H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

have you."

She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.

" I'mgoing to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'mso

discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come

between us if I didn't. I'min love with you, with everything-with

all my brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master,

never you fear. But to-day I'mcrying out with all my being. This

election-You're going up; you're going on. In these papers-you're

a great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my

mindI've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow

presently for myself-I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to

keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening. It's

a sort of habitual background to my thoughtof you. And it's

nonsense-utter nonsense!" She stopped. She was crying and

choking. "And the child, you know-the child!"

I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were

clear and strong.

"We can't have that," I said.

"No," she said, "we can't have that."

"We've got our own things to do."

"YOUR things," she said.

"Aren't they yours too?"

"Because of you," she said.

"Aren't they your very own things?"

"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!

And think! You've been down there preaching the goodnessof

children, telling them the only goodthing in a stateis happy,

hopeful children, working to free mothers and children-"

"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I thinkit's too much to give-too

much altogether… Children get into a woman's brain-when she

mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.

Thinkof the child we might have now!-the little creature with

soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it

haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear

it in the night… The world is full of such little ghosts,

dear lover-little things that asked for life and were refused.

They clamour to me. It's like a little fist beating at my heart.

Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at

my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with

both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herselfto

my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit

with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I ama woman

and your lover!…"

But the profound impossibility of our relationwas now becoming more

and more apparent to us. We found ourselvesseeking justification,

clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,

impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together

and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that

were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily

difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against

those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one

found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if

we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we

wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or

even chiefly, a thing in itself-it is for the most part a value set

upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;

to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like

killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sightof each

other engaged finely and characteristically, we kneweach other best

as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't

want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We

wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other

openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.

We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every

helpfulchance in the world, and children born in scandal would be

handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a

solitude.

And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations

that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us…

I heardof it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with

that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the

preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel

almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it

her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us

both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel

admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom

of action."

Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces

and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends

ceasedto invade either of us. It was manifest we had become-we

knewnot how-a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an

amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it

seemed London passed from absoluteunsuspiciousness to a chattering

exaggeration of its knowledgeof our relations.

It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The

long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had

flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be

altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal

irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging

respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the

thing as far as I had done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a

leak, and scandal was pouring in… It chanced, too, that a

wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those

waves in which the bitternessof the consciouslyjust finds an ally

in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had

been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,

and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition

in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had

been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting

an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the

private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an

extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters…

I thinkthere can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving

realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly

one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One

walks silenced through a world that one feelsto be full of

inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out

into the open, separate truthand falsehood. It slinks from you,

turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made

extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world

and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step

of flat repudiation. I became doubtfulabout the return of a nod,

retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto

spread to the world. I still growwarm with amazed indignation when

I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the

Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching

him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all gooddeeds and

bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond

comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open