stephen, that perhaps these (repressionist)

people are righter than you are--that if the worker gets free he _won't_

work and that if the woman gets free she won't furl her sex and stop

disturbing things? Suppose she _is_ wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_

trade on her power of exciting imaginative men. A lot of these new

women run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, beguile some poor

innocent of a man to ruin them and then call in fathers, brother,

husbands, friends, chivalry, all the rest of it, and make the best of

both sides of a sex. Suppose we go on behaving like that. After we've

got all our emancipations. Suppose that the liberation of common people

simply means loafing, no discipline, nothing being done, an end to labor

and the beginning of nothing to replace it, and that the liberation of

women simply means the elaboration of mischief. Suppose that it is so.

Suppose you are just tumbling the contents of the grate into the middle

of the room. Then all this emancipation _is_ a decay, even as

conservative-minded people say,--it's none the less a decay because we

want it,--and the only thing to stop it is to stop it, and to have more

discipline and more suppression and say to women and the common people:

'Back to the Sterner Virtues; Back to Servitude!' I wish I hadn't these

reactionary streaks in my thoughts, but I have and there you are...."

And then towards the second year her letters began to break away from

her preoccupation with her position as a woman and to take up new

aspects of life, more general aspects of life altogether. It had an

effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of

a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other

considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and taking that for

granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. She remembered that

she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances,

was "utter nonsense." She went back to that. "One says things like

that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. I grumble

at my life, I seem to be always weakly and fruitlessly fighting my life,

and I love it. I would not be willingly dead--for anything. I'd rather

be an old match-woman selling matches on a freezing night in the streets

than be dead. Nothing nonsensical ever held me so tightly or kept me so

interested. I suppose really I am full of that very same formless faith

on which you rely. But with me it's not only shapeless but

intangible.... I nibble at religion. I am immensely attracted. I stand

in the doorway. Only when they come out to persuade me to come in I am

like a shy child and I go away. The temples beguile me and the music,

but not the men. I feel I want to join _it_ and they say 'join _us_.'

They are--like vergers. Such small things! Such dreadful little

_arguing_ men! They don't let you come in, they want you to say they are

right. All the really religious people seem to be outside nowadays and

all the pretending, cheating, atheistical, vain and limited people

within....

"But the beautiful things religion gives! The beauty! Do you know Saint

Paul's, Stephen? Latterly I have been there time after time. It is the

most beautiful interior in all the world, so great, so sombrely

dignified, so perfectly balanced--and filled with such wonderful music,

brimming with music just as crystal water brims in a bowl of crystal.

The other day I went there, up into a little gallery high up under the

dome, to hear Bach's Passion Music, the St. Matthew Passion. One hangs

high and far above the little multitudes below, the white-robed singers,

the white-robed musicians, ranks and ranks, the great organ, the rows

and rows and rows of congregation, receding this way, that way, into the

haze of the aisle and the transepts, and out of it all streams the

sound and the singing, it pours up past you like a river, a river that

rushes upward to some great sea, some unknown sea. The whole place is

music and singing.... I hang on to the railings, Stephen, and weep--I

have to weep--and I wonder and wonder....

"One prays then as naturally as one drinks when one is thirsty and cold

water comes to hand. I don't know whom I pray to, but I pray;--of course

I pray. Latterly, Stephen, I have been reading devotional works and

trying to catch that music again. I never do--definitely. Never. But at

times I put down the book and it seems to me that surely a moment ago I

heard it, that if I sit very still in a moment I shall hear it again.

And I can feel it is there, I know it is there, like a bat's cry,

pitched too high for my ears. I know it is there, just as I should still

know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no

roof to his mouth and no knowledge of any but the commonest words tried

to read Shelley to me....

"I wish I could pray with you, Stephen; I wish I could kneel down

somewhere with you of all people and pray."

§ 6

Presently our correspondence fell away. The gaps between our letters

lengthened out. We never wrote regularly because for that there must be

a free exchange upon daily happenings, and neither of us cared to dwell

too closely on our immediate lives. We had a regard for one another that

left our backgrounds vague and shadowy. She had made her appeal across

the sundering silences to me and I had answered, and we had poured out

certain things from our minds. We could not go on discussing. I was a

very busy man now, and she did not write except on my replies.

For a gap of nearly four months neither of us had anything to say in a

letter at all. I think that in time our correspondence might have

altogether died away. Then she wrote again in a more familiar strain to

tell me of certain definite changes of relationship and outlook. She

said that the estrangement between herself and Justin had increased

during the past year; that they were going to live practically apart;

she for the most part in the Surrey house where her two children lived

with their governesses and maids. But also she meant to snatch weeks and

seasons for travel. Upon that they had been disputing for some time. "I

know it is well with the children," she wrote; "why should I be in

perpetual attendance? I do nothing for them except an occasional kiss,

or half-an-hour's romping. Why should one pretend? Justin and I have

wrangled over this question of going away, for weeks, but at last

feminine persistence has won. I am going to travel in my own fashion and

see the world. With periodic appearances at his side in London and

Scotland. We have agreed at least on one thing, and that is upon a

companion; she is to be my secretary in title, my moral guarantor in

fact, and her name which is her crowning glory is Stella Summersley

Satchel. She is blonde, erect, huffy-mannered and thoroughly up to both

sides of her work. I partly envy her independence and rectitude--partly

only. It's odd and quite inconsistent of me that I don't envy her

altogether. In theory I insist that a woman should not have charm,--it

is our undoing. But when I meet one without it----!

"I shall also trail a maid, but I guess that young woman will learn what

it is to be left behind in half the cities of Europe before I have done

with her. I always lose my maids. They are so much more passive and

forgettable than luggage--abroad that is. And Justin usually in the old

days used to remember about them. And his valet used to see after

them,--a most attentive man. Justin cannot, he says, have his wife

abroad with merely a companion; people would talk; maid it must be as

well. And so in a week or less I shall start, unusually tailor-made, for

South Germany and all that jolly country, companioned and maided. I

shall tramp--on the feet God has given me--in stout boots. Miss

Summersley Satchel marches, I understand, like the British infantry but

on a vegetarian 'basis,'--fancy calling your nourishment a 'basis'!--the

maid and so forth by _Èilgut_...."

§ 7

After the letter containing that announcement she wrote to me twice

again, once from Oban and then after a long interval from Siena. The

former was a scornfully minute description of the English at their

holidays and how the conversation went among the women after dinner.

"They are like a row of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and

swinging about in a wind," she wrote--an extravagant image that yet

conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of a sort

of social intercourse very vividly. In the second letter she was

concerned chiefly with the natural beauty of Italy and how latterly she

had thrice wept at beautiful things, and what this mystery of beauty

could be that had such power over her emotions.

"All up the hillside before the window as I write the herbage is thick

with anemones. They aren't scattered evenly and anyhow amongst the other

things but in little clusters and groups that die away and begin again,

like the repetitions of an air in some musical composition. I have been

sitting and looking at them for the better part of an hour, loving them

more and then more, and the sweet sunlight that is on them and in among

them.... How marvellous are these things, Stephen! All these little

exquisite things that are so abundant in the world, the gleaming lights

and blossoms, the drifting scents! At times these things bring me to

weeping.... I can't help it. It is as if God who is so stern and high,

so terrible to all our appeals, took pity for a moment and saw fit to

speak very softly and tenderly...."

That was the last letter I was ever to have from her.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

THE LAST MEETING

§ 1

In the summer of 1911 immediately after the coronation of King George

there came one of those storms of international suspicion that ever and

again threaten Europe with war. It seems to have been brewed by some

German adepts at Welt-Politik, those privileged makers of giant bombs

who sit at the ears of foreign ministers suggesting idiotic wickedness,

and it was brewed with a sublime ignorance of nearly every reality in

the case. A German warship without a word of notice seized Agadir on the

Atlantic coast of Morocco, within the regions reserved to French

influence; an English demand for explanations was uncivilly disregarded

and England and France and presently Germany began vigorous preparations

for war. All over the world it was supposed that Germany had at last

flung down the gauntlet. In England the war party was only too eager to

grasp what it considered to be a magnificent opportunity. Heaven knows

what the Germans had hoped or intended by their remarkable coup; the

amazing thing to note is that they were not prepared to fight, they had

not even the necessary money ready and they could not get it; they had

perhaps never intended to fight, and the autumn saw the danger disperse

again into diplomatic bickerings and insincerely pacific professions.

But in the high summer the danger had not dispersed, and in common with

every reasonable man I found myself under the shadow of an impending

catastrophe that would have been none the less gigantic and tragic

because it was an imbecility. It was an occasion when everyone needs

must act, however trivially disproportionate his action may be to the

danger. I cabled Gidding who was in America to get together whatever

influences were available there upon the side of pacific intervention,

and I set such British organs as I could control or approach in the same

direction. It seemed probable that Italy would be drawn into any

conflict that might ensue; it happened that there was to be a Conference

of Peace Societies in Milan early in September, and thither I decided to

go in the not very certain hope that out of that assemblage some form of

European protest might be evolved.

