As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.
For a time I acquiesced in this.I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor dinners at all.For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles I had frequented.I put up for the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious and substantial political standing.I didn't go up to Cambridge, Iremember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new adjustments.
The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already actually placed in the political world.They ranged between very considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed.There were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.
Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles instead of being naturally there.They couldn't quite reckon upon what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and incalculable traditions.Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of letters who are the glory of latter-day England.Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he had married.I had known all these men, but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and took me into their order.They were all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close.They were all tremendously keen upon social and political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions.The young wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I--whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits of this set were very much in the background during that time.
We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary.Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made lemonade available.No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids.Our meat was usually Welsh mutton--Idon't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues.And we talked politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.
The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate.We were all very earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to be most remote from reality.
2
I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those beginnings of my married life.I try to recall something near to their proper order the developing phases of relationship.I am struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.
It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate, shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evade violent pressures.I have come these latter years of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying love between them.It is possible to love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air.But it is a rare and intricate chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union, and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.
