THE NEW MACHIAVELLI by H. G. Wells

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
by H. G. Wells
CONTENTS
BOOK THE FIRST
THE MAKING OF A MAN
I. CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
II. BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
III. SCHOLASTIC
IV. ADOLESCENCE
BOOK THE SECOND
MARGARET
I. MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
II. MARGARET IN LONDON
III. MARGARET IN VENICE
IV. THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
BOOK THE THIRD
THE HEART OF POLITICS
I. THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
II. SEEKING ASSOCIATES
III. SECESSION
IV. THE BESETTING OF SEX
BOOK THE FOURTH
ISABEL
I. LOVE AND SUCCESS
II. THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
III. THE BREAKING POINT
BOOK THE FIRST
THE MAKING OF A MAN
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
1
Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my
energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does
not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of
living, and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the
life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in
my head. My mind has been full of confused protests and
justifications. In any case I should have found difficulties enough
in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it has added
greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain
Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much the
age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of
his mind, very much as I have wanted to do. He wrote about the
relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual
character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a
deep rut in the road of my intention. It has taken me far astray.
It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long
drives into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa
across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I
began a laboured and futile imitation of "The Prince." I sat up
late last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at last made a
little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to
begin again clear this morning.
But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting
those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now
that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent,
that he still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I
claim kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, in
partial intimation of the matter of my story. He takes me with
sympathy not only by reason of the dream he pursued and the humanity
of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature. His vices come
in, essential to my issue. He is dead and gone, all his immediate
correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance,
leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and
upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its
salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be
exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that
seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to
one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling
against the red that I have to tell.
The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius
are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and
peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought
in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered
marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of
muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions
that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with
passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender
beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered
by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who
reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering
response. But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily
entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.
It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he
lived in retirement upon his property after the fall of the
Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his
conspiracy still lurking in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop
his dreaming. Then it was "The Prince" was written. All day he
went about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with
his family, gave vent to everyday passions. He would sit in the
shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company,
or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter
meditations. In the evening he returned home and went to his study.
At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes covered
with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put
on his "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling
and getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets,
sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.
I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the
light of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter
of "The Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of
his animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such
lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of
the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His
Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of
the continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws
complete him. They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to
Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and whose
correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished; or to
Confucius who travelled China in search of a Prince he might
instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages.
They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and
Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the
Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition.
They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes
his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and
less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and
at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the
desk.
That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist
in my story. But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the
manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir
and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French
Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.
Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd
decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man,
himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that
was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men
turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--
what shall I call it?--secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had
some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it
was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.
Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my
mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various times I
redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the
Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor
who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.
Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances
and possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its
own accord towards irony because--because, although at first I did
not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal
was unfair. The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has
vanished from the world. The commonweal is one man's absolute
estate and responsibility no more. In Machiavelli's time it was
indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair. But the days of the
Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all
power are ended. We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more
complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a
servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince. No
magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for
secretarial hopes.
In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense
wonderful how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited
man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among
the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the
deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits
except by theft and crime. No King, no council, can seize and
torture me; no Church, no nation silence me. Such powers of
ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is not
because power has diminished, but because it has increased and
become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and
specialised. It is no longer a negative power we have, but
positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond
all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they
had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.
The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are
being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the
former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical
science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I
measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,
the power now available for human service, the merely physical
increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's
disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling,
incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,
experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this
development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the
disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate
resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with
dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the
heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches
at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the
old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a
flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen
fellowship about him. The last written dedication of all those I
burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially
constructive passion--in any man. . . .
There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my
world and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if
they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very
chamber of the statesman.
2
In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region
of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the
vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of today
have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give
them in the state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed
earth bears its crops. Apart from their function of fertility they
gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and
wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought of women outside
with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write,
dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world is burthened
with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of
women. They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver
candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen
and turns to discuss his writing with them.
It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively
portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is
to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the
telling of my own story. In my life I have paralleled very closely
the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me. I
began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and
dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after
misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man
and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of
the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my
career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.
But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left
not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.
3
Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one
step further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to
me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered
and ended for ever.
I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a
stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides
are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of
Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains
hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving
on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet
with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from
Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the
splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to
and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of
that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not
for ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the
clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I
go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit
again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars
below the House--dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I
think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that
electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I see the
stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency
after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting. . . .
It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no
more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate
version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed
your partial judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone
table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure,
splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper
before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his
exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during
the career that has ended now in my divorce.
I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my
party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red
blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for
ever.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
1
I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was
a little boy in knickerbockers.
When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back
to me the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up
to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and
defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they
call it, of dark stained wood. Here and there against the wall are
trunks and boxes. There are cupboards on either side of the
fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and
rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the
South of England. Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral
rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait
of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of
intricate detail and much vigour of coloring. It is the floor I
think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land,
spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are
steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare
brown surround were the water channels and open sea of that
continent of mine.
