Very completely....We shall have not to see each other for a time, you know.Perhaps not a long time.Two or three years.Or write--or just any of that sort of thing ever--"Some subconscious barrier gave way in me.I found myself crying uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child.Iwas amazed and horrified at myself.And wonderfully, Margaret was on her knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping with mine."Oh, my Husband!" she cried, my poor Husband! Does it hurt you so? I would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you.I love you over and away and above all these jealous little things!"She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of a son.She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me."Oh! my dear,"she sobbed, "my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you cry.Ever! I didn't know you could.Oh! my dear! Can't you have her, my dear, if you want her? I can't bear it! Let me help you, dear.Oh! my Husband! My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!" For a time she held me in silence.
"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen.You two, I mean.It was dreaming put it into my head.When I've seen you together, so glad with each other....Oh! Husband mine, believe me! believe me! I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to give my life to you."...
6
"We can't part in a room," said Isabel.
"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we should meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk ourselves out.I still recall that day very well, recall even the curious exaltation of grief that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable.We had seen so much of one another, had become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness.We went together up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking.It was a spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers.Shrieking gulls and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose.
We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations.It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch upon.Lying there at Isabel's feet, Ihave become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to solve.Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way..
..The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves until we were something representative and general.She was womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you.""It wasn't a thing planned," she said.
"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned back from America.""I'm glad we did it," she said."Don't think I repent."I looked at her.
"I will never repent," she said."Never!" as though she clung to her life in saying it.
I remember we talked for a long time of divorce.It seemed to us then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment.We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of marriage.We criticised the current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of women."It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said;for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose dissolving again into chaotic forces."There is no clear right in the world any more.The world is Byzantine.The justest man to-day must practise a tainted goodness."These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective hold upon educated people.Discretions, as I have said already, will never hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us.
Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,--the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its purpose."You and I, Isabel," I said, "have always been a little disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad.Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all.I wish humbugs would leave duty alone.I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime.That's where the real mischief comes in.Passion can always contrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid.That carried us.But for all its mean associations there is this duty....
"Don't we come rather late to it?"
"Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do.""It's queer to think of now," said Isabel."Who could believe we did all we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly.Who could believe we thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love....Master, there's not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will credit.And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our story....
"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked--"shield you--knowing of...THIS?""I'm certain.I don't understand--just as I don't understand Shoesmith, but she does.These people walk on solid ground which is just thin air to us.They've got something we haven't got.
Assurances? I wonder."...
Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life might be with him.