That August I was very much run down. I had been staying in London

through almost intolerably hot weather to attend a Races Congress that

had greatly disappointed me. I don't know particularly now why I had

been disappointed nor how far the feeling was due to my being generally

run down by the pressure of detailed work and the stress of thinking

about large subjects in little scraps of time. But I know that a kind of

despair came over me as I sat and looked at that multicolored assembly

and heard in succession the heavy platitudes of white men, the slick,

thin cleverness of Hindoos, the rich-toned florid rhetoric of negroes. I

lost sight of any germ of splendid possibility in all those people, and

saw all too plainly the vanity, the jealousy, the self-interests that

show up so harshly against the professions of every altruistic movement.

It seemed all such a windy business against the firm prejudices, the

vast accumulated interests that grind race against race. We had no

common purpose at all at that conference, no proposal to hold us

together. So much of it was like bleating on a hillside....

I wanted a holiday badly, and then came this war crisis and I felt

unable to go away for any length of time. Even bleating it seemed to me

was better than acquiescence in a crime against humanity. So to get

heart to bleat at Milan I snatched at ten days in the Swiss mountains en

route. A tour with some taciturn guide involving a few middling climbs

and glacier excursions seemed the best way of recuperating. I had never

had any time for Switzerland since my first exile there years ago. I

took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget--if ever I

knew it, a dark man with a scar--and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above

Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up

into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed

and extraordinarily delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those

interminable uplands of ice. I wished I could have lingered up there.

But that is the tragedy of those sunlit desolations; one may not stay;

one sees and exclaims and then looks at a watch. I wonder no one has

ever taken an arctic equipment up into that wilderness, and had a good

healing spell of lonely exaltation. I found the descent from the

Strahlegg as much of a climb as I was disposed to undertake; for an hour

we were coming down frozen snow that wasn't so much a slope as a

slightly inclined precipice....

From the Grimsel I went over the Rhone glacier to the inn on the Furka

Pass, and then, paying off my guide and becoming frankly a pedestrian, I

made my way round by the Schöllenen gorge to Goeschenen, and over the

Susten Joch to the Susten Pass and Stein, meaning to descend to

Meiringen.

But I still had four days before I went on to Italy, and so I decided to

take one more mountain. I slept at the Stein inn, and started in the

morning to do that agreeable first mountain of all, the Titlis, whose

shining genial head attracted me. I did not think a guide necessary, but

a boy took me up by a track near Gadmen, and left me to my Siegfried map

some way up the great ridge of rocks that overlooks the Engstlen Alp. I

a little overestimated my mountaineering, and it came about that I was

benighted while I was still high above the Joch Pass on my descent. Some

of this was steep and needed caution. I had to come down slowly with my

folding lantern, in which a reluctant candle went out at regular

intervals, and I did not reach the little inn at Engstlen Alp until long

after eleven at night. By that time I was very tired and hungry.

They told me I was lucky to get a room, only one stood vacant; I should

certainly not have enjoyed sleeping on a billiard table after my day's

work, and I ate a hearty supper, smoked for a time, meditated emptily,

and went wearily to bed.

But I could not sleep. Usually, I am a good sleeper, but ever and again

when I have been working too closely or over-exerting myself I have

spells of wakefulness, and that night after perhaps an hour's heavy

slumber I became thinly alert and very weary in body and spirit, and I

do not think I slept again. The pain in my leg that the panther had torn

had been revived by the day's exertion. For the greater part of my life

insomnia has not been disagreeable to me. In the night, in the

stillness, one has a kind of detachment from reality, one floats there

without light, without weight, feeling very little of one's body. One

has a certain disembodiment and one can achieve a magnanimity of

thought, forgiveness and self-forgetfulness that are impossible while

the body clamors upon one's senses. But that night, because, I suppose,

I was so profoundly fatigued, I was melancholy and despondent. I could

feel again the weight of the great beast upon me as he clawed me down

and I clung--desperately, in that interminable instant before he lost

his hold....

Yes, I was extraordinarily wretched that night. I was filled with

self-contempt and self-disgust. I felt that I was utterly weak and vain,

and all the pretensions and effort of my life mere florid, fruitless

pretensions and nothing more. I had lost all control over my mind.

Things that had seemed secondary before became primary, difficult things

became impossible things. I had been greatly impeded and irritated in

London by the manoeuvres of a number of people who were anxious to make

capital out of the crisis, self-advertising people who wanted at any

cost to be lifted into a position of unique protest.... You see, that

unfortunate Nobel prize has turned the advocacy of peace into a highly

speculative profession; the qualification for the winner is so vaguely

defined that a vast multitude of voluntary idealists has been created

and a still greater number diverted from the unendowed pursuit of human

welfare in other directions. Such a man as myself who is known to

command a considerable publicity is necessarily a prey to those moral

_entrepreneurs_. All sorts of ridiculous and petty incidents had forced

this side of public effort upon me, but hitherto I had been able to say,

with a laugh or sigh as the case warranted, "So much is dear old

humanity and all of us"; and to remember the great residuum of nobility

that remained. Now that last saving consideration refused to be

credible. I lay with my body and my mind in pain thinking these people

over, thinking myself over too with the rest of my associates, thinking

drearily and weakly, recalling spites, dishonesties and vanities, feuds

and absurdities, until I was near persuaded that all my dreams of wider

human understandings, of great ends beyond the immediate aims and

passions of common everyday lives, could be at best no more than the

refuge of shy and weak and ineffective people from the failure of their

personal lives....

We idealists are not jolly people, not honest simple people; the strain

tells upon us; even to ourselves we are unappetizing. Aren't the burly,

bellowing fellows after all righter, with their simple natural hostility

to everything foreign, their valiant hatred of everything unlike

themselves, their contempt for aspiring weakness, their beer and lush

sentiment, their here-to-day-and-gone-tomorrow conviviality and

fellowship? Good fellows! While we others, lost in filmy speculations,

in moon-and-star snaring and the chase of dreams, stumble where even

they walk upright....

You know I have never quite believed in myself, never quite believed in

my work or my religion. So it has always been with me and always, I

suppose, will be. I know I am purblind, I know I do not see my way

clearly nor very far; I have to do with things imperfectly apprehended.

I cannot cheat my mind away from these convictions. I have a sort of

hesitation of the soul as other men have a limp in their gait. God, I

suppose, has a need for lame men. God, I suppose, has a need for blind

men and fearful and doubting men, and does not intend life to be

altogether swallowed up in staring sight. Some things are to be reached

best by a hearing that is not distracted by any clearer senses. But so

it is with me, and this is the innermost secret I have to tell you.

I go valiantly for the most part I know, but despair is always near to

me. In the common hours of my life it is as near as a shark may be near

a sleeper in a ship; the thin effectual plank of my deliberate faith

keeps me secure, but in these rare distresses of the darkness the plank

seems to become transparent, to be on the verge of dissolution, a sense

of life as of an abyssmal flood, full of cruelty, densely futile,

blackly aimless, penetrates my defences....

I don't think I can call these stumblings from conviction unbelief; the

limping man walks for all his limping, and I go on in spite of my falls.

"Though he slay me yet will I trust in him...."

I fell into an inconsecutive review of my life under this light that

touched every endeavor with the pale tints of failure. And as that flow

of melancholy reflection went on, it was shot more and more frequently

with thoughts of Mary. It was not a discursive thinking about Mary but a

definite fixed direction of thought towards her. I had not so thought of

her for many years. I wanted her, I felt, to come to me and help me out

of this distressful pit into which my spirit had fallen. I believed she

could. I perceived our separation as an irreparable loss. She had a

harder, clearer quality than I, a more assured courage, a readier, surer

movement of the mind. Always she had "lift" for me. And then I had a

curious impression that I had heard her voice calling my name, as one

might call out in one's sleep. I dismissed it as an illusion, and then I

heard it again. So clearly that I sat up and listened--breathless....

Mixed up with all this was the intolerable uproar and talking of a

little cascade not fifty yards from the hotel. It is curious how

distressing that clamor of running water, which is so characteristic of

the Alpine night, can become. At last those sounds can take the likeness

of any voice whatever. The water, I decided, had called to me, and now

it mocked and laughed at me....

The next morning I descended at some late hour by Swiss reckoning, and

discovered two ladies in the morning sunlight awaiting breakfast at a

little green table. One rose slowly at the sight of me, and stood and

surveyed me with a glad amazement.

§ 2

There she stood real and solid, a little unfamiliar in her tweeds and

with her shining eyes intimate and unforgettable, as though I had never

ceased to see them for all those intervening years. And bracing us both

and holding back our emotion was, quite unmistakably, Miss Summersley

Satchel, a blonde business-like young woman with a stumpy nose very

cruelly corrugated and inflamed by a pince-nez that savagely did much

more than its duty by its name. She remained seated, tilting her chair

a little, pushing herself back from the table and regarding

me--intelligently.

It was one of those moments in life when one is taken unawares. I think

our common realization of the need of masking the reality of our

encounter, the hasty search in our minds for some plausible face upon

this meeting, must have been very obvious to the lady who observed us.

Mary's first thought was for a pseudonym. Mine was to make it plain we

met by accident.

"It's Mr.--Stephen!" said Mary.

"It's you!"

"Dropped out of the sky!"

"From over there. I was benighted and go there late."

"Very late?"

"One gleam of light--and a yawning waiter. Or I should have had to break

windows.... And then I meet you!"

Then for a moment or so we were silent, with our sense of the immense

gravity of this position growing upon us. A little tow-headed waiter-boy

appeared with their coffee and rolls on a tray poised high on his hand.