I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have
not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a
prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three
nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made
by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the
toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks
made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by
two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to
correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds. I could
build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite
enough for every engineering project I could undertake. I could
build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels;
I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over
crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of
whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the
high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined
population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors
and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who
write about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common
theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and
cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink
and glory of the performance and the final conflagration. I had
such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from
it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an
incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of
the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and
steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies,
and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them,
and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the
hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And
there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of
nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender
from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pillboxes,
or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread
and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the
beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places
that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on the way.
That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget
by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--
I have never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father
helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a
hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of
an ancient trunk. Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.
(Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation--one my
mother trod on--and their land became a wilderness again and was
ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)
And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable
thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus
brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks
concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines
of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of survivors
from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the
uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privettwigs
from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders. By
these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro,
bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic
hills--one tunnel was three volumes long--defended as occasion
required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at
last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the
cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion
and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or
twelve. I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the
retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I
played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;
through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school
and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them all
not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused
together. A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went;
one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled,
would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a
detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me
by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt,
that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
cannon in the garden.
I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots
that went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they
stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow
growth of whole days of civilised development. I still remember the
hatred and disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given
warnings. Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend,
plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling
them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and
swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial
Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into
the fire.
Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say,
"you ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until
you've sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do
it I will."
And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
swiping strokes of house-flannel.
That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear
lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore springsided
boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world,
with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that
were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial
Road. She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me
for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity!
fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to
understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which
she came to me. Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the
bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a
Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a
wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know whether a
thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon,
and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of
God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
ark rather elaborately done.
Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of
the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.
You made your beasts--which were all the ark lot really,
provisionally conceived as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a
central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a
time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitterlitter
over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah)
strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks
along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly
Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army
sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.
My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my
mother disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my
little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable
understanding and sympathy.
It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of
my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable
for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled
paper that is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you
see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your
cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a
special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting
expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the
city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and
his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.
And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the
inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood
except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for
himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and
Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war
and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end;
Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and
Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived
conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of
adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we had Wood's
NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE
ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of
unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's
NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other
informing books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also,
with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and
one or two other important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed
to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays
and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.
And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that
fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a
pin.
2
My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and
with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher,
taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under
the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools;
and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a
hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three
palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead
Station.
They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs
coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect
vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so,
he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant
would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional
tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every
storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which
would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs
went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for
occupation. The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical
design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and
the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much
variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses
at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable
tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and
devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to
the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of
the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which
my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated
vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner
in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the
back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that
yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and
imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes
of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for
my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was
thirteen.
My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not
always good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster
and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father
had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and
diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small
private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.
Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a
science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these
days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass
of the English population, and had thrown himself into science
teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if
transitory zeal and success.
I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married
when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw
only the last decadent phase of his educational career.
The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness
and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive,
more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.
The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how
many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and
early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient
machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was
ruled by a strange body called a Local Board--it was the Age of
Boards--and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the
breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and
devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there
were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics
before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading
tentacles of the London County Council.
It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State
to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within
my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic
people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of
the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could
neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,
were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the
population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools
flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the
country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and
dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great
centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the
factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and
under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary
contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight
against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs
clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of
indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they
should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust
of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the
general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about
the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train
teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and
provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt
MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was
manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in
default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money
payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in
Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known
technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination
results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to
send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be
established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was
created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grantearning
was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the
task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the
most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also
were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared
that injustice might be done. Year after year these eminent persons
set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the
increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the
national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were
careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing
the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a
result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and
permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the
practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,
but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grantearning
assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine
education whatever.
Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of
the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science
prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by
making graduates in arts and priests in the established church
Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private
enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according
to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private
enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of
competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in
Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce
text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of
knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and
models and instructions that should give precisely the method and
gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book
was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the
examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former
years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the
teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of
grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other
methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with
questions and then dictated model replies.
That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes
as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,
and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,
smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible
formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of
desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to
a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and
deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in
coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or
arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in
which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus
prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the
Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to
pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,
because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen
burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second
they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger
the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.
Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover
they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant
learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite
early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the
unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is
fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for
example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic
Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a
glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue
to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face
and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And
I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a
retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and
may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything
of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium
chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says
"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady
student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.
Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite
understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own
undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference
for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an
arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing
whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,
and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it
when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond
illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you
did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in
this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed
from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life
without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then
my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be
copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any
exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as
"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."
Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once
sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,
"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"
"The precipitate is."
"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"
"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why--" he extended
his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.
"Like that," he said.
I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment
after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and
resumed his discourse.
3
My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any
human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest
manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own
spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do
anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were
extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes
for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the
peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical
theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.
