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. You talk of beauty, both of you, as something
terrible, mysterious, imperative. YOUR beauty is something
altogether different from anything I know or feel. It has pain in
it. Yet you always speak as though it was something I ought to feel
and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is a quiet thing. You have
always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned chintz and blue china
and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED things. My beauty
is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I know nothing of the
fascination of the fire, or why one should go deliberately out of
all the decent fine things of life to run dangers and be singed and
tormented and destroyed. I don't understand…"
6
I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the
platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead,
the bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of
newsboys and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends
seeing travellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very quiet and
still in the compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the
door open, with a curious reluctance to take the last step that
should sever me from London 's ground. I showed our tickets, and
bought a handful of red roses for her. At last came the guards
crying: "Take your seats," and I got in and closed the door on me.
We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to ourselves. I let down the
window and stared out.
There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of "Stand
away, please, stand away!" and the train was gliding slowly and
smoothly out of the station.
I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly
gathering pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the
pedestrians in the footway, and the curve of the river and the
glowing great hotels, and the lights and reflections and blacknesses
of that old, familiar spectacle. Then with a common thought, we
turned our eyes westward to where the pinnacles of Westminster and
the shining clock tower rose hard and clear against the still,
luminous sky.
"They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night," I said,
a little stupidly.
"And so," I added, "good-bye to London!"
We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below-bright
gleams of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes
of houses and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London
Bridge, New Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to
me that for a time we had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped,
we had cut our knot, we had accepted the last penalty of that
headlong return of mine from Chicago a year and a half ago. That
was all settled. That harvest of feelings we had reaped. I thought
now only of London, of London as the symbol of all we were leaving
and all we had lost in the world. I felt nothing now but an
enormous and overwhelming regret…
The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran through old
Bromstead, where once I had played with cities and armies on the
nursery floor. The sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights
gave way to dim tree-set country under a cloud-veiled,
intermittently shining moon. We passed Cardcaster Place. Perhaps
old Wardingham, that pillar of the old Conservatives, was there,
fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with our young Toryism.
Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and how it would
confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps some faint
intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the
young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of
lighted carriage windows gliding southward…
Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I
had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all
my ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be
going out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance
fell from us-and before us was no meaning any more. We were
leaving London; my hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its
complex life, had been forced from it, my fingers left their hold.