"You'll have your coffee out here with us?" said Mary.

"Where else?" said I, as though there was no conceivable alternative,

and told the tow-headed waiter.

Belatedly Mary turned to introduce me to her secretary: "My friend Miss

Summersley Satchel. Mr.--Stephen." Miss Satchel and I bowed to each

other and agreed that the lake was very beautiful in the morning light.

"Mr. Stephen," said Mary, in entirely unnecessary explanation, "is an

old friend of my mother's. And I haven't seen him for years. How is

Mrs. Stephen--and the children?"

I answered briefly and began to tell of my climb down the Titlis. I

addressed myself with unnecessary explicitness to Miss Satchel. I did

perhaps over-accentuate the extreme fortuitousness of my appearance....

From where I stood, the whole course of the previous day after I had

come over the shoulder was visible. It seemed a soft little shining

pathway to the top, but the dangers of the descent had a romantic

intensification in the morning light. "The rule of the game," said I,

"is that one stops and waits for daylight. I wonder if anyone keeps that

rule."

We talked for a time of mountains, I still standing a little aloof until

my coffee came. Miss Summersley Satchel produced that frequent and most

unpleasant bye-product of a British education, an intelligent interest

in etymology. "I wonder," she said, with a brow of ruffled omniscience

and eyeing me rather severely with a magnified eye, "why it is _called_

Titlis. There must be _some_ reason...."

Presently Miss Satchel was dismissed indoors on a transparent excuse and

Mary and I were alone together. We eyed one another gravely. Perhaps all

the more gravely because of the wild excitement that was quickening our

pulse and breathing, and thrilling through our nerves. She pushed back

the plate before her and put her dear elbows on the table and dropped

her chin between her hands in an attitude that seemed all made of little

memories.

"I suppose," she said, "something of this kind was bound to happen."

She turned her eyes to the mountains shining in the morning light. "I'm

glad it has happened in a beautiful place. It might have

been--anywhere."

"Last night," I said, "I was thinking of you and wanting to hear your

voice again. I thought I did."

"I too. I wonder--if we had some dim perception...."

She scanned my face. "Stephen, you're not much changed. You're looking

well.... But your eyes--they're dog-tired eyes. Have you been working

too hard?"

"A conference--what did you call them once?--a Carnegieish conference in

London. Hot weather and fussing work and endless hours of weak grey

dusty speeches, and perhaps that clamber over there yesterday was too

much. It _was_ too much. In India I damaged a leg.... I had meant to

rest here for a day."

"Well,--rest here."

"With you!"

"Why not? Now you are here."

"But---- After all, we've promised."

"It's none of our planning, Stephen."

"It seems to me I ought to go right on--so soon as breakfast is over."

She weighed that with just the same still pause, the same quiet moment

of lips and eyes that I recalled so well. It was as things had always

been between us that she should make her decision first and bring me to

it.

"It isn't natural," she decided, "with the sun rising and the day still

freshly beginning that you should go or that I should go. I've wanted to

meet you like this and talk about things,--ten thousand times. And as

for me Stephen I _won't_ go. And I won't let you go if I can help it.

Not this morning, anyhow. No. Go later in the day if you will, and let

us two take this one talk that God Himself has given us. We've not

planned it. It's His doing, not ours."

I sat, yielding. "I am not so sure of God's participation," I said. "But

I know I am very tired, and glad to be with you. I can't tell you how

glad. So glad---- I think I should weep if I tried to say it...."

"Three, four, five hours perhaps--even if people know. Is it so much

worse than thirty minutes? We've broken the rules already; we've been

flung together; it's not our doing, Stephen. A little while longer--adds

so little to the offence and means to us----"

"Yes," I said, "but--if Justin knows?"

"He won't."

"Your companion?"

There was the briefest moment of reflection. "She's discretion itself,"

she said.

"Still----"

"If he's going to know the harm is done. We may as well be hung for a

sheep as a lamb. And he won't know. No one will know."

"The people here."

"Nobody's here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name....

No one ever talks to me."

I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced,

but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....

"You take the good things God sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and

talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We've tired of

letters. You stay and talk to me.

"Here we are, Stephen, and it's the one chance that is ever likely to

come to us in all our lives. We'll keep the point of honor; and you

shall go to-day. But don't let's drive the point of honor into the

quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has

happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you

to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and

this sunlight!..."

I looked up to see her with her elbows on the table and her hands

clasped under her chin; that face close to mine, her dear blue eyes

watching me and her lips a little apart.

No other human being has ever had that effect upon me, so that I seem to

feel the life and stir in that other body more than I feel my own.

§ 3

From the moment when I confessed my decision to stay we gave no further

thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours

together. We thought only of those hours. Things lent themselves to us.

We stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a

stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel

on the Engstlen See. We would take food with us as we decided and row

out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of

earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. And I remember

now how Mary stood and called to Miss Satchel's window to tell her of

this intention, and how I discovered again that exquisite slender grace

I knew so well.

You know the very rowing out from the shore had in it something sweet

and incredible. It was as if we were but dreaming together and might at

any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. I

rowed slowly with those clumsy Swiss oars that one must thrust forward,

breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking

forward, saying very little and with much the same sense I think of

enchantment and unreality. And I saw now for the first time as I watched

her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, I

thought, stronger than the Mary I had known.

Even now I can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. And yet I

remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day's impressions

with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. Perhaps it is that very

luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common

experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that

are ordinarily real.

We rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end

of the water. We had not realized at first that we could row beyond the

range of the hotel windows. The rock that comes out of the lake is a

clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is

wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen

to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. It splinters

vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a

quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become

more rude and massive and begin to overhang. Under the cliffs the water

is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts.

This place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of

the ice, all the rocks immediately about us were ice-worn, and the place

was paved with ice-worn boulders. Two huge bluffs put their foreheads

together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the

near presence of ice in the air. Out between them boiled a little

torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst

the great pebbles. And those pebbles were covered by a network of

marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and

blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a

peculiar gentleness and richness to the Alpine severity that had dwarfed

and tangled them. It was astounding that any plant could find

nourishment among those stones. The great headland, with patches of

yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper masses,

had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it

altogether. There was nothing to remind us of the world that had

separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the

stones at the limpid water's edge.

"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a

voice to my thought.

She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away,

and we looked at one another. "It's still unreal," she said.

I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused

to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.

"You are so _you_," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing--and so

strange too, so far off, that I feel--shy....

"I'm shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will

vanish...."

I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the

whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"

"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is!

Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The

little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save

us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to

ordinary sensible affairs.... This _beauty_....

"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked

about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of

what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy

and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to

know that it is so, that this life--no, not _this_ life, but that life,

is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I think death--just dead

death--after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You

don't want--particularly? I want to passionately. I _want_ to live

again--out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be

free--as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free--an

exquisite clean freedom....

"I can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for

us--or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the

ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do--because they

aren't--_us_.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what

were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such

things. And all the mad fury of sex, Stephen!... We don't live, we

suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and snatch; it isn't

_us_, Stephen, really. It can't be us. It's all so excessive--if it is

anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that

will go on--go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this

perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and

love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It's so incredible that

you and I must part to-day. It's as if--someone told me the sun was a

little mad. It's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."

Her voice sank. She leant a little forward towards me. "Stephen, suppose

that you and I were dead to-day. Suppose that when you imagined you were

climbing yesterday, you died. Suppose that yesterday you died and that

you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me.

Perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and I am lying dead in my

room in this hotel, and this is the Great Beginning....

"Stephen, I am talking nonsense because I am so happy to be with you

here...."

§ 4

For a time we said very little. Then irregularly, disconnectedly, we

began to tell each other things about ourselves.

The substance of our lives seemed strangely objective that day; we had

as it were come to one another clean out of our common conditions. She

told me of her troubles and her secret weaknesses; we bared our spirits

and confessed. Both of us had the same tale of mean and angry and hasty

impulses, both of us could find kindred inconsistencies, both had an

exalted assurance that the other would understand completely and forgive

and love. She talked for the most part, she talked much more than I,

with a sort of wonder at the things that had happened to her, and for

long spaces we did not talk at all nor feel the need of talking, and

what seems very strange to me now, seeing that we had been impassioned

lovers, we never kissed; we never kissed at all; I do not even remember

that I thought of kissing her. We had a shyness between us that kept us

a little apart, and I cannot remember that we ever touched one another

except that for a time she took me and led me by the hand towards a

little place of starry flowers that had drawn her eyes and which she

wished me to see. Already for us two our bodies were dead and gone. We

were shy, shy of any contact, we were a little afraid of one another,

there was a kind of awe between us that we had met again.

And in that strange and beautiful place her fancy that we were dead

together had a fitness that I cannot possibly convey to you. I cannot

give you by any writing the light and the sweet freshness of that high

desolation. You would need to go there. What was lovely in our talk,

being said in that setting, would seem but a rambling discourse were I

to write it down,--as I believe that even now I could write it

down--word for word almost, every thought of it, so fresh does it remain

with me....

My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to

tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two

years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together

there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were

little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....

§ 5

It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the

meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed

slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....

Little we knew to what it was we rowed.

As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly

into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a

little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a

little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it's

done."