The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near
the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I
was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and
assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up
both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour
alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And
for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every
meal.
A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does
not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its
own. Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to
trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged
and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross
purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew
wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified
nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The
peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the
beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a
spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for
being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the
catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your
cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its
occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,
because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one
watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome
spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.
In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the
consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he
erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and
never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by
means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2,
and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the
abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe
or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a
singularly desolate and disorderly appearance. He took steps
towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the
Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time. He
hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else
became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a
man less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he
had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out
his patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men
after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or
social organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He
talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my
limitations. Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.
"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.
More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.
His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off
in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would
darken. He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.
"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was
at an end.
I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively
enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff
all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah!
AAAAAAH!"
My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing
on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in
the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he
sought.
"If you say such things--"
He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he
would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the
towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the
towel! I'll give up everything, I tell you--everything!" . . .
At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I
was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it
happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still
echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for
all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery
of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or
so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall
slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great
wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"
The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold
tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable
aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned
for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows,
flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe
with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame. Something of the awe
of that moment returns to me as I write of it.
Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like
reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed
for an instant with bitter resentment--" Pandering to cabbages."
4
That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is
that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston
and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green,
and the other is that my father as he went along talked about
himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he
had done with it. He monologued so that at times he produced an
effect of weird world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at
that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain
to me. It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos
of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in
his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for
the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.
"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I
start gardening?
"I suppose man was created to mind a garden. . . But the Fall let
us out of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created
for? . . .
"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me,
you know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about
with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself
to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.
"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good
Plan and stick to it. Find out what life is about--I never have--
and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a
puzzle. . . .
"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white
elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and
green. Conferva and soot. . . . Property, they are! . . . Beware
of Things, Dick, beware of Things! Before you know where you are
you are waiting on them and minding them. They'll eat your life up.
Eat up your hours and your blood and energy! When those houses came
to me, I ought to have sold them--or fled the country. I ought to
have cleared out. Sarcophagi--eaters of men! Oh! the hours and
days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!
The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over me. I stank of
it. It made me ill. It isn't living--it's minding. . . .
"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this
country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all
those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that
tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it
like a dog tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about
it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by. Look at that noticeboard!
One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other
rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows why! Look at the
weeds in it. Look at the mended fence! . . . There's no property
worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All
these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
rubbish. . . .
"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.
I ought to have made a better thing of life.
"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my
leg. They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only
began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,
if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest. . . .
"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's
a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU
be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any
one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you
make one. Get education, get a good education. Fight your way to
the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no
good at digging and property minding. There isn't a neighbour in
Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I
are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those
blithering houses come to you--don't have 'em. Give them away!
Dynamite 'em--and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if
I can, Dick, but remember what I say." . . .
So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,
yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,
with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and
flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of
Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon he hated
Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He had no illusions
about Bromstead or himself. I have the clearest impression of him
in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of
his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and
sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his
talk from his original exasperation. . . .
This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at
the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has
become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't
understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me
two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with
it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained
fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion
and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about
us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he
called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do
not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people
nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the Fabians expound it.
He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand,
but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his
contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his
age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of
his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this
Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a
world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it. . . .
5
When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up
with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings
and paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece
with that.
Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and
something of its history. It is the quality and history of a
thousand places round and about London, and round and about the
other great centres of population in the world. Indeed it is in a
measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we
who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still
of evolving order.
First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years
ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung
out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a
social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its
own. At that time its population numbered a little under two
thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades
serving agriculture. There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist,
a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a
veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns. Round
and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats, whose
owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the
very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough to hold the
whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a
large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and
everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at
last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the
place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community
in those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle
of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much
cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a
pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and
the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant
cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement
of the entire population. It was very much the same sort of place
that it had been for three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van
Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old
houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved
and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more
carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient
familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have
struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the
swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the
protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,--
both from the material point of view very little things. A Rip van
Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater
changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of
the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses,
the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed
him, and suchlike details. The place would have had the same
boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still
itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has "filled
out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.
But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to
improve material things. In another part of England ingenious
people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were
producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had
hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or preparation,
increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was
coming to the strength of horses and men. "Power," all
unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social
body.
Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost
inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have
amazed their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles
much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make
up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too
heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of
wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to
trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods
abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities
from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in
bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances
replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic, paper-making
and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and tile
appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead
thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively
enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover,
only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the
Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of
several daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be too
tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new road cut off its
worst contortions. Residential villas appeared occupied by retired
tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others
of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested
in joint-stock enterprises. First one and then several boys'
boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,--my
grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the northwest,
was making itself felt more and more.
But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first
trickle of the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north
they were casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way
to the production of steel on a large scale, applying power in
factories. Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before
the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High
Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front
doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square
glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps--
previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching
inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk, it long
remained talk,--of gas. The gasworks came in 1834, and about that
date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for
the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the real
suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still
engaged in business.
