of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these
five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky
dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of
correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing
homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the
London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the
observant…
How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without
qualification! Yet at the time there was surely something not
altogether ugly in it-something that has vanished, some fine thing
mortally ailing.
One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a
pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone
else. And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or
twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a
position to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar
effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of it.
Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of
streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by
a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with
curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of
paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-
haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in
broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first
inadequate to understand…
I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the
meaning came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and
she was telling me-just as one tells something too strange for
comment or emotion-how her father had been shot and her sister
outraged and murdered before her eyes.
It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you
know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite
brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,
with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful
adventure fading out of my mind.
"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten
and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a
detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of
what I was striving to say.
8
I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I
passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier
encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the
subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of
interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping
into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this
memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what
led to them and joined them together. And they are all mixed up
with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits
of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered
misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for Margaret
were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.
It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same
time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds
streams of thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same
time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person
quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to
level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had
no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret
was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to
certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to
matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of
vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from
her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive;
she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy,
confirmatory action.
I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I
seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I
would state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."
I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her
blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."