"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It's just as if--when I

was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and

despaired altogether,--some power had said, 'Have you forgotten the

friendship I gave you?' ... But we shall have had our time. We've

met,--we've seen one another, we've heard one another. We've hurt no

one...."

"You will go?"

"To-day. Before sunset. Isn't it right that I should go?"

"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.

"No. I dare not."

She did not speak for a long time.

"Of course," she said at last, "you're right. You only said--I would

have said it for you if you had not. You're so right, Stephen.... I

suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should

certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We

should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to

stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn't what we want.

You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In

spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we

hadn't made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could

_make_ you stay....

"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet,

and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love

will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born,

got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....

"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind,

that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan't be tormented by

the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so

sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I've never done

her justice--never. Nor she me. I snatched you from her. I snatched

you....

"Someday we shall be different.... All this putting oneself round

another person like a fence, against everyone else, almost against

everything else; it's so wicked, so fierce.

"It's so possible to be different. Sometimes now, sometimes for long

parts of a day I have no base passions at all--even in this life. To be

like that always! But I can't see clearly how these things can be; one

dreams of them in a kind of luminous mist, and if one looks directly at

them, they vanish again...."

§ 6

And at last we came to the landing, and moored the little boat and

walked up the winding path to the hotel. The dull pain of separation was

already upon us.

I think we had forgotten Miss Summersley Satchel altogether. But she

appeared as we sat down to tea at that same table at which we had

breakfasted, and joined us as a matter of course. Conceivably she found

the two animated friends of the morning had become rather taciturn.

Indeed there came a lapse of silence so portentous that I roused myself

to effort and told her, all over again, as I realized afterwards, the

difficulties that had benighted me upon Titlis. Then Miss Satchel

regaled Mary with some particulars of the various comings and goings of

the hotel. I became anxious to end this tension and went into the inn to

pay my bill and get my knapsack. When I came out Mary stood up.

"I'll come just a little way with you, Stephen," she said, and I could

have fancied the glasses of the companion flashed to hear the surname of

the morning reappear a Christian name in the afternoon....

"Is that woman behind us safe?" I asked, breaking the silence as we went

up the mountain-side.

Mary looked over her shoulder for a contemplative second.

"She's always been--discretion itself."

We thought no more of Miss Satchel.

"This parting," said Mary, "is the worst of the price we have to

pay.... Now it comes to the end there seem a thousand things one hasn't

said...."

And presently she came back to that. "We shan't remember this so much

perhaps. It was there we met, over there in the sunlight--among those

rocks. I suppose--perhaps--we managed to say something...."

As the ascent grew steeper it became clear that if I was to reach the

Melch See Inn by nightfall, our moment for parting had come. And with a

"Well," and a white-lipped smile and a glance at the Argus-eyed hotel,

she held out her hand to me. "I shall live on this, brother Stephen,"

she said, "for years."

"I too," I answered....

It was wonderful to stand and face her there, and see her real and

living with the warm sunlight on her, and her face one glowing

tenderness. We clasped hands; all the warm life of our hands met and

clung and parted.

I went on alone up the winding path,--it zigzags up the mountain-side in

full sight of the hotel for the better part of an hour--climbing

steadily higher and looking back and looking back until she was just a

little strip of white--that halted and seemed to wave to me. I waved

back and found myself weeping. "You fool!" I said to myself, "Go on";

and it was by an effort that I kept on my way instead of running back to

her again. Presently the curvature of the slope came up between us and

hid her altogether, hid the hotel, hid the lakes and the cliffs....

It seemed to me that I could not possibly see her any more. It was as if

I knew that sun had set for ever.

§ 7

I lay at the Melch See Inn that night, and rose betimes and started down

that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. I walked to Sachseln,

caught an early train to Lucerne and went on in the afternoon to Como.

And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up

the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the

accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not

thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the

finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when

the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by

the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was

alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. It seemed to me that

at any moment I could go to her. And the last vestige of any cloud

between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of

distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.

In the afternoon I wrote to Rachel. I had not written to her for three

days, and even now I told her nothing of my meeting with Mary. I had not

written partly because I could not decide whether I should tell her of

that or not; in the end I tried to hide it from her. It seemed a little

thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as

detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.

Three days later I reached Milan, a day before the formal opening of the

Peace Congress. But I found a telegram had come that morning to the

Poste Restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my

mind. It came from Paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:

_"Come back at once to London. Justin has been told of our meeting

and is resolved upon divorce. Will do all in my power to explain

and avert but feel you should know at once."_

There are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear

that for a time it is impossible to believe them. I remember now that as

I read that amazing communication through--at the first reading it was a

little difficult to understand because the Italian operator had guessed

at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me.

That followed sluggishly. I felt as one might feel when one opens some

offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.

"What _nonsense_!" I said, faint-heartedly. I stood for a time at my

bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. But it

stayed, and became more and more real. Suddenly with a start I perceived

it was real. I had to do things forthwith.

I rang the bell and asked for an _Orario_. "I shan't want these rooms. I

have to go back to England," I said. "Yes,--I have had bad news." ...

§ 8

"We've only got to explain," I told myself a hundred times during that

long sleepless journey. The thundering wheels so close beneath my head

echoed: "Explain. Oh yes! Explain! Explain! Explain!"

And something, a voice to which I would not listen, urged: "Suppose

they do not choose to believe what you explain."

When I sat face to face with Maxwell Hartington, my solicitor, in his

ink-splashed, dirty, yellow-grained room with its rows of black tin

boxes, I could no longer ignore that possibility. Maxwell Hartington sat

back in his chair after his fashion, listening to my story, breathing

noisily through his open mouth, perspiring little beads and looking more

out of condition than ever. I never knew a man so wine-sodden and so

sharp-witted.

"That's all very well, Stratton," he said, "between ourselves. Very

unfortunate and all that sort of thing. But it doesn't satisfy Justin

evidently; and we've got to put a different look on it if we can, before

we go before a jury: You see----" He seemed to be considering and

rejecting unpalatable phrases "They won't understand."

"But," I said, "after all--, a mere chance of the same hotel. There must

be more evidence than that."

"You spent the night in adjacent rooms," he said dryly.

"Adjacent rooms!" I cried.

He regarded me for a moment with something bordering on admiration.

"Didn't you know?" he said.

"No."

"They've routed that out. You were sleeping with your two heads within a

yard of one another anyhow. Thirty-six you had, and she had

thirty-seven."

"But," I said and stopped.

Maxwell Hartington's admiration gave place I think to a slight

resentment at my sustained innocence. "And Lady Mary changed rooms with

her secretary two nights before--to be near the vacant room. The

secretary went into number 12 on the floor below,--a larger room, at

thirteen francs a day, and one not exposed to the early daylight...."

He turned over a paper on his desk. "You didn't know, of course," he

said. "But what I want to have"--and his voice grew wrathful--"is sure

evidence that you didn't know. No jury on earth is going to believe you

didn't know. No jury!---- Why,"--his mask dropped--"no man on earth is

going to believe a yarn like that! If that's all you have, Stratton----"

§ 9

Our London house was not shut up--two servants were there on board-wages

against the possibility of such a temporary return as I was now

making--Rachel was away with you three children at Cromingham. I had not

told her I was returning to London, and I had put up at one of my clubs.

Until I had had a second interview with Maxwell Hartington I still would

not let myself think that it was possible that Mary and I would fail

with our explanations. We had the common confidence of habitually

unchallenged people that our word would be accepted. I had hoped indeed

to get the whole affair settled and abolished without anything of it

coming to Rachel's ears. Then at my leisure I should be able to tell her

exactly how things had come about. But each day made it clearer that

things were not going to be settled, that the monstrous and the

incredible was going to happen and that Justin had set his mind

implacably upon a divorce. My sense of complete innocence had already

been shaken by Maxwell Hartington; I had come to perceive that we had

been amazingly indiscreet, I was beginning to think we had been

criminally indiscreet.

I saw Maxwell Hartington for a second time, and it became clear to me I

must abandon any hope of keeping things further from Rachel. I took my

luggage round to my house, to the great astonishment of the two

servants,--they had supposed of course that I was in Italy--and then

went down on the heels of a telegram to Rachel. I forget the wording of

that telegram, but it was as little alarming as possible; I think I said

something about "back in London for documents; shall try to get down to

you." I did not specify any particular train or indeed state definitely

that I was coming that day.

I had never been to Cromingham before. I went to the house you occupied

on the Esplanade and learnt that you were all upon the beach. I walked

along the sea-wall scrutinizing the various bright groups of children

and nursemaids and holiday people that were scattered over the sands. It

was a day of blazing sunshine, and, between the bright sky and the

silver drabs of the sand stretched the low levels of a sea that had its

customary green-grey touched for once with something of the sapphire

glow of the Mediterranean. Here and there were gay little umbrella tents

or canvas shelters, and a bather or so and pink and white wading

children broke the dazzling edge of foam. And I sought you with a kind

of reluctance as though finding you would bring nearer the black

irrational disaster that hung over us all.

