Part 13 (1/2)

”She came to your room?”

I nodded.

”I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday.... Any one might have heard you.”

I went on with my head in the air.

”You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble.

You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know about her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were talking about,” he said with a determined eye upon me, ”chast.i.ty will be first among the virtues prescribed.”

”I shall form a rival league,” I said a little damped. ”I'm hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I know why.”

He lifted his chin and stared before him through his gla.s.ses at nothing.

”There are some things,” he said, ”that a man who means to work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it,--out you go from political life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things.... Only--”

He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.

”I mean to take myself as I am,” I said. ”I'm going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing.”

Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. ”I doubt if s.e.xual proclivities,” he said drily, ”come within the scope of the parable.”

I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. ”s.e.x!” said I, ”is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it--and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look this in the face. G.o.ds! what a m.u.f.fled time we're coming out of! s.e.x means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation.

The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics--”

”THAT wasn't Eugenics,” said Willersley.

”It was a woman,” I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case against him.

BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET

CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDs.h.i.+RE

1

I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my cla.s.s nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of the forces that went to her making. I met her in Staffords.h.i.+re while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and circ.u.mstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do, come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol....

But first I must tell of my Staffords.h.i.+re cousins and the world that served as a foil for her.

2

I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-cla.s.s in the local trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.