The Passionate Friends
being across the seas who had offered them to me so straightly and
sweetly. All that is brave and good and as you would have me, is it not?
Only, dear son, that is not all the truth.
There was still in my mind, for long it remained in my mind, a
bitterness against Mary. I had left her, I had lost her, we had parted;
but from Germany to America and all through America and home again to my
marriage and with me after my marriage, it rankled that she could still
go on living a life independent of mine. I had not yet lost my desire to
possess her, to pervade and dominate her existence; my resentment that
though she loved me she had first not married me and afterwards not
consented to come away with me was smouldering under the closed hatches
of my mind. And so while the better part of me was laying hold of this
work because it gave me the hope of a complete distraction and escape
from my narrow and jealous self, that lower being of the pit was also
rejoicing in the great enterprises before me and in the marriage upon
which I had now determined, because it was a last trampling upon my
devotion to Mary, because it defied and denied some lurking claims to
empire I could suspect in her. I want to tell you that particularly
because so I am made, so you are made, so most of us are made. There is
scarcely a high purpose in all the world that has no dwarfish footman at
its stirrup, no base intention over which there does not ride at least
the phantom of an angel.
Constantly in those days, it seems to me now, I was haunted by my own
imagination of Mary amiably reconciled to Justin, bearing him children,
forgetful of or repudiating all the sweetness, all the wonder and beauty
we had shared.... It was an unjust and ungenerous conception, I knew it
for a caricature even as I entertained it, and yet it tormented me. It
stung me like a spur. It kept me at work, and if I strayed into
indolence brought me back to work with a mind galled and bleeding....
§ 12
And I suppose it is mixed up with all this that I could not make love
easily and naturally to Rachel. I could not write love-letters to her.
There is a burlesque quality in these scruples, I know, seeing that I
was now resolved to marry her, but that is the quality, that is the
mixed texture of life. We overcome the greater things and are
conscience-stricken by the details.
I wouldn't, even at the price of losing her--and I was now passionately
anxious not to lose her--use a single phrase of endearment that did not
come out of me almost in spite of myself. At any rate I would not cheat
her. And my offer of marriage when at last I sent it to her from Chicago
was, as I remember it, almost business-like. I atoned soon enough for
that arid letter in ten thousand sweet words that came of themselves to
my lips. And she paid me at any rate in my own coin when she sent me her
answer by cable, the one word "Yes."
And indeed I was already in love with her long before I wrote. It was
only a dread of giving her a single undeserved cheapness that had held
me back so long. It was that and the perplexity that Mary still gripped
my feelings; my old love for her was there in my heart in spite of my
new passion for Rachel, it was blackened perhaps and ruined and changed
but it was there. It was as if a new crater burnt now in the ampler
circumference of an old volcano, which showed all the more desolate and
sorrowful and obsolete for the warm light of the new flames....
How impatiently I came home! Thoughts of England I had not dared to
think for three long years might now do what they would in me. I dreamt
of the Surrey Hills and the great woods of Burnmore Park, of the
changing skies and stirring soft winds of our grey green Motherland.
There was fog in the Irish Sea, and we lost the better part of a day
hooting our way towards Liverpool while I fretted about the ship with
all my luggage packed, staring at the grey waters that weltered under
the mist. It was the longest day in my life. My heart was full of
desire, my eyes ached for the little fields and golden October skies of
England, England that was waiting to welcome me back from my exile with
such open arms. I was coming home,--home.
I hurried through London into Surrey and in my father's study, warned by
a telegram, I found a bright-eyed, resolute young woman awaiting me,
with the quality about her of one who embarks upon a long premeditated
adventure. And I found too a family her sisters and her brother all
gladly ready for me, my father too was a happy man, and on the eighth of
November in 1906 Rachel and I were married in the little church at
Shere. We stayed for a week or so in Hampshire near Ringwood, the season
was late that year and the trees still very beautiful; and then we went
to Portofino on the Ligurian coast.
There presently Gidding joined us and we began to work out the schemes
we had made in America, the schemes that now fill my life.
CHAPTER THE TENTH
MARY WRITES
§ 1
It was in the early spring of 1909 that I had a letter from Mary.
