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this,' to all the world. All the world!… I will!"
Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk.
"That's all very well, Remington," he said. "You mean to go."
He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the
wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong.
It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work,
you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your
jolly mistress… You won't see you're a statesman that
matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as
you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away and
accusing your country of rejecting you."
He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have
you forgotten the immense things our movement means?"
I thought. "Perhaps Iam rhetorical," I said.
"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now-even now!
Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able
to go on-perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd
get. You know, Remington-you KNOW."
I thought and went back to his earlier point. "If Iam rhetorical,
at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all
the implications of our aims-very splendid, very remote. But just
now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit
Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you
talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents
everything. I'm not going out of this-for delights. That's the
sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine-that excites
them! When I think of the things these creatures think! Ugh! But
YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a
fire-ends clean. I'm going for love, Britten-if I si
passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day
she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten… I've been a cold
man-I've led a rhetorical life-you hit me with that word!-I put
things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last
is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick thing-
a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god… I'm
not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a
man that's been flayed. I have been flayed… You don't begin
to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude… She's not going
to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails… It's hard
to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten-
there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or
achievements in the world… I made her what she is-as I never
made Margaret. I've made her-I've broken her… I'm going
with my own woman. The rest of my life and England, and so forth,
must square itself to that…"
For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless.
We'd said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the
desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays.
"This man goes on doing first-rate stuff," I said. "I hope you will
keep him going."
He did not answer for a moment or so. "I'll keep him going," he
said at last with a sigh.
5
I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I
ca
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 passed 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 proprietorship, 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 Iamfeeling
than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of