Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (93 page)

Should I, then, submit myself to the pain of a future so completely out of tune with the past? Should I, who had once dedicated myself to the dead, assume yet further responsibilities towards the living? Could I, a wartime veteran, transform myself into a young wife and mother, and thereby give fate once more the power to hurt me, to destroy my vitality and my creative ability as it had destroyed them in the years which followed 1914? If life chose to deal me a new series of blows through G. and his children, should I have the strength to survive them and go on working? I doubted it, and often felt that it would be better to avoid the risk altogether. Yet always, after a tumult of thought, I was forced to conclude that it is only by grasping this nettle, danger, that we pluck this flower, safety; that those who flee from emotion, from intimacy, from the shocks and perils attendant upon all close human relationships, end in being attacked by unseen Furies in the ultimate stronghold of their spirit.

‘You fear marriage, and America, and the cost of marriage, and me because I stand for these things,’ G. had written with intuitive comprehension of my hesitations only a few weeks before. ‘Of course you do . . . Marriage is a great risk properly faced with fear, and we all so face it . . . Marriage is not, as it is made out conventionally, sheer joy. It is, like all life’s valuable things, new pain. The best hope for us . . . is that we both recognise that . . . I offer you, I think, as free a marriage as it lies in the power of a man to offer a woman . . . I ask you to give what you want to give, no more . . . I hope you will never be condemned to regard marriage as in any sense an impoverishment . . . If it is, you should give it up. There are sacred duties one owes oneself and others through oneself . . . If when I die I shall have destroyed a few shams, done a very little for the better understanding of that social system which we must master as we have mastered Nature . . . I shall die satisfied . . . I know that your work is more to you than I am . . . for love . . . is good but it is long after our own work, the work the War imposed on us, the task imposed on us by our knowledge; a knowledge gained in bitter experience.’

Yes, I thought, that was really the point; whatever might be true for our successors, for us love and marriage must be subordinate to work. Yet surely to sacrifice them completely, and in fear of their burdens to give them up, was to deny the vital principle which insisted that ideas and philosophies, like life itself, must be carried on?

‘For me,’ I told G., ‘the feminist problem ranks with your economic problem. Just as you want to discover how a man can maintain a decent standard of culture on a small income, so I want to solve the problem of how a married woman, without being inordinately rich, can have children and yet maintain her intellectual and spiritual independence as well as having . . . time for the pursuit of her own career. For the unmarried woman there is now no problem provided that she has the will to work. For a married woman without children there is only a psychological problem - a problem of prejudice - which can be overcome by determination. But the other problem - that of the woman with children - remains the most vital. I am not sure that by refusing to have children one even solves the problem for one’s self; and one certainly does not solve it for the coming womanhood of the race. But the need to solve it is so urgent that it is raised to the level of those cases where it is expedient that one man - and more than one man - should die for the people.’

For weeks on end we exchanged similar letters, discussing how best I could combine writing and political work with temporary residence in America and the production of a family, and how we could help and not hinder each other’s ambitions and occupations. Never before had I realised so forcibly as in meditating upon this problem - a problem by no means mine alone, but intimately bound up with the sociology of the future - how time had moved on for the world and myself since 1915. When I sat before the stove in the dark hut at Camberwell and considered marrying Roland, the personal difficulties of the situation had not occurred to me as fundamental, and, indeed, hardly as difficulties. In those days the War, with its dreadful and constant intimations of human mortality, made life itself infinitely more important than any way of living; in comparison with the tense anxieties of that moment, that remote post-war future had seemed curiously simple. In any case, a college first-year student temporarily transformed into a V.A.D.

probationer could hardly be said to have a career to defend, but after six years of learning, and writing, and lecturing, the proposition appeared very different. Its solution was one which went far beyond both the person and the hour; the future of women, like the future of peace, could be influenced by individual decisions in a way that had never seemed possible when all individuality was quenched and drowned in the dark tide of the War.

Marriage, for any woman who considered all its implications both for herself and her contemporaries, could never, I now knew, mean a ‘living happily ever after’; on the contrary it would involve another protracted struggle, a new fight against the tradition which identified wifehood with the imprisoning limitations of a kitchen and four walls, against the prejudices and regulations which still made success in any field more difficult for the married woman than for the spinster, and penalised motherhood by demanding from it the surrender of disinterested intelligence, the sacrifice of that vitalising experience only to be found in the pursuit of an independent profession. But tired as I was of conflict, I felt that I must not shrink from that fight, nor abandon in cowardice the attempt to prove, as no theories could ever satisfactorily prove without examples, that marriage and motherhood need never tame the mind, nor swamp and undermine ability and training, nor trammel and domesticise political perception and social judgment. To-day, as never before, it was urgent for individual women to show that life was enriched, mentally and spiritually as well as physically and socially, by marriage and children; that these experiences rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world’s pulse, to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the constructive ends of a political civilisation.

The demonstration would not, I was well aware, be easy; for me and my contemporaries our old enemies - the Victorian tradition of womanhood, a carefully trained conscience, a sheltered youth, an imperfect education, lost time, blasted years - were still there and always would be; we seemed to be for ever slaying them, and they to be for ever rising again. Yet even these handicaps I no longer resented, for I was ceasing at last to feel bitterness against the obstacles that had impeded for half a lifetime my fight for freedom to work and to create. Dimly I perceived that it was these very handicaps and my struggle against them which had lifted life out of mediocrity, given it glamour, made it worth while; that the individuals from whom destiny demands too much are infinitely more vital than those of whom it asks too little. In one sense I was my war; my war was I; without it I should do nothing and be nothing. If marriage made the whole fight harder, so much the better; it would become part of my war and as this I would face it, and show that, however stubborn any domestic problem, a lasting solution could be found if only men and women would seek it together.

