H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

a time she held me in silence.

"I've thoughtthis might happen, I dreamtit might happen. You two,

I mean. It was dreamingput it into my head. When I've seenyou

together, so glad with each other… Oh! Husband mine, believe

me! believe me! I'mstupid, I'mcold, I'monly beginning to realise

how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to give my

life to you."…

"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

ourselvesout. I still recall that day very well, recall even the

curious exaltation of grief that made our mental atmosphere

distinctive and memorable. We had seenso 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 thoughtthat 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 touchupon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I

have become for myselfa 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'mglad we did it," she said. "Don't thinkI repent."

I looked at her.

"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to

her life in saying it.

I rememberwe 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 knowthere'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

realmischief 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 thinkof now," said Isabel. "Who could believe we

did all we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who

could believe we thoughtthis 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 reallywant to go on with you?" she asked-"shield

you-knowing of… THIS?"

" I'mcertain. 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.

"He's good," she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic.

He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You

can't say a thing against him or I-except that something-something

in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice-fails for

me. Why don't I love him?-he's a better man than you! Why don't

you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's

the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,-a gentleman.

You're your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will

trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time…"

We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It

seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to

the pitch of easy and confident affection and happinessthat held

between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder

half the substance of their lives. We felt ourselvescrushed and

beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happinessin

the service of jealousy. "The mass of people don't feelthese

things in quite the same manner as we feelthem," she said. "Is it

because they're different in grain, or educated out of some

primitive instinct?"

"It's because we've explored love a little, and they knowno more

than the gateway," I said. "Lust and then jealousy; their simple

conception-and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in

hand…"

I rememberthat for a time we watched two of that larger sort of

gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the

blue. And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear

far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the

restshould leave it so serene.

"And in this State of ours," I resumed.

"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking

out at the horizon. "Let's talk no more of things we can never see.

Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall do-after we

have parted. We've said too little of that. We've had our red

life, and it's over. Thank Heaven!-though we stole it! Talk about

your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doing-just as though we

were still together. We'll still be together in a sense-through

all these things we have in common."