THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 creto

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."