And when I found you at last you were all radiantly happy and healthy,

the prettiest of families, and only your mother was touched with any

gravity deeper than the joy of sunshine and sea. You and Mademoiselle

Potin--in those days her ministrations were just beginning--were busy

constructing a great sea-wall that should really and truly stop the

advancing tide. Rachel Two was a little apart, making with infinite

contentment an endless multitude of conical sand pies with her little

tin pail. Margaret, a pink inarticulate lump, scrabbled in the warm sand

under Jessica's care. Your mother sat and watched you--thoughtfully. And

before any of you knew that I was there my shadow fell across you all.

You accepted my appearance when I ought to have been in Italy with the

unquestioning confidence with which you still take all my comings and

goings. For you, Italy, America, any place is just round the corner. I

was kissed with affection but haste, and you got back to your sand-works

as speedily as possible. I inspected Rachel Two's mounds,--she was

giving them the names of her various aunts and uncles--and patted the

crowing Margaret, who ignored me. Rachel had sprung to her feet and

kissed me and now hovered radiant over me as I caressed you youngsters.

It was all so warm, so real, that for an instant the dark threat that

hung over us all vanished from my skies, to return with the force of a

blow.

"And what has brought you back?" said Rachel. "I had expected a month of

widowhood. What can have brought you back?"

The dancing gladness in her eyes vanished swiftly as she waited for an

answer to her question. She caught the note of tragedy from my face.

"Why have you come back from Italy?" she asked in an altered voice.

"Rachel," I said taking her arm, with a desolating sense of the

futility in my gesture of protection; "let us walk along the beach. I

want to tell you something---- Something rather complicated."

"Is there going to be war, Stephen?" she asked abruptly.

It seemed then that this question which merely concerned the welfare of

a hundred million people or so and pain, destruction and disaster beyond

measure, was the most trivial of digressions.

"No," I said. "I haven't thought about the war."

"But I thought--you were thinking of nothing else."

"This has put it out of my head. It's something---- Something disastrous

to us."

"Something has happened to our money?"

"I wish that was all."

"Then what is it?" Her mind flashed out. "It has something to do with

Mary Justin."

"How did you know that?"

"I guessed."

"Well. It is. You see--in Switzerland we met."

"You _met_!"

"By accident. She had been staying at the hotel on Engstlen Alp."

"You slept there!" cried Rachel.

"I didn't know she was in the hotel until the next day."

"And then you came away!"

"That day."

"But you talked together?"

"Yes."

"And for some reason---- You never told me, Stephen! You never told me.

And you met. But---- Why is this, disaster?"

"Because Justin knows and he means to divorce her--and it may be he

will succeed...."

Rachel's face had become white, for some time she said nothing. Then

slowly, "And if he had not known and done that--I should never have

known."

I had no answer to make to that. It was true. Rachel's face was very

still, and her eyes stared at the situation laid bare to her.

"When you began," she choked presently, "when she wrote--I knew--I

felt----"

She ceased for fear she might weep, and for a time we walked in silence.

"I suppose," she said desperately at last, "he will get his divorce."

"I am afraid he will."

"There's no evidence--you didn't...."

"No."

"And I never dreamt----!"

Then her passion tore at her. "Stephen my dear," she wept, "you didn't?

you didn't? Stephen, indeed you didn't, did you? You kept faith with me

as a husband should. It was an accident--a real accident--and there was

no planning for you to meet together. It was as you say? I've never

doubted your word ever--I've never doubted you."

Well, at any rate I could answer that plainly, and I did.

"And you know, Stephen," she said, "I believe you. And I _can't_ believe

you. My heart is tormented. Why did you write to her? Why did you two

write and go on writing? And why did you tell me nothing of that

meeting? I believe you because I can't do anything but believe you. It

would kill me not to believe you in a thing that came so near to us. And

yet, there it is, like a knife being twisted in my heart--that you met.

Should I have known of your meeting, Stephen--ever? I know I'm talking

badly for you.... But this thing strikes me suddenly. Out of this clear

beautiful sky! And the children there--so happy in the sunshine! I was

so happy. So happy. With you coming.... It will mean shames and

law-courts and newspapers, losses of friends, losses of money and

freedom.... My mother and my people!... And you and all the work you

do!... People will never forget it, never forgive it. They will say you

promised.... If she had never written, if she had kept to her

bargain----"

"We should still have met."

"Stephen!... Stephen, you must bear with me...."

"This is a thing," I said, "that falls as you say out of the sky. It

seemed so natural--for her to write.... And the meeting ... it is like

some tremendous disaster of nature. I do not feel I have deserved it. It

is--irrational. But there it is, little Rachel of my heart, and we have

to face it. Whatever happens we have to go on. It doesn't alter the work

we have to do. If it clips our wings--we have to hop along with clipped

wings.... For you--I wish it could spare you. And she--she too is a

victim, Rachel."

"She need not have written," said Rachel. "She need not have written.

And then if you had met----"

She could not go on with that.

"It is so hard," I said, "to ask you to be just to her--and me. I wish I

could have come to you and married you--without all that legacy--of

things remembered.... I was what I was.... One can't shake off a thing

in one's blood. And besides--besides----"

I stopped helplessly.

§ 10

And then Mary came herself to tell me there would be no divorce.

She came to me unexpectedly. I had returned to town that evening, and

next morning as I was sitting down in my study to answer some

unimportant questions Maxwell Hartington had sent me, my parlormaid

appeared. "Can you speak," she asked, "to Lady Mary Justin?"

I stood up to receive my visitor.

She came in, a tall dark figure, and stood facing me in silence until

the door had closed behind her. Her face was white and drawn and very

grave. She stooped a little, I could see she had had no sleep, never

before had I seen her face marked by pain. And she hesitated.... "My

dear!" I said; "why have you come to me?"

I put a chair for her and she sat down.

For a moment she controlled herself with difficulty. She put her hand

over her eyes, she seemed on the verge of bitter weeping....

"I came," she said at last.... "I came. I had to come ... to see you."

I sat down in a chair beside her.

"It wasn't wise," I said. "But--never mind. You look so tired, my dear!"

She sat quite still for a little while.

Then she moved her arm as though she felt for me blindly, and I put my

arms about her and drew her head to my shoulder and she wept....

"I knew," she sobbed, "if I came to you...."

Presently her weeping was over.

"Get me a little cold water, Stephen," she said. "Let me have a little

cold water on my face. I've got my courage now again. Just then,--I was

down too low. Yes--cold water. Because I want to tell you--things you

will be glad to hear."

"You see, Stephen," she said--and now all her self-possession had

returned; "there mustn't be a divorce. I've thought it all out. And

there needn't be a divorce."

"Needn't be?"

"No."

"What do you mean?"

"I can stop it."

"But how?"

"I can stop it. I can manage---- I can make a bargain.... It's very

sweet, dear Stephen, to be here talking to you again."

She stood up.

"Sit at your desk, my dear," she said. "I'm all right now. That water

was good. How good cold things can be! Sit down at your desk and let me

sit here. And then I will talk to you. I've had such a time, my dear.

Ah!"

She paused and stuck her elbows on the desk and looked me in the eyes.

And suddenly that sweet, frank smile of hers swept like sunshine across

the wintry desolation of her face. "We've both been having a time," she

said. "This odd little world,--it's battered us with its fists. For such

a little. And we were both so ridiculously happy. Do you remember it,

the rocks and the sunshine and all those twisted and tangled little

plants? And how the boat leaked and you baled it out! And the parting,

and how you trudged up that winding path away from me! A grey figure

that stopped and waved--a little figure--such a virtuous figure! And

then, this storm! this _awful_ hullabaloo! Lawyers, curses, threats----.

And Stella Summersley Satchel like a Fury of denunciation. What hatred

that woman has hidden from me! It must have accumulated.... It's

terrible to think, Stephen, how much I must have tried her.... Oh! how

far away those Alps are now, Stephen! Like something in another life....

And here we are!--among the consequences."

"But,--you were saying we could stop the divorce."

"Yes. We can. I can. But I wanted to see you,--before I did. Somehow I

don't feel lonely with you. I had to see you.... It's good to see you."

She looked me in the face. Her tired eyes lit with a gleam of her former

humor.

"Have you thought," she asked, "of all that will happen if there is a

divorce?"

"I mean to fight every bit of it."

"They'll beat you."

"We'll see that."

"But they will. And then?"

"Why should one meet disaster half way?"

"Stephen!" she said; "what will happen to you when I am not here to make

you look at things? Because I shan't be here. Not within reach of

you.... There are times when I feel like a mother to you. Never more

than now...."

And then with rapid touches she began to picture the disaster before

me. She pictured the Court and our ineffectual denials, she made me

realize the storm of hostility that was bound to burst over us. "And

think of me," she said. "Stripped I shall be and outcast."

"Not while I live!"

"But what can you do for me? You will have Rachel. How can you stand by

me? You can't be cruel to Rachel. You know you can't be cruel to Rachel.

Look me in the face, Stephen; tell me. Yes.... Then how can you stand by

me?"

"Somehow!" I cried foolishly and stopped.

"They'll use me to break your back with costs and damages. There'll be

those children of yours to think of...."

"My God!" I cried aloud. "Why do you torment me? Haven't I thought

enough of those things?... Haven't I seen the ruin and the shame, the

hopeless trap, men's trust in me gone, my work scattered and ended

again, my children growing up to hear this and that exaggeration of our

story. And you----. All the bravery of your life scattered and wasted.

The thing will pursue us all, cling to us. It will be all the rest of

our lives for us...."

