THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

I admired her appearance tremendously but-I can only express it by

saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always

delectably done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears,

and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue

velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light,

the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful. And it was

clear to me that I made her happy.

My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling

at last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed

to offer me something…

She stood in my mind for goodness-and for things from which it

seemed to me my hold was slipping.

She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition

in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the

career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.

All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather

ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a

shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my

darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I could understand clearly

that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political

thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all

the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.

Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted

disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen

in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl

haunted me persistently. I would seemyself again and again sitting

amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while

her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended

meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this

was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any

permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous

degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled

by any ordered will.

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those

Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!

There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I

ought to have thought!"…

How did I get to it?"… I would ransack the phases of my

development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the

last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to

find some disorganising error…

I was also involved at that time-I find it hard to place these

things in the exact order of their dates because they were so

disco

intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated

intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her

husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we

quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and

jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of

our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable

interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,

except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us

back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and

unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality

of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions

against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in

illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent

irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine

and beautiful into a net-into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,

this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had

made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of

our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst

incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of

bodily love and wasted them…

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting

entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I

had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the

Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt

that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a

harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not

doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its

nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had

gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of

false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt

to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of

profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated with

moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I

was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were

times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.

Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three

and twenty-eight, this rotte