There remained now only the final and acute question of loyalty to the dead; of how far I and the other women of my generation who deliberately accepted a new series of emotional relationships thereby destroyed yet again the men who had once uncomplainingly died for them in the flesh. Up and down the narrow, solitary roads through Regent’s Park, or round and round the proletarian paths of Paddington Recreation Ground, I walked pondering this ultimate uncertainty. In spite of myself and the grief for their unfulfilled lives that no time could diminish, a gulf had stretched between my spirit and theirs; the world in which at the Armistice I seemed to have no part had closed in and absorbed me - or was it, rather, that my own view of my destiny had widened to the dimensions of its needs?

If the dead could come back, I wondered, what would they say to me? Roland - you who wrote in wartime France of ‘another stranger’ - would you think me, because I marry him, forgetful and unfaithful? Edward, Victor, Geoffrey, would you have me only remember you, only dwell in those days that we shared so long ago - or would you wish my life to go on? In spite of the War, which destroyed so much hope, so much beauty, so much promise, life is still here to be lived; so long as I am in the world, how can I ignore the obligation to be part of it, cope with its problems, suffer claims and interruptions? The surge and swell of its movements, its changes, its tendencies, still mould me and the surviving remnant of my generation whether we wish it or not, and no one now living will ever understand so clearly as ourselves, whose lives have been darkened by the universal breakdown of reason in 1914, how completely the future of civilised humanity depends upon the success of our present halting endeavours to control our political and social passions, and to substitute for our destructive impulses the vitalising authority of constructive thought. To rescue mankind from that domination by the irrational which leads to war could surely be a more exultant fight than war itself, a fight capable of enlarging the souls of men and women with the same heightened consciousness of living, and uniting them in one dedicated community whose common purpose transcends the individual. Only the purpose itself would be different, for its achievement would mean, not death, but life.

To look forward, I concluded, and to have courage - the courage of adventure, of challenge, of initiation, as well as the courage of endurance - that was surely part of fidelity. The lover, the brother, the friends whom I had lost, had all in their different ways possessed this courage, and it would not be utterly wasted if only, through those who were left, it could influence the generation, still to be, and convince them that, so long as the spirit of man remained undefeatable, life was worth having and worth giving. If somehow I could make my contemporaries, and especially those who, like myself, had once lost heart, share this belief; if perhaps, too, I could have children, and pass on to them the desire for this courage and the impulse to redeem the tragic mistakes of the generation which gave them birth, then Roland and Edward and Victor and Geoffrey would not have died vainly after all. It was only the past that they had taken to their graves, and with them, although I should always remember, I must let it go.

. . . Under the sway
Of death the past’s enormous disarray
Lies hushed and dark.

So Henley had written: and so, with my eyes on the future, I must now resolve.

12

At last the June weather, golden and benign, had come; the Ruhr was all but free of its invaders, and the days, busy with preparations of a kind that could not be delayed until G.’s return and the final week before our marriage, rushed past with the sudden alarming rapidity of an express train. The planning of a honeymoon in South-Eastern Europe - not Germany this time, I told him; it was too harsh and bitter a country for a newly married husband and wife with their own problems to discuss - involved getting a new passport, even though, with G.’s ready co-operation, I had decided to keep and use my own name after marriage.

‘Really,’ I complained to him, after discovering that all the visas expensively obtained for travelling as a spinster in 1924 would have to be acquired again if I wished to revisit Austria and Hungary as a married woman in 1925, ‘the legal disadvantages of being your mistress would be small compared with those of being your wife.’ But I determined to have my passport made out in my maiden name; and after a brief contest it was, and still is.

We had arranged to spend the first year of our marriage together in America, a new world which would symbolise for me the breaking away from my thraldom to the sorrows of the old. After that some expedient, we both knew, would have to be thought out by which partial residence in England, where my real field of work lay, would be possible for me; an experiment in that type of arrangement which I later described in books and articles as ‘semi-detached marriage’, and which rendered feasible a profession for both partners even when one had a post abroad. To Winifred, in the midst of other plans to round off appropriately the years which had bound me to Oxford by taking my M.A. at a Degree-giving two days before my marriage - an intention in which I had been confirmed by the immediate response of the first family acquaintance to whom I mentioned it: ‘How
can
you find time to think about a thing like
that
in the week you’re going to be MARRIED !’ - I outlined schemes and suggestions to which, while making her own plans for a long lecture-tour in South Africa, she listened with a half-amused, half-sad incredulity.

‘Dear Winifred, I shall never be parted from you for very long,’ I mentally insisted, undeterred by her scepticism; ‘I never can be. You represent in my life the same element of tender, undistressing permanence that Edward represented, and in the end, when passion is spent and adventures are over, this is the thing that comes out on top.’

Our wedding-day was fixed for June 27th - the same date on which, ten years earlier, I had gone, untried and young and hopeful, as a new V.A.D. to take my part in the War. I had long intended, if I ever did marry, to go to a register office, but when G. explained to me that civil marriages were not recognised by the Catholic community, a memory suddenly came to me of Sunday mornings early in 1916, when I had knelt grieving beneath the tall, pointed arches of a Catholic church while the half-comprehended music of the Mass drugged my senses with anodyne sweetness. And I thought: ‘We’ll be married at St James’s, Spanish Place, and I’ll carry, not lilies nor white heather, but the tall pink roses with a touch of orange in their colouring and the sweetest scent in the world, that Roland gave me one New Year’s Eve a lifetime ago. When the wedding is over, I’ll give them to Roland’s mother; I know G. will understand why.’