By that time my life was set fully upon its present courses, Gidding and
I had passed from the stage of talking and scheming to definite
undertakings. Indeed by 1909 things were already organized upon their
present lines. We had developed a huge publishing establishment with one
big printing plant in Barcelona and another in Manchester, and we were
studying the peculiar difficulties that might attend the establishment
of a third plant in America. Our company was an English company under
the name of Alphabet and Mollentrave, and we were rapidly making it the
broadest and steadiest flow of publication the world had ever seen. Its
streams already reached further and carried more than any single firm
had ever managed to do before. We were reprinting, in as carefully
edited and revised editions as we could, the whole of the English,
Spanish and French literature, and we were only waiting for the release
of machinery to attack German, Russian and Italian, and were giving each
language not only its own but a very complete series of good
translations of the classical writers in every other tongue. We had a
little band of editors and translators permanently in our service at
each important literary centre. We had, for example, more than a score
of men at work translating Bengali fiction and verse into English,--a
lot of that new literature is wonderfully illuminating to an intelligent
Englishman--and we had a couple of men hunting about for new work in
Arabic. We meant to give so good and cheap a book, and to be so
comprehensive in our choice of books, excluding nothing if only it was
real and living, on account of any inferiority of quality, obscurity of
subject or narrowness of demand, that in the long run anybody, anywhere,
desiring to read anything would turn naturally and inevitably to our
lists.
Ours was to be in the first place a world literature. Then afterwards
upon its broad currents of distribution and in the same forms we meant
to publish new work and new thought. We were also planning an
encyclopædia. Behind our enterprise of translations and reprints we were
getting together and putting out a series of guide-books, gazetteers,
dictionaries, text-books and books of reference, and we were organizing
a revising staff for these, a staff that should be constantly keeping
them up to date. It was our intention to make every copy we printed bear
the date of its last revision in a conspicuous place, and we hoped to
get the whole line of these books ultimately upon an annual basis, and
to sell them upon repurchasing terms that would enable us to issue a new
copy and take back and send the old one to the pulping mill at a narrow
margin of profit. Then we meant to spread our arms wider, and
consolidate and offer our whole line of text-books, guide-books and
gazetteers, bibliographies, atlases, dictionaries and directories as a
new World Encyclopædia, that should also annually or at longest
biennially renew its youth.
So far we had gone in the creation of a huge international organ of
information, and of a kind of gigantic modern Bible of world literature,
and in the process of its distribution we were rapidly acquiring an
immense detailed knowledge of the book and publishing trade, finding
congestions here, neglected opportunities there, and devising and
drawing up a hundred schemes for relief, assistance, amalgamation and
rearrangement. We had branches in China, Japan, Peru, Iceland and a
thousand remote places that would have sounded as far off as the moon to
an English or American bookseller in the seventies. China in particular
was a growing market. We had a subsidiary company running a flourishing
line of book shops in the east-end of London, and others in New Jersey,
Chicago, Buenos Ayres, the South of France, and Ireland. Incidentally we
had bought up some thousands of miles of Labrador forest to ensure our
paper supply, and we could believe that before we died there would not
be a corner of the world in which any book of interest or value whatever
would not be easily attainable by any intelligent person who wanted to
read it. And already we were taking up the more difficult and ambitious
phase of our self-appointed task, and considering the problem of using
these channels we were mastering and deepening and supplementing for the
stimulation and wide diffusion of contemporary thought.
There we went outside the province of Alphabet and Mollentrave and into
an infinitely subtler system of interests. We wanted to give sincere and
clear-thinking writers encouragement and opportunity, to improve the
critical tribunal and make it independent of advertising interests, so
that there would be a readier welcome for luminous thinking and writing
and a quicker explosion of intellectual imposture. We sought to provide
guides and intelligencers to contemporary thought. We had already set up
or subsidized or otherwise aided a certain number of magazines and
periodicals that seemed to us independent-spirited, out-spoken and well
handled, but we had still to devise our present scheme of financing
groups of men to create magazines and newspapers, which became their own
separate but inalienable property after so many years of success.
But all this I hope you will already have become more or less familiar
with when this story reaches your hands, and I hope by the time it does
so we shall be far beyond our present stage of experiment and that you
will have come naturally to play your part in this most fascinating
business of maintaining an onward intellectual movement in the world, a
movement not simply independent of but often running counter to all
sorts of political and financial interests. I tell you this much here
for you to understand that already in 1909 and considering the business
side of my activities alone, I was a hard worker and very strenuously
employed. And in addition to all this huge network of enterprises I had
developed with Gidding, I was still pretty actively a student. I
wasn't--I never shall be--absolutely satisfied with my general ideas. I
was enquiring keenly and closely into those problems of group and crowd
psychology from which all this big publishing work has arisen, and
giving particular attention to the war-panics and outbreaks of
international hostility that were then passing in deepening waves
across Europe. I had already accumulated a mass of notes for the book
upon "Group Jealousy in Religious Persecution, Racial Conflicts and War"
which I hope to publish the year after next, and which therefore I hope
you will have read long before this present book can possibly come to
you. And moreover Rachel and I had established our home in London--in
the house we now occupy during the winter and spring--and both you and