Part 53 (1/2)
5
I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has pa.s.sed utterly from my mind....
”Certainly,” she says, ”I want to hear from you, but I do not want to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with.
Something I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you--but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietors.h.i.+p, it may be different. Then perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING for the world--had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly at loose ends....
”We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you and your schemes....
”After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...
”It is just as though you were wilfully dead....
”Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe impossible....
”Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood away from. You let my first repugnances repel you....
”It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATE you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time, thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life, when clearly I have understood so little of yours. But I am savage--savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.
”Oh, why--why did you give things up?
”No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companions.h.i.+p, but to great purposes. They ARE great purposes....
”If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and your young mistress.... All that matters so little to me....
”Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At times I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to give you.... I've always hidden my tears from you--and what was in my heart.
It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things brought to you to see.
You are so curious as to be almost cruel. You don't understand reserves.
You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. You are not really a CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretences--and not only pretences but decent coverings....
”It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slow people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't I bold and reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as to ask why my hair is fair....
”I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find myself alone....
”My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which you were to forge so much of the new order....
”But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of you, I mean.... It tears me when I think of you poor and discredited. You will let me help you if I can--it will be the last wrong not to let me do that....
”You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district visitor....”
There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating a.n.a.lysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
”There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to.
There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but by a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watched you so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow rules. I don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at once makers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people--criminal people, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're so much better than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making without destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing but an instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do you remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat because there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crust forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again.