The World as I Found It (73 page)

Dora burst out of the room then, but five minutes later she returned to find him slumped in a chair, clearly as devastated as she was by the viciousness of this exchange. Never in ten years of marriage had they fought like this, and that day they vowed, as they had vowed before, never to let it happen again. Dora hated the way she was acting. It made her feel so crazed and driven, so horribly biological, falling against her will into the stereotypical role of spurned wife turned shrew. But she couldn't help herself. I don't want to fight with you, she insisted. I'm not trying to call the kettle black — it's my fault, too — but you egg me on. You seem to want to bring out the very worst in me, Bertie. Really you do.

He apologized then. He had tried terribly hard to avoid bitterness and hypocrisy. He did not expect Dora to be faithful when he wasn't, but illegitimate children were another matter, another matter entirely. This, he had written, went against the biological basis for marriage and could be a source of intolerable strain. And with modern contraceptive techniques, he added, there was no need for this to happen.

But it had happened. Like him, Dora was too open and principled — too defiant — to lie, and he believed her when she told him it had been an accident. Nonetheless, it did seem possible to him that Dora had subconsciously let down her guard, so badly had she wanted another child. But then so had he. That's what hurt most. Another man had given his wife what he couldn't, and after several years of trying. Worse, he had all but asked for it. On the lecture circuit in Chicago the summer before, during one of those inevitable late-night depressions in his hotel room, he had written her saying that if he couldn't do the job, then maybe someone else ought to do it.

On a purely rational plane — as a simple means to produce a desired end — this might have been the practical thing to suggest. Within the scope of their beliefs, it might have even been politically courageous — proof against outdated moral systems and the commonplaces of bourgeois marriage. But there is nothing political about the emotions, and Russell realized all too soon that there was no rationalizing another man's child in his wife's womb. It broke his heart. In his books Russell had championed the need for freedom and openness in marriage and warned of the alternative — jealousy, poisonous jealousy, and all that it engenders: man jealous of man, family of family, nation of nation, the whole prurient, pent-up legacy of paternalism, colonial oppression, hatred and war. It was the jealous cuckold, the shamed and raging man or nation made a fool, who was the murderer of civilization. Jealousy was the misery of miseries, a vestige of man's savagery, like the appendix or foreskin, forever useless or festering. And what was the origin of male jealousy in marriage, he had written, but the fear of false parentage? Robbed of his power of parentage, the would-be father was finally a nothing, a bounding cur that doesn't know his offspring from what dribbled down the leg of another.

Yet what was he now, thought Russell, if not jealous — stupidly, spitefully, maliciously jealous? For years, he had been a teacher of men, urging civilization to reach for its highest. But here, in himself, he felt his hopes for civilization die. The child was an intruder: it was not his, and in his heart he knew that nothing would ever make it so. It shouldn't have mattered, he thought. For a genuinely caring species that truly loved life and didn't cling to vanity, it would not have mattered. Even with certain
animals
it did not matter. And yet for him and his kind it did matter. It did, indeed.

As for Dora, Russell tended to attitudinize: great men require many loves, and ten years with any woman was about his limit. His love for her, while genuine, had never been especially passionate. Certainly he had never loved her with the intensity with which he had loved Ottoline or, later, Colette. He still regularly corresponded with Ottoline and Colette. At fifty-eight, Ottoline was now too old for him. Not
quite
as old as he, but well past her prime — certainly too old, by his book, for affairs. Colette was still ripe for him, though, still beautiful and available. Funny, he found himself thinking more and more of Colette lately, rooting through old letters and photographs, wondering how it might have been with her. They had come close to marrying in 1920. The problem was children. Realizing he was getting no younger, he had wanted to start a family immediately, but Colette had wanted to wait a year or two. Surely, he could wait a year or two, she said. He wasn't that old yet.