And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal;
there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the
east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural
placidities that had formerly come to the very borders of the High
Street were broken up north, west and south, by new roads. This
enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses,
irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the
same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and with much
hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works. Rates
became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several
chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in
commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the
residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
The population doubled again and doubled again, and became
particularly teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about
the deep-rutted, muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks,
Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goods-yard. Weekly
properties, that is to say small houses built by small property
owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the Cage Fields, and
presently extended right up the London Road. A single national
school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to
collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy
offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages of
Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely
four miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar
distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect
of locality or community had gone from these places long before I
was born; hardly any one knew any one; there was no general meeting
place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by
gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches
were incapable of a quarter of the population. One or two local
papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local
Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested
in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian" as one
expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a
weak tradition of some local quality that embraced us all. Then the
parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious
area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery
Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful
varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas
with a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a
supply of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone,
marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in
elaborate detail the entire population of Bromstead as one found it
in 1750.
The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was
in the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second
railway with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage
followed when I was ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are
of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed
open and littered with iron pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of
men peeped at and seen toiling away deep down in excavations, of
hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and
builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drainpipes.
Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of undergrowth and
left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar tattered
dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have seen
happier days.
The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It
came into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden,
splashing brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a
mill. (Above the weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing
in splendid clumps, and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and
crimson spikes of hollyhock, and blue suggestions of wonderland.)
From the pool at the foot of this initial cascade it flowed in a
leisurely fashion beside a footpath,--there were two pretty thatchcd
cottages on the left, and here were ducks, and there were willows on
the right,--and so came to where great trees grew on high banks on
either hand and bowed closer, and at last met overhead. This part
was difficult to reach because of an old fence, but a little boy
might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by wading. Either I have
actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has described them so
accurately to me that he inserted them into my memory. I remember
them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never penetrated at
all, but followed the field path with my mother and met the stream
again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows. The
Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between
steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the
cattle waded and drank. Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary
rushes grew in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On
rare occasions of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers
at the water's edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds,
and in them fishes lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen
and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps;
in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly
places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine--to
vanish in a flash at one's shadow. In one place, too, were Rapids,
where the stream woke with a start from a dreamless brooding into
foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well do I remember that
half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their
reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we left
Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new
drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first
acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do
with that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at
first did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy
might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon
that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's
meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed
out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of
working-class cottages. The roads came,--horribly; the houses
followed. They seemed to rise in the night. People moved into them
as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives,
and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again
from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping
and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty
cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river only when
unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
surface water. . . .
That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of
Bromstead. The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative
life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with
my mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it
indicative of all the other things that had happened just before my
time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening. I realised
that building was the enemy. I began to understand why in every
direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into
litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every
path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either
white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites,
proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating
passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.
It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time
and what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that
even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and
growing disorder. The serene rhythms of the old established
agriculture, I see now, were everywhere being replaced by
cultivation under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceased to be
repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or chunks of
corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed
more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew
before the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts of
Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that
ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't remember barbed
wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until
later), and in trespass boards that used vehement language. Broken
glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheap glass, cheap
tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world
quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the fulness of
enjoyment was past.
I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient
balance, by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's
intimations, it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude
of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive
than the last, and none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and
satisfactory completion. Each left a legacy of products, houses,
humanity, or what not, in its wake. It was a sort of progress that
had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented
pace nowhere in particular.
No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a
hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly
and wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things
are necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves
to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms
the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard
methods. The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some
of them very impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come
to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants
cherish? It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may
not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a
scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live
in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or
railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem,
except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and
the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?
That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great
new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;
stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one
possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my
father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.
The whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is
a year ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an
immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the
builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old
fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless
contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle
slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another
across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are now
quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the
railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and
there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass,
advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike
solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in
them. . . .
Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted
if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
6
Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these
give the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of
them all rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring
sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes
and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother
returned from church to find my father dead. He had been pruning
the grape vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the
sill of the third-floor windows--at house-painting times he had
borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint--and he had in his
own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit
ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd
purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up this arrangement by means
of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment--
rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly
bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression
of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a
tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had
been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him
hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into
the garden and so discovered him.
"Arthur!" I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in
her voice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And--SUNDAY!"
I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her
voice roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had
always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another
enigma. Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of
him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and
clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly,
too astonished for feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried,
pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"
I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into
the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an
immense fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my
childish world. My father was lying dead before my eyes. . . . I
perceived that my mother was helpless and that things must he done.
"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him
indoors."
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SCHOLASTIC
1
My formal education began in a small preparatory school in
Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The charge for my
instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father
with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.
I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school
work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable
appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a
scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a
scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's
death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds
from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with
a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged
into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was
otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt
houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's
life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within
sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.
Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.
School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge
of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town
and outskirts of Bromstead.
It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges
and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's
notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal
Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west
with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it
added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of
gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after
supper and drew me abroad to see them better. Such walks as I took,
to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me
the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after
mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of
shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges. I have forgotten
the detailed local characteristics--if there were any--of much of
that region altogether. I was only there two years, and half my
perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with Penge I
associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight
and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the
mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops
by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains
and railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the
evening occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independentspirited
boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these
twilight prowls with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes
then just appearing in the world.
My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught
the eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four
nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back
home again until within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half
holidays at school in order to play cricket and football. This, and
a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was
fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much
leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang in the choir
at St. Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out
alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I
wrote or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I
could contrive.
Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and
uneventful place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative
temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious
solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that
usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own
view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my
meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from
my mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote chance
of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this
religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.
When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write
and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in
washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against
these things as indignities. But our minds parted very soon. She
never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never
interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had
felt towards my father.
Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not
think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness
in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the
half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,
and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I
wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards
he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after
another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.
Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in
church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was
characteristic of the large mass of the English people--for after
all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass--in
early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of going to
church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a
large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a
little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top
trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince
Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their
amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies
and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)
little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she
must have seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a
vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or
again, making preserves in the kitchen. My father's scienceteaching,
his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of
prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition
towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a
clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes,
must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent
anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would
swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She
was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to
understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her
standards, and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid
him from her. The blazing things he said rankled in her mind
unforgettably.
As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude to
nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and
not to her. "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had
got him for her.
She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally selfsubsisting
before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days I
used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a
considerable interest in the housework that our generally
servantless condition put upon her--she used to have a charwoman in
two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great
skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting
covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The
Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was
crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with
the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the
veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"
by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were
rarely open.
She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do
not think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that
dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in
them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I
remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE
WORLD. She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing
outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these
habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old
ladies.
My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and
rejoiced to watch me in the choir.
On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the
table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning
stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather
stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I
think she found these among her happy times. On such occasions she
was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of
thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my
curiosity. For like most young people I could not imagine mental
states without definite forms.
She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and
friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing
mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the
vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.
And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own
that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes
credible to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a
diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket
books. She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer
stiff little comments on casual visitors,--" Miss G. and much noisy
shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A.
delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.
She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my
father is always "A.," and I am always "D." It is manifest she
followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales,
who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy. "Pray
G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.
But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to
tell easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in
very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then
later I find such things as this: "Heard D. s----." The "s" is
evidently "swear "--" G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And
again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not
go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things,
much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men
should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!" Then trebly
underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING." Dreadful little tangle
of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to
read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more thoughtful every day."
I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think
the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for
many years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in
any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong
into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never,
and for her diary also she could find no phrases. But on a loose
half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that
follows, written very carefully. I do not know whose lines they are
nor how she came upon them. They run:--
"And if there be no meeting past the grave;
If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."
That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder
if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.
It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and
joined in a whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a
mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.
After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something
more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father. But I
found nothing. And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation
that there had been love. . . . Her love for me, on the other hand,
was abundantly expressed.
I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not
know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her.
Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind
thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as
one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.
So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and
with new requirements. It was essential to our situation that we
should fail to understand. After this space of years I have come to
realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, I
can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving
and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person. There are times
when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to
her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow
intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so
abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I could make that
return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her demand
was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as
I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely
remote. . . .
My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret
I feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and
turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I
could look back without that little twinge to two people who were
both in their different quality so good. But goodness that is
narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my
father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have
come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can
transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any
explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of
weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard and
narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least
evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their
estrangement followed from that.
These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must
needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I
suppose I am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I
hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast
by religious organisations. All my life has been darkened by
irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and
exclusions. Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I
suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the
Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the
anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality. It is their
exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that
inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one
and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical
goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty
difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a
damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the
believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful
are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books,
from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly
instruments that mingle human sympathy. For only by isolating its
flock can the organisation survive.
Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that
ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with
one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the
missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in
the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was! A score of vices that
shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an
outrage upon the natural kindliness of men. The contents were all
admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their force of
sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful
intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for
Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism,
or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would
be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and
terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with
boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there
would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety"
lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced
their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads
people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual
love. My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and
anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to
unintelligent pestering. . . .
2
A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It
was at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club,
the Blackfriars.
I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor
of discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an
influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He
was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which
I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin,
with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple
sticking out between the wings of his collar. He ate with
considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was
underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the
swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious look. After dinner
he a little forced himself upon me. At that time, though the shadow
of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for
great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and
anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to make
him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran,
but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to
put constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you
know, very narrow. Very." He made his moustache and lips express
judicious regret. "One has to consider them carefully, one has to
respect their attitudes. One dare not go too far with them. One
has to feel one's way."
