Most coupled people never really look at one another.They look a little away to preconceived ideas.And each from the first days of love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense.They build not solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous hidden life.Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die.For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.
I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.
Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the injustice our marriage did us both.There was no kindred between us and no understanding.We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each other.I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.
Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating time.When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little.But now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of understanding and co-operation.These are stupendous demands.
People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted couples....
Our very mental texture was different.I was rough-minded, to use the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary.She was loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming.My imagination moves in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance.My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory.I like the facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things.She abounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary points.Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way.It is an admirable test of tempera-mental quality.In spite of my early training I have come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our fundamental breach.She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my "true self," and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest.And also Ihad far more initiative than had she.This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.
This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either of us at the outset.To begin with, I found myself reserving myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding in her....
It did not hinder my being very fond of her....
Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most astounding was in our personal relations.It is not too much to say that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one another during the first six years of our life together.It goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself.Iwould not admit my own perceptions and interpretations.I tried to fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations.There are people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to conquer myself.I record that much without any note of approval....
For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings....
3
The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and the North Western railways.I was going to "take hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle.Iwas to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.