I covered my face with my hands.

When I looked up, her face was white and still, and full of a strange

tenderness. "I wouldn't have you, Stephen--I wouldn't have you be cruel

to Rachel.... I just wanted to know--something.... But we're wandering.

We're talking nonsense. Because as I said, there need be no divorce.

There will be no divorce at all. That's what I came to tell you. I shall

have to pay--in a way, Stephen.... Not impossibly. Don't think it is

anything impossible...."

Then she bit her lips and sat still....

"My dear," I whispered, "if we had taken one another at the

beginning...."

But she went on with her own thoughts.

"You love those little children of yours," she said. "And that trusting

girl-wife.... Of course you love them. They're yours. Oh! they're so

deeply--yours.... Yours...."

"Oh my dear! don't torture me! I do love them. But I love you too."

"No," she said, "not as you do them."

I made a movement of protest.

"No," she said, whitely radiant with a serenity I had never seen before

in her face. "You love me with your brain. With your soul if you like. I

_know_, my poor bleeding Stephen!--Aren't those tears there? Don't mind

my seeing them, Stephen.... Poor dear! Poor dear!.... You love _them_

with your inmost heart. Why should you mind that I see you do?... All my

life I've been wrong, Stephen, and now I know too late. It's the things

we own we love, the things we buy with our lives.... Always I have been

hard, I've been a little hard.... Stephen, my dear, I loved you, always

I have loved you, and always I have tried to keep myself.... It's too

late.... I don't know why I am talking like this.... But you see I can

make a bargain now--it's not an impossible bargain--and save you and

save your wife and save your children----"

"But how?" I said, still doubting.

"Never mind how, Stephen. Don't ask me how now. Nothing very difficult.

Easy. But I shall write you no more letters--see you--no more. Never.

And that's why I had to come, you see, why I was able to come to you,

just to see you and say good-bye to you, and take leave of you, dear

Love that I threw away and loved too late...."

She bit her lip and faced me there, a sweet flushed living thing, with a

tear coursing down her cheek, and her mouth now firm and steady.

"You can stop this divorce?" I said, "But how, Mary?"

"No, don't ask me how. At a price. It's a bargain. No, no! Don't think

that,--a bargain with Justin, but not degrading. Don't, my dear, let the

thought of it distress you. I have to give earnests.... Never, dear,

never through all the dusty rest of life again will you and I speak

together. Never! Even if we come face to face once more--no word...."

"Mary," I said, "what is it you have to do? You speak as if---- What is

it Justin demands?"

"No! do not ask me that.... Tell me--you see we've so much to talk

about, Stephen--tell me of all you are going to do. Everything. Because

I've got to make a great vow of renunciation--of you. Not to think

again--not even to think of you again.... No, no. I'm not even to look

for you in the papers any more. There's to be no tricks this time. And

so you see I want to fill up my mind with you. To store myself with you.

Tell me your work is worth it--that it's not like the work of everyone.

Tell me, Stephen--_that_. I want to believe that--tremendously. Don't be

modest now. That will be cruel. I want to believe that I am at last to

do something that is worth doing, something not fruitless...."

"Are you to go into seclusion," I asked suddenly, "to be a nun----?"

"It is something like that," she said; "very like that. But I have

promised--practically--not to tell you that. Tell me your soul, Stephen,

now. Give me something I may keep in my mind through--through all those

years of waiting...."

"But where?" I cried. "What years of waiting?"

"In a lonely place, my dear--among mountains. High and away. Very

beautiful, but lonely. A lake. Great rocks.... Yes,--like that place. So

odd.... I shall have so much time to think, and I shall have no

papers--no news. I mustn't talk to you of that. Don't let me talk to you

of that. I want to hear about this world, this world I am going to

leave, and how you think you are going on fighting in the hot and dusty

struggle--to make the world cool and kind and reasonable, to train minds

better, to broaden ideas ... all those things you believe in. All those

things you believe in and stick to--even when they are dull. Now I am

leaving it, I begin to see how fine it is--to fight as you want to

fight. A tiresome inglorious lifelong fight.... You really believe,

Stephen?"

§ 11

And then suddenly I read her purpose.

"Mary," I cried, and stood up and laid my hand upon her arm, "Tell me

what is it you mean to do. What do you mean to do?"

She looked up at me defensively and for a moment neither of us spoke.

"Mary," I said, and could not say what was in my thoughts.

"You are wrong," she lied at last....

She stood up too and faced me. I held her shoulder and looked into her

eyes.

The gong of my little clock broke the silence.

"I must go, Stephen," she said. "I did not see how the time was slipping

by."

I began to entreat her and she to deny. "You don't understand," she

said, "you don't understand. Stephen!--I had hoped you would understand.

You see life,--not as I see it. I wanted--all sorts of splendid things

and you--begin to argue. You are shocked, you refuse to understand....

No. No. Take your hands off me, Stephen dear, and let me go. Let me go!"

"But," I said, stupid and persistent, "what are you going to do?"

"I've told you. Stephen. I've told you. As much as I can tell you. And

you think--this foolish thing. As though I could do that! Stephen, if I

promise, will you let me go?..."

§ 12

My mind leaps from that to the moment in the afternoon, when torn by

intolerable distresses and anxiety I knocked and rang, and again knocked

at the door of the house she occupied in South Street, with the

intention of making one last appeal to her to live--if, indeed, it was

death she had in mind. I had let her go from me and instantly a hundred

neglected things had come into my head. I could go away with her, I

could threaten to die with her; it seemed to me that nothing in all the

world mattered if only I could thrust back the dark hand of death to

which she had so manifestly turned. I knew, I knew all along that her

extorted promise would not bind her. I knew and I let the faintest

shadow of uncertainty weaken and restrain me. And I went to her too

late. I saw instantly that I was too late when the door opened and

showed me the scared face of a young footman whose eyes were red with

tears.

"Are you Doctor----?" he asked of my silence.

"I want----" I said. "I must speak to Lady Mary."

He was wordless for a moment. "She--she died, sir," he said. "She's died

suddenly." His face quivered, he was blubbering. He couldn't say

anything more; he stood snivelling in the doorway.

For some moments I remained confronting him as if I would dispute his

words. Some things the mind contests in the face of invincible

conviction. One wants to thrust back time....

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

THE ARRAIGNMENT OF JEALOUSY

§ 1

I sit here in this graciously proportioned little room which I shall

leave for ever next week, for already your mother begins to pack for

England again. I look out upon the neat French garden that I have

watched the summer round, and before me is the pile of manuscript that

has grown here, the story of my friendship and love for Mary and of its

tragic end, and of all the changes of my beliefs and purposes that have

arisen out of that. I had meant it to be the story of my life, but how

little of my life is in it! It gives, at most, certain acute points,

certain salient aspects. I begin to realize for the first time how thin

and suggestive and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be. How

we must simplify! How little can we convey the fullness of life, the

glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects, the dawns and

dreams and double refractions of experience! Even Mary, of whom I have

labored to tell you, seems not so much expressed as hidden beneath these

corrected sheets. She who was so abundantly living, who could love like

a burst of sunshine and give herself as God gives the world, is she here

at all in this pile of industrious inexpert writing?

Life is so much fuller than any book can be. All this story can be

read, I suppose, in a couple of hours or so, but I have been living and

reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of it for over forty

years. I do not see how this book can give you any impression but that

of a career all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship, yet

no life unless it is a very short young life can have that simplicity.

Of all the many things I have found beautiful and wonderful, Mary was

the most wonderful to me, she is in my existence like a sunlit lake seen

among mountains, of all the edges by which life has wrought me she was

the keenest. Nevertheless she was not all my life, nor the form of all

my life. For a time after her death I could endure nothing of my home, I

could not bear the presence of your mother or you, I hated the

possibility of consolation, I went away into Italy, and it was only by

an enormous effort that I could resume my interest in that scheme of

work to which my life is given. But it is manifest I still live, I live

and work and feel and share beauty....

It seems to me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most

literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant

with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and

recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life

under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who

loved and hated more naïvely, aged sooner and died younger than we do.

Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not

dominate us. We range wider, last longer, and escape more and more from

intensity towards understanding. And already this astounding blow begins

to take its place among other events, as a thing strange and terrible

indeed, but related to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of

the universal mysteries of despair and futility and death that have

troubled my consciousness since childhood. For a time the death of Mary

obscured her life for me, but now her living presence is more in my mind

again. I begin to see that it is the reality of her existence and not

the accidents of her end that matter most. It signifies less that she

should have flung out of life when it seemed that her living could only

have meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than that all her

life should have been hampered and restricted. Through all her life this

brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her

possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you

will, but wasted.

§ 2

It was that idea of waste that dominated my mind in a strange interview

I had with Justin. For it became necessary for me to see Justin in order

that we should stamp out the whispers against her that followed her

death. He had made it seem an accidental death due to an overdose of the

narcotic she employed, but he had not been able to obliterate altogether

the beginnings of his divorce proceedings. There had been talk on the

part of clerks and possible witnesses. But of all that I need not tell

you here; what matters is that Justin and I could meet without hatred or

violence. I met a Justin grey-haired and it seemed to me physically

shrunken, more than ever slow-speaking, with his habit of attentive

silences more marked and that dark scar spread beyond his brows.