Dora, on the other hand, was eager to start a family. Dora was also ready to accompany him to China, whereas Colette had been again unsure, begging him for more time to think about it, if only a week. Thinking about Colette now, with his second marriage a shambles, Russell wondered why he had been in such an all-fired hurry. He couldn't wait. The next thing he knew, he and Dora were on a steamer bound for China. Dora was a good, sturdy woman to travel with, fearless, resourceful and free. Russell was her hero. They were not mere lovers, she thought, they were socialist comrades, and she imagined them striding side by side into a revolutionary future, banners waving as they stoutly sang
Ich hatt' einen Kameraden
. The Chinese certainly liked the indefatigable Miss Black, who, if anything, was more defiant in her views than Russell was. The frozen looks, the snubs they got from the Europeans for sharing the same quarters and “subverting” the Chinese — these didn't bother an inveterate bourgeois basher like Dora one bit. They can all bloody well stuff it, she liked to say, and that pretty much summed up the couple's attitude. Skidding over the cheap glaze of social convention that gilds human society, they careened across the Orient with all the careless aplomb of geese landing on a frozen pond. And by the time they returned to England a year later, the die was cast: Dora was six months pregnant. She very much wanted the child but saw no reason to marry. However, the eventual lord was adamant that his child not enter life as a bastard, and six weeks before the boy was born, Russell had his way.

Despite their present tensions, Russell still loved Dora, in a peculiar, somewhat possessive way. Nor did he entirely rule out the possibility that some rough
modus vivendi
might eventually be worked out, if only for the children's sake. Russell told himself that he should adopt a wait-and-see attitude. And he must, in any event, try to be decent. It was an odd, rubbed life that he led, and he was long used to a heavy load of confusion and ambiguity. His home, after all, was a school, and his personal life and even his family sometimes seemed like an unwieldy public experiment. Russell was aware that by dissolving his marriage he would be making a public admission of failure, which was to say he would be turning his marriage into a public event, within the stream of public discourse. To be sure, this was a lonely, bile-producing and quite humbling prospect, but he nonetheless found it a comfort that he could make this admission of failure under the guise of his own public persona. This public persona was often a burden and a nuisance but it also offered escape, affording him a sort of second skin — a slick chameleon suit that he could wriggle out of when it became psychically necessary. The public and the critics assailed a mere empty suit, a distant, distinctly public self, not his real self. In this context, personal pain as such had become a somewhat abstract concept to Russell.
He
was not himself in pain;
he
was actively searching and discovering in the hope that from his private pain and discontents he might extrapolate some broader prescriptions for the public weal. Above all, he told himself that he must be honest and consistent and not hypocritical. After all, if he and his wife — the fundamental social unit — couldn't broker a civil solution to their problems, could he expect any better of the world?

Dora felt these same pressures and ambiguities — the family as part of a school, the school as family and social experiment. This tribal creature, the Family School, was easily as much her creation as his, but she, unlike him, was less burdened and blinkered by a public sense of herself. Like him, she wanted to be decent and reasonably discreet, but even with the tremendous pains they took to conceal their tensions from John and Kate and the rest of the school, they were abundantly evident and only begat further tensions, further politics. It got so bad that there were days when Russell and Dora would have to call a truce so they could emotionally regroup. This was what happened following their quarrel about hiring the young Belgian.

Wait, Dora had said, taking his hand that afternoon. Just sit down here with me, dear. Just let's rest here for a few minutes.

That “dear” rattled him. They had not slept together, or even touched each other in weeks, and he was tense as Dora eased him back on the creaking bed. In its way, it was an act odder and more improbable than sex, and more eerily intimate, how they lay there together, talking and staring at the ceiling. For half an hour they lay there, trying to summon enough feeling that they might walk peacefully downstairs to dinner without upsetting the thirty-five children and thirteen adults who would all be watching them, the putative “parents” of this unwieldy extended family.

A month ago this had happened. Two days later, Lily had come to the school, and Russell, in his unhappiness, found himself bitten, then stunned, then absolutely captivated by her.

