MARGARET IN VENICE
1
There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne.We had the immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay before us.I was now very deeply in love with her indeed.I felt not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had.We called each other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St.Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking.I was full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and work.We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for him from the toiling people in the potteries.The end of the Boer War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still in people's minds and thoughts.Lord Roseberry in a memorable oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was taken to him.But then it was their habit to make claims of that sort.They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.
Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient." We were to be a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type." She explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in the world.
I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously focussed upon the ideal of social service.
Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a gondola on our way to Torcella.Far away behind us the smoke of Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially.Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our destination.Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again.Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.
"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.
There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be distracted from one's purpose.The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans.For a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like ourselves it's--it's the constant small opportunity of agreeable things.""Frittering away," she says, "time and strength.""That is what I feel.It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too seriously.We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."She endorses my words with her eyes.
"I feel I can do great things with life.""I KNOW you can."
"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main end.We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our scheme.""I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give--every hour."Her face becomes dreamy."I WANT to give every hour," she adds.
2
That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and skylike, and discontinuous with all about it.The faded quality of the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.
There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed chandeliers.We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well with ourselves and the world.It was ten days or a fortnight before I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for such a temperament as mine.