We had come to our parting, we had done our business with an

affectation of emotional aloofness, and then suddenly he gripped me by

the arm. "Stratton," he said, "we two---- We killed her. We tore her to

pieces between us...."

I made no answer to this outbreak.

"We tore her to pieces," he repeated. "It's so damned silly. One gets

angry--like an animal."

I became grotesquely anxious to assure him that, indeed, she and I had

been, as they say, innocent throughout our last day together. "You were

wrong in all that," I said. "She kept her faith with you. We never

planned to meet and when we met----. If we had been brother and

sister----. Indeed there was nothing."

"I suppose," he said, "I ought to be glad of that. But now it doesn't

seem to matter very much. We killed her.... What does that matter to me

now?"

§ 3

And it is upon this effect of sweet and beautiful possibilities, caught

in the net of animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient

rigid institutions, that I would end this writing. In Mary, it seems to

me, I found both womanhood and fellowship, I found what many have dreamt

of, love and friendship freely given, and I could do nothing but clutch

at her to make her my possession. I would not permit her to live except

as a part of my life. I see her now and understand her better than when

she was alive, I recall things that she said and wrote and it is clear

to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, with her

resentment at being in any sense property, her self-reliant thought, her

independence of standard, was the very prototype of that sister-lover

who must replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and

deceiving, who waste the world to-day. And she was owned, she was

mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was there

for her? What alternative is there for any woman? She might perhaps have

kept her freedom by some ill-paid work and at the price of every other

impulse in her swift and eager nature. She might have become one of

those poor neuters, an independent woman.... Life was made impossible

for her and she was forced to die, according to the fate of all untimely

things. She was destroyed, not merely by the unconsidered, undisciplined

passions of her husband and her lover, but by the vast tradition that

sustains and enforces the subjugation of her sex. What I had from her,

and what she was, is but a mere intimation of all that she and I might

have made of each other and the world.

And perhaps in this story I have said enough for you to understand why

Mary has identified herself with something world-wide, has added to

herself a symbolical value, and why it is I find in the whole crowded

spectacle of mankind, a quality that is also hers, a sense of fine

things entangled and stifled and unable to free themselves from the

ancient limiting jealousies which law and custom embody. For I know that

a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient ways. The

blood-stained organized jealousies of religious intolerance, the

delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred which

simple people and young people and common people cherish against all

that is not in the likeness of themselves, cease to be the undisputed

ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate our lives

from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds and

suspicion. The ripening mind of our race tires of these boorish and

brutish and childish things. A spirit that is like hers, arises and

increases in human affairs, a spirit that demands freedom and gracious

living as our inheritance too long deferred, and I who loved her so

blindly and narrowly now love her spirit with a dawning understanding.

I will not be content with that compromise of jealousies which is the

established life of humanity to-day. I give myself, and if I can I will

give you, to the destruction of jealousy and of the forms and shelters

and instruments of jealousy, both in my own self and in the thought and

laws and usage of the world.

THE END

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Abner Daniel _Will N. Harben_

Adventures of a Modest Man _Robert W. Chambers_

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes _A. Conan Doyle_

After House, The _Mary Roberts Rinehart_

Ailsa Paige _Robert W. Chambers_

Air Pilot, The _Randall Parrish_

Alton of Somasco _Harold Bindloss_

Andrew The Glad _Maria Thompson Daviess_

Ann Boyd _Will N. Harben_

Anna the Adventuress _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Armchair at the Inn, The _F. Hopkinson Smith_

As the Sparks Fly Upward _Cyrus Townsend Brady_

At the Mercy of Tiberius _Augusta Evans Wilson_

At the Moorings _Rosa N. Carey_

Aunt Jane of Kentucky _Eliza Calvert Hall_

Awakening of Helena Richie _Margaret Deland_

Bandbox, The _Louis Joseph Vance_

Bar 20 _Clarence E. Mulford_

Bar 20 Days _Clarence E. Mulford_

Barrier, The _Rex Beach_

Battle Ground, The _Ellen Glasgow_

Bella Donna _Robert Hichens_

Beloved Vagabond, The _William J. Locke_

Ben Blair _Will Lillibridge_

Beth Norvell _Randall Parrish_

Betrayal, The _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Beulah (Illustrated Edition) _Augusta J. Evans_

Bob Hampton of Placer _Randall Parrish_

Bob, Son of Battle _Alfred Ollivant_

Brass Bowl, The _Louis Joseph Vance_

Broad Highway, The _Jeffery Farnol_

Bronze Bell, The _Louis Joseph Vance_

Buck Peters, Ranchman _Clarence E. Mulford_

Butterfly Man, The _George Barr McCutcheon_

By Right of Purchase _Harold Bindloss_

Cabbages and Kings _O. Henry_

Calling of Dan Matthews, The _Harold Bell Wright_

Call of the Blood, The _Robert Hichens_

Cape Cod Stories _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Cap'n Eri _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Cap'n Warren's Wards _Joseph C. Lincoln_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Cardigan _Robert W. Chambers_

Car of Destiny, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Carpet From Bagdad, The _Harold MacGrath_

Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine _F. R. Stockton_

Chaperon, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Circle, The _Katherine Cecil Thurston_

Claw, The _Cynthia Stockley_

Colonial Free Lance, A _Chauncey C. Hotchkiss_

Coming of the Law, The _Charles Alden Seltzer_

Conquest of Canaan, The _Booth Tarkington_

Conspirators, The _Robert W. Chambers_

Cordelia Blossom _George Randolph Chester_

Counsel for the Defense _Leroy Scott_

Cry in the Wilderness, A _Mary E. Waller_

Dark Hollow, The _Anna Katharine Green_

Day of Days, The _Louis Joseph Vance_

Depot Master, The _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Derelicts _William J. Locke_

Desired Woman, The _Will N. Harben_

Destroying Angel, The _Louis Joseph Vance_

Divine Fire, The _May Sinclair_

Dixie Hart _Will N. Harben_

Dominant Dollar, The _Will Lillibridge_

Dr. David _Marjorie Benton Cooke_

Enchanted Hat, The _Harold MacGrath_

Excuse Me _Rupert Hughes_

54-40 or Fight _Emerson Hough_

Fighting Chance, The _Robert W. Chambers_

Financier, The _Theodore Dreiser_

Flamsted Quarries _Mary E. Waller_

For a Maiden Brave _Chauncey C. Hotchkiss_

Four Million, The _O. Henry_

From the Car Behind _Eleanor M. Ingraham_

Fruitful Vine, The _Robert Hichens_

Gentleman of France, A _Stanley Weyman_

Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford _George Randolph Chester_

Gilbert Neal _Will N. Harben_

Girl From His Town, The _Marie Van Vorst_

Glory of Clementina, The _William J. Locke_

Glory of the Conquered, The _Susan Glaspell_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

God's Good Man _Marie Corelli_

Going Some _Rex Beach_

Gordon Craig _Randall Parrish_

Greyfriars Bobby _Eleanor Atkinson_

Guests of Hercules, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Halcyone _Elinor Glyn_

Happy Island (Sequel to Uncle William) _Jennette Lee_

Havoc _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Heart of the Hills, The _John Fox, Jr._

Heart of the Desert, The _Honore Willsie_

Heather-Moon, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Her Weight in Gold _George Barr McCutcheon_

Herb of Grace _Rosa N. Carey_

Highway of Fate, The _Rosa N. Carey_

Homesteaders, The _Kate and Virgil D. Boyles_

Hopalong Cassidy _Clarence E. Mulford_

Honor of the Big Snows, The _James Oliver Curwood_

House of Happiness, The _Kate Langley Bosher_

House of the Lost Court, The _C. N. Williamson_

House of the Whispering Pines, The _Anna K. Green_

Household of Peter, The _Rosa N. Carey_

Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker _S. Weir Mitchell, M.D._

Husbands of Edith, The _George Barr McCutcheon_

Idols _William J. Locke_

Illustrious Prince, The _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Imposter, The _John Reed Scott_

In Defiance of the King _Chauncey C. Hotchkiss_

Indifference of Juliet, The _Grace S. Richmond_

Inez (Illustrated Edition) _Augusta J. Evans_

Infelice _Augusta Evans Wilson_

Initials Only _Anna Katharine Green_

Iron Trail, The _Rex Beach_

Iron Woman, The _Margaret Deland_

Ishmael (Illustrated) _Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth_

Island of Regeneration, The _Cyrus Townsend Brady_

Japonette _Robert W. Chambers_

Jane Cable _George Barr McCutcheon_

Jeanne of the Marshes _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Jennie Gerhardt _Theodore Dreiser_

Joyful Heatherby _Payne Erskine_

Judgment House, The _Sir Gilbert Parker_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Keith of the Border _Randall Parrish_

Key to the Unknown, The _Rosa N. Carey_

King Spruce _Holman Day_

Knave of Diamonds, The _Ethel M. Dell_

Lady and the Pirate, The _Emerson Hough_

Lady Betty Across the Water _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Land of Long Ago, The _Eliza Calvert Hall_

Langford of the Three Bars _Kate and Virgil D. Boyles_

Last Trail, The _Zane Grey_

Last Voyage of the Donna Isabel, The _Randall Parrish_

Leavenworth Case, The _Anna Katherine Green_

Life Mask, The _Author of "To M. L. G."_

Lighted Way, The _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Lin McLean _Owen Wister_