He chummed and the moustache bristled.
A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered
there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and
clothed and educated. . . .
I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with muttonchop
whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed,
were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday
opening of museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and
vindictive as ever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the
utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious
damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn
Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the
novelist--who was being baited by the moralists at that time for
making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock,
desire a baby and say so. . . .
The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We
do go on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living
and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding,
vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close
darknesses of these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of
Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!
3
While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They
had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was
quietly taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--
realities I had indeed known about before but never realised. Each
of these experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the
values in my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment.
One of these disturbing and illuminating events was that I was
robbed of a new pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love. It
was altogether surprising to me to be robbed. You see, as an only
child I had always been fairly well looked after and protected, and
the result was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of
the people one met in the world. I knew there were robbers in the
world, just as I knew there were tigers; that I was ever likely to
meet robber or tiger face to face seemed equally impossible.
The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all
sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone
out of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a
carefuly accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new
experience in knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then
one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath
crossing a field between Penge and Anerley. I heard it fall in the
way one does without at the time appreciating what had happened,
then, later, before I got home, when my hand wandered into my pocket
to embrace the still dear new possession I found it gone, and
instantly that memory of something hitting the ground sprang up into
consciousness. I went back and commenced a search. Almost
immediately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of four or
five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching
carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.
"Lost anythink, Matey?" said he.
I explained.
"'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and joined in the
search.
"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced
sniffing boy in a big bowler hat.
I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the
ground about us.
"GOT it," he said, and pounced.
"Give it 'ere," said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over
to me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible
worlds.
"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely. "Oo said it
was your knife?"
Remarkable doubts assailed me. "Of course it's my knife," I said.
The other boys gathered round me.
"This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat casually.
"I dropped it just now."
"Findin's keepin's, I believe," said the big boy.
"Nonsense," I said. "Give me my knife."
"'Ow many blades it got?"
"Three."
"And what sort of 'andle?"
"Bone."
"Got a corkscrew like?"
"Yes."
"Ah! This ain't your knife no'ow. See?"
He made no offer to show it to me. My breath went.
"Look here!" I said. "I saw that kid pick it up. It IS my knife."
"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into
his trouser pocket.
I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I
doubt if it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and
clenched my fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose,
the advantage of two years of age and three inches of height. "Hand
over that knife," I said.
Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary
vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a
knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and
so got me down. "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little
ruffian. My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out
and hit something like sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or
three seemed to be at me at the same time. Then I rolled over and
sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, footballing
my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them. I leapt to my feet in
a passion of indignation and pursued them.
But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition,
and I doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour
required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just
been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little
antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable
unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I
wanted of course to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching
him would necessarily involve that. They kicked my cap into the
ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder
lane while I turned aside to recover my dishonoured headdress. As I
knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my
knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this
startling occurrence in my mind.
I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a
police station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented
that. No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and
murderous reprisals. And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought
of my knife. The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and
weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me. It was the
first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence that lurks and peeps
beneath our civilisation. A certain kindly complacency of attitude
towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever
4
But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first
clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to
rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave
with and at last dominate all my life.
It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I
never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her
name. It was some insignificant name.
Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly
like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.
It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on
to anything else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or
beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about
myself, a discovery about the whole world. Only in after years did
sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to
illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of
life.
It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of
the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came
by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a
row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a
glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.
These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the
lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the
great suburban growths--unkindly critics, blind to the inner
meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades--the shop
apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth,
stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money
upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walkingsticks,
sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague
transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down,
to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer
instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which
so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that
hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.
Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in
the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I
made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a
public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes
for me!--and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.
And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with
dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes
like pools reflecting stars.
I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl
as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any
woman. I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette
ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was
we had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when
suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous
amazement upon its mate.
We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
keeping us apart. We walked side by side.
It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five
times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on
the other side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in
arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the
glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we
whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's
warm and shaded face. "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she
answered, "Dear!" We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that
quality of intimacy and more. We wanted each other as one wants
beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.
And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the
thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed
through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light,
with a huge new interest shining through the rent.
When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her
face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft
shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her
proximity. . . .
Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach
their house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of
small houses near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any
intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more,
they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and
left me possessed of an intolerable want. . . .
The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my
work and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded
up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire,
with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have
gone on. I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing
place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed
them up. But I never saw her again, except that later she came to
me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How my blood was stirred! I
lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her. I prayed
for her.
Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when
her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen
to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a
man.
I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was
about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed
nonsense about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine
could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put
the book aside. . . .
I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this
thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and
secretive about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in
to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.
One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the
Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and
its dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bareshouldered,
bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling
faintly. I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought
it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing is that I was more than a
little shamefaced about it. I did not have it framed and hung in my
room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the
drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked for a
year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often
when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was
sitting with it before me.
Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a
time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was
locked in me. I seemed as sexless as my world required.
5
These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above
and below and before me. They had an air of being no more than
incidents, interruptions.
The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City
Merchants School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the
mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which
occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere
interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant
spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career. School
life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was
joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went
together. Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our
morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of
rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have
passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them
again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main
gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient wellproportioned
kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are
imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the
old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams
that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western
boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not
been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went
up to Cambridge.
I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a
mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's
estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our
national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck
by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless
disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community. I
suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an
institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as
having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation,
as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the
more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms,
broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary
developments he will presently be called upon to influence and
control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and
set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is
impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually--given
certain impossibilities perhaps--the job might be done.
My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about
me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic
forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that
stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school
not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to
make upon it at all. We were within three miles of Westminster and
Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all
within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under
our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the
Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession
through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside
news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing
discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty,
imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was
the background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and
through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all
these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was
necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest
played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly
proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart
virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by
Inigo Jones.
Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin
and Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us
did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them
any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine
monasteries. At the utmost our men read them. We were taught these
languages because long ago Latin had been the language of
civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised
life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had
come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas. Once
these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the
detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world. I can
imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper,
teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely,
patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the
irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago.
A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school,
had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on
to new and yet more amazing developments of its own. But the City
Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and
Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream
amidst the harvesting.
There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went
up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of
our curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted
that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating
knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and
failed to button up a sentence in saying so. His main argument
conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City
Merchants' curriculum. He admitted that translation had now placed
all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely
a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long
since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any
utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these
grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.
Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline
for the mind.
He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
Classic!
Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case. In
schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available,
the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old
lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing
attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet
systematic adjustment. And that was as far as his imagination could
go.
It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end
them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English
public school are the crowning instances of that. They go on
because they have begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions
but reproductive ones. Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am
sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have
dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools and university
colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to
the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as
they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real
use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd
perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by
means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its
very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public
schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the
fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased
to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that
only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been
through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade
them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit
of man could devise. And, moreover, they did not want their
children made strange to them. There was all the machinery and all
the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever
new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father
gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical
grind. It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that
time.
So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We
would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures
who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his
considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a
Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He
would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar,
and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not
"GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the
dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of
books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his
deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking
boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would consent
that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely.
We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these
strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the
Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the
stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English
tongue. That indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he
was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every
beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.
And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it
best? We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical
difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely,
helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with
the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest,
of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not
believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe
in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and
costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as
yet to touch these things to life again. It was like the ghost of
an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed
into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.
Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall. . . .
And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the
evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract,
London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like
the very loom of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher
has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound. Life and
death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an
intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable
procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless
people we knew not whence, we knew not whither. Hansoms clattered,
foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding
caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window and street
mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly
flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting
news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.
One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham
was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
gesticulations. . . .
That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to
living interests where it might have done so. We were left
absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political
speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of
some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the
huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves. I always
look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our
modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up abruptly, as
though it had come upon something indelicate. . . .
But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief
cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which
pretends that the place of this or that county in the struggle for
the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys. He
obliged us to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county
matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms. What a fuss there would
be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared
with an evening paper! "I say, you chaps, Middlesex all out for a
hundred and five!"
Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the
first class. I applied myself industriously year by year to
mastering scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval
were the places nearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either.)
Through a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey
for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we were by some five
hundred yards or so in Kent. It did quite as well for my purposes.
I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring
the skill to bowl Flack out. He was a bat in the Corinthian style,
rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low shooter or
an unexpected Yorker, hut usually he was caught early by long leg.
The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught. He loved to
lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him at the practice
nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel
nice again.
Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has
been observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly
respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into
a strange brief dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his
umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The
hit accomplished, Flack resumed his way.
Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror,
needlessly alert.
6
These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little
distant and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they
wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and
gowns, a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the
world of actual men. Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man,
rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into
contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to be liberalminded.
He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a
grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a
Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled
but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made a
tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me
only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a
wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not
one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the
Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation
after generation. I recall him most vividly against the background
of faded brown book-backs in the old library in which we less
destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the
stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his face. It
gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own. He had a
habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used
to come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said.
That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the
school."
He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
man captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans
had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a
Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a
disposition towards developments. City Merchants had no modern
side, and utilitarian spirits were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE
and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly
at our want of German. Moreover, four classes still worked
together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big Hall that had
once held in a common tumult the entire school. Gates used to come
and talk to us older fellows about these things.
"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. But we ought to
get in some German, you know,--for those who like it. The army men
will be wanting it some of these days."
He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for
the lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he
achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked
wooden tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by
sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable
seats, "with grave misgivings." And though he never birched a boy
in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a
scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all
his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in
temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear
soul! to the power of the sword. . . .