Dora, meanwhile, was looking forward to his annual summer departure for America, praying that he would be gone before the baby arrived. As a matter of patrician principle, he had offered (though clearly without much appetite) to remain with Dora until the baby came. Quite sincerely, she thanked him but said that this would not be necessary. Higgins would be there with her.

Higgins, an American journalist and socialist in his mid-thirties, had been with Dora on and off during her pregnancy, but at nearly two weeks this was his longest visit, with no end in sight. Russell had tried to be decent, but he could not get past his jealous rage at this usurper twenty years his junior who was stealing his family. Russell was fond of belittling Higgins around Dora, with digs about his sponging, his parlor socialism and lackluster career as a stringer for the sleazy Hearst papers. Even more effective were Russell's gibes about how Higgins was now licking the boots of Henry Luce for a berth on his new magazine,
Fortune
.

Russell hardly missed a beat when Dora pointed out that he himself had written for Hearst until he had made the mistake of declining the magnate's imperial invitation to be his guest at San Simeon. It didn't matter that Higgins was a respected journalist and activist, or that he had offered Dora money, which she had declined. Russell didn't care about his distortions. Lately all he cared about was that Higgins vacate for those three days that Wittgenstein and Moore would be there. In fact, once he left in two weeks for America, Russell said, Higgins could stay to his heart's content. Three or four days! That was all he was asking! Dora refused.

I want him with
me
! she insisted, the more to emphasize the fact that he, Russell, had deserted her. Tell your guests anything you want. He won't compromise you.

It was the morning his guests were to arrive, and Dora, who had been having a hard pregnancy, was ill in bed with a splitting headache. So Russell did what he thought was the sensible thing: he went straight to Higgins about the matter.

Russell caught Higgins in the upstairs hall, on his way to Dora's room with a glass of water. Russell was casual and businesslike. He even managed a feeble smile as he explained, I'm only asking for three days. I'll be happy to pay for your hotel. And, by all means, if you feel the need, you can certainly come by. I really think it would be best for all — and Dora especially. I do think it would be rather less strained, don't you?

Tall and balding, pettishly fingering what Russell called his Public Enemy mustache, Higgins said at last:

It's Dora's decision. If she says so, fine — I'll leave.

But as you well know, Dora
won't
agree, said Russell, with an edge to his voice. That's why I'm asking you. He hung back momentarily, then added, I am trying to be decent about this, you know. I think I've been uncommonly decent about everything. You might try putting yourself in my place for once.

I'm very sorry, said Higgins coldly. Dora is my concern, and Dora needs some aspirin. Now, if you'll excuse me …

With his comparative youth and size, Higgins was more than Russell's match. But as the American walked by him, Russell, in a flash of rage, fantasized throwing him over the stair rail — fantasized but then watched in astonishment as his young rival strode into his wife's room and quietly shut the door.

O
NE MORE PROBLEM
cropped up that afternoon before Wittgenstein and the Moores arrived.

Dora was still in bed with a headache. The children were outside playing, and Russell was secluded in his tower study, struggling to complete his
Parents' Magazine
article, “Are Parents Bad for Children?”

In the downstairs study, meanwhile, one of the teachers was reading when she felt a cold drop of water strike her on the leg. Looking up, she saw beads of water dribbling along the ceiling. Then there came a crash as the chandelier in the next room collapsed under a hundredweight of water. The teacher ran into the hallway, where she saw water lapping down the stairs like a lazy falls. Running up, she found the next floor completely flooded and water slopping out of the lavatory, where two sinks were stoppered and the faucets wrenched on full blast.

In his study upstairs, Russell was just becoming aware of the commotion when he heard Dora below, banging on the bolted door. Hurrying down and opening the door, he met Dora's distraught face as one of the teachers came splattering down the hall with a pile of soaked books. Dora was holding her throbbing temples with her thumb and index finger, and now he, too, felt sick.