Little Brown Jug at Kildare, The _Meredith Nicholson_

Lonesome Land _B. M. Bower_

Lord Loveland Discovers America _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Lorimer of the Northwest _Harold Bindloss_

Lorraine _Robert W. Chambers_

Lost Ambassador, The _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Love Under Fire _Randall Parrish_

Macaria (Illustrated Edition) _Augusta J. Evans_

Maid at Arms, The _Robert W. Chambers_

Maid of Old New York, A _Amelia E. Barr_

Maids of Paradise, The _Robert W. Chambers_

Maid of the Whispering Hills, The _Vingie E. Roe_

Maid of the Forest, The _Randall Parrish_

Making of Bobby Burnit, The _Geo. Randolph Chester_

Mam' Linda _Will N. Harben_

Marriage _H. G. Wells_

Marriage a la Mode _Mrs. Humphrey Ward_

Master Mummer, The _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Masters of the Wheatlands _Harold Bindloss_

Max _Katherine Cecil Thurston_

Mediator, The _Roy Norton_

Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes _A. Conan Doyle_

Missioner, The _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Miss Gibbie Gault _Kale Langley Bosher_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Miss Philura's Wedding Gown _Florence Morse Kingsley_

Miss Selina Lue _Maria Thompson Daviess_

Mollie's Prince _Rosa N. Carey_

Molly McDonald _Randall Parrish_

Money Moon, The _Jeffery Farnol_

Motor Maid, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Moth, The _William Dana Orcutt_

Mountain Girl, The _Payne Erskine_

Mr. Pratt _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Mr. Pratt's Patients _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Mrs. Red Pepper _Grace S. Richmond_

My Friend the Chauffeur _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

My Lady Caprice _Jeffery Farnol_

My Lady of Doubt _Randall Parrish_

My Lady of the North _Randall Parrish_

My Lady of the South _Randall Parrish_

Mystery Tales _Edgar Allen Poe_

Mystery of the Boule Cabinet, The _Burton E. Stevenson_

Nancy Stair _Elinor Macartney Lane_

Ne'er-Do-Well, The _Rex Beach_

Net, The _Rex Beach_

Night Riders, The _Ridgwell Cullum_

No Friend Like a Sister _Rosa N. Carey_

Officer 666 _Barton W. Currie and Augustin McHugh_

Once Upon a Time _Richard Harding Davis_

One Braver Thing _Richard Dehan_

One Way Trail, The _Ridgwell Cullum_

Orphan, The _Clarence E. Mulford_

Out of the Primitive _Robert Ames Bennet_

Pam _Bettina Von Hutten_

Pam Decides _Bettina Von Hutten_

Pardners _Rex Beach_

Parrot & Co _Harold McGrath_

Partners of the Tide _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Passage Perilous, The _Rosa N. Carey_

Passionate Friends, The _H. G. Wells_

Paul Anthony, Christian _Hiram W. Hays_

Peter Ruff _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Phillip Steele _James Oliver Curwood_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Phra the Phoenician _Edwin Lester Arnold_

Pidgin Island _Harold MacGrath_

Place of Honeymoons, The _Harold MacGrath_

Pleasures and Palaces _Juliet Wilbor Tompkins_

Plunderer, The _Roy Norton_

Pole Baker _Will N. Harben_

Pool of Flame, The _Louis Joseph Vance_

Polly of the Circus _Margaret Mayo_

Poppy _Cynthia Stockley_

Port of Adventure, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Postmaster, The _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Power and the Glory, The _Grace McGowan Cooke_

Price of the Prairie, The _Margaret Hill McCarter_

Prince of Sinners, A _E. Phillips Oppenheim_

Prince or Chauffeur _Lawrence Perry_

Princess Passes, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Princess Virginia, The _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Prisoners of Chance _Randall Parrish_

Prodigal Son, The _Hall Caine_

Purple Parasol, The _George Barr McCutcheon_

R. J.'s Mother _Margaret Deland_

Ranching for Sylvia _Harold Bindloss_

Reason Why, The _Elinor Glyn_

Redemption of Kenneth Galt, The _Will N. Harben_

Red Cross Girl, The _Richard Harding Davis_

Red Lane, The _Holman Day_

Red Pepper Burns _Grace S. Richmond_

Red Republic, The _Robert W. Chambers_

Refugees, The _A. Conan Doyle_

Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary, The _Anne Warner_

Rise of Roscoe Paine, The _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Road to Providence, The _Maria Thompson Daviess_

Robinetta _Kate Douglas Wiggin_

Rose in the Ring, The _George Barr McCutcheon_

Rose of the World _Agnes and Egerton Castle_

Rose of Old Harpeth, The _Maria Thompson Daviess_

Round the Corner in Gay Street _Grace S. Richmond_

Routledge Rides Alone _Will Levington Comfort_

Rue: With a Difference _Rosa N. Carey_

St. Elmo (Illustrated Edition) _Augusta J. Evans_

Seats of the Mighty, The _Gilbert Parker_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Second Violin, The _Grace S. Richmond_

Self-Raised (Illustrated) _Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth_

Septimus _William J. Locke_

Set in Silver _C. N. and A. M. Williamson_

Sharrow _Bettina Von Hutten_

Shepherd of the Hills, The _Harold Bell Wright_

Sheriff of Dyke Hole, The _Ridgwell Cullum_

Ship's Company _W. W. Jacobs_

Sidney Carteret, Rancher _Harold Bindloss_

Sign at Six, The _Stewart Edward White_

Silver Horde, The _Rex Beach_

Simon the Jester _William J. Locke_

Sir Nigel _A. Conan Doyle_

Sir Richard Calmady _Lucas Malet_

Sixty-First Second, The _Owen Johnson_

Slim Princess, The _George Ade_

Speckled Bird, A _Augusta Evans Wilson_

Spirit in Prison, A _Robert Hichens_

Spirit of the Border, The _Zane Grey_

Spoilers, The _Rex Beach_

Strawberry Acres _Grace S. Richmond_

Strawberry Handkerchief, The _Amelia E. Barr_

Streets of Ascalon, The _Robert W. Chambers_

Sunnyside of the Hill, The _Rosa N. Carey_

Sunset Trail, The _Alfred Henry Lewis_

Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop _Anne Warner_

Sword of the Old Frontier, A _Randall Parrish_

Tales of Sherlock Holmes _A. Conan Doyle_

Tarzan of the Apes _Edgar Rice Burroughs_

Taste of Apples, The _Jennette Lee_

Tennessee Shad, The _Owen Johnson_

Tess of the D'Urbervilles _Thomas Hardy_

Texican, The _Dane Coolidge_

That Affair Next Door _Anna Katharine Green_

That Printer of Udell's _Harold Bell Wright_

Their Yesterdays _Harold Bell Wright_

Throwback, The _Alfred Henry Lewis_

Thurston of Orchard Valley _Harold Blindloss_

To M. L. G.; Or, He Who Passed _Anonymous_

To Him That Hath _Leroy Scott_

* * * * *

Popular Copyright Novels

AT MODERATE PRICES

Ask your dealer for a complete list of A. L. Burt Company's Popular

Copyright Fiction

Torn Sails _Allen Raine_

Trail of the Axe, The _Ridgwell Cullum_

Trail to Yesterday, The _Charles Alden Seltzer_

Treasure of Heaven, The _Marie Corelli_

Truth Dexter _Sidney McCall_

T. Tembarom _Frances Hodgson Burnett_

Turnstile, The _A. E. W. Mason_

Two-Gun Man, The _Charles Alden Seltzer_

Uncle William _Jeanette Lee_

Under the Red Robe _Stanley J. Weyman_

Up From Slavery _Booker T. Washington_

Valiants of Virginia, The _Hallie Erminie Rives_

Vanity Box, The _C. N. Williamson_

Vane of the Timberlands _Harold Blindloss_

Varmint, The _Owen Johnson_

Vashti _Augusta Evans Wilson_

Wall of Men, A _Margaret Hill McCarter_

Watchers of the Plains, The _Ridgwell Cullum_

Way Home, The _Basil King_

Way of An Eagle, The _E. M. Dell_

Weavers, The _Gilbert Parker_

West Wind, The _Cyrus Townsend Brady_

Wheel of Life, The _Ellen Glasgow_

When Wilderness Was King _Randall Parrish_

Where the Trail Divides _Will Lillibridge_

Where There's A Will _Mary Roberts Rinehart_

White Sister, The _Marion Crawford_

Wind Before the Dawn, The _Dell H. Munger_

Window at the White Cat, The _Mary Roberts Rinehart_

Winning of Barbara Worth, The _Harold Bell Wright_

With Juliet in England _Grace S. Richmond_

With the Best Intentions _Bruno Lessing_

Woman in the Alcove, The _Anna Katharine Green_

Woman Haters, The _Joseph C. Lincoln_

Woodcarver of 'Lympus, The _Mary E. Waller_

Woodfire in No. 3, The _F. Hopkinson Smith_

Wrecker, The _Robert Louis Stevenson_

Younger Set, The _Robert W. Chambers_

You Never Know Your Luck _Gilbert Parker_

End of Project Gutenberg's The Passionate Friends, by Herbert George Wells