I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the
effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that
is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to
complete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days,
his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way
through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped
redundant prepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so
finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole
best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and
even with short arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to
stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern,
unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular,
which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.
7
The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was
because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly
because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way
and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little
antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I
was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never
quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a
fight--in all my time there were only three fights--but I followed
my own curiosities. I was already a very keen theologian and
politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely interested in
modern warfare. I read the morning papers in the Reading Room
during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and
often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way
home.
I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a
magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was
indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books--which I
detested--and fiction. I read histories, travel, popular science
and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps. School work
and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me. I worked
well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was
abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the
charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of
Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the
old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere,
with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a
continual pleasure to me. But these things were certainly not the
living and central interests of my life.
I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the
masters even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go
freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the
Agent-General for East Australia. We two discovered in a chance
conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of
us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca
pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.
Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the
school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as
water on the way to India. But Britten had come up through the Suez
Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It gave
him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these pilgrims we
got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a
sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions
concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.
We became congenial intimates from that hour.
The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the
Lower Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment
between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand
and human intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher
education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the
doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my
mind. As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our
time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of
solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite
joint enterprises. I went several times to his house, he was the
youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and
let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in
vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of
provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the
Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters. We
went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made
an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and
Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way
places together.
We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom
warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had
both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle
about us as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our
attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind
hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces,
fighting from house to house. The hillsides about Penge were
honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had
created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey. For him
West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate
and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized
the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army--
reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known to
themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary
game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a
success of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed
defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the
sunset. Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a
large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut
out of paper.
A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by
Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's,
admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers
fighting the war game in Caxton Hall. We developed a war game of
our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead
soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at
six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.
For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.
Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have
understood.
And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to
write, for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had
discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies
as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full
of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of
expression. Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had
disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things
had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking. I was
somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked
along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another
that we had never read Lucretius. We thought every one who mattered
had read Lucretius.
When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and
died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change
in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my
Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms
with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a
mile and a half from the school. So it was I came right into
London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.
Tehose were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;
Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw
us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books,
pursued the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and
the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and
thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of
face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.
Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite
limitations. We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we
went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith
and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we
got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medicalstudent
brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in
Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground floor
illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over
our Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did
exhaustively. But on the other hand I do not remember any
discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships. There, in
spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a
peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had occasion either
of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we were
instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed
of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We
evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the
emancipation of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had
oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We
had a secret literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of
theological caricature. Britten's father had delighted his family
by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS,
and Britten conveyed the precious volume to me. That and the BAB
BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations.
For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a
tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very
directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been
comatose for some years. But there we came upon a disappointment.
8
In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys,
and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations
of a career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington,
now Lord Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy,
rather good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an
outsider even as we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been
sufficiently detached to observe him, with private imaginings very
much of the same quality and spirit as our own. He was, we were
inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he
affected a concise emphatic styl, played chess very well, betrayed
a belief in will-power, and earned Britten's secret hostility,
Britten being a sloven, by the invariable neatness of his collars
and ties. He came into our magazine with a vigour that we found
extremely surprising and unwelcome.
Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our
project modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and
brilliant literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the
vague tumult of ideas that teemed within us was to find form and
expression; Cossington, it was manifest from the outset, wanted
neither to write nor writing, but a magazine. I remember the
inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's study--we had had great
trouble in getting it together--and how effectually Cossington
bolted with the proposal.
"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said Cossington. "The
school used to have one. A school like this ought to have a
magazine."
"The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the hearthrug.
"Called the OBSERVER. Rot rather."
"Bad title," said Cossington.
"There was a TATLER before that," said Britten, sitting on the
writing table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of
the Lower School at play, and clashing his boots together.
"We want something suggestive of City Merchants."
"CITY MERCHANDIZE," said Britten.
"Too fanciful. What of ARVONIAN? Richard Arvon was our founder,
and it seems almost a duty--"
"They call them all -usians or -onians," said Britten.
"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE," I said. "We could probably find a
quotation to suggest--oh! mixed good things."
Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith,
who had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a
murmur of approval.
"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN," decided Cossington, "and we
might very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the
OBSERVER.' That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old
boys and all that, and it gives us something to print under the
title."
I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy.
"Some of the chaps' people won't like it," said Naylor, "certain not
to. And it sounds Rum."
"Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
"We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoesmith, pointedly
not looking at Britten.
The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. "Oh! HAVE
it ARVONIAN," I said.
"And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossington.
"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is
better because it has a whole page, not columns. It makes no end of
difference to one's effects."
"What effects?" asked Shoesmith abruptly.
"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write
closer for a double column. It's nuggetty. You can't get a swing
on your prose." I had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
"If the fellows are going to write--" began Britten.
"We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith. "It's cheek.
I vote we don't have any."
"We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as an olive branch
to me, "unless Remington does a bit. Or Britten. But it's no good
making too much space for it."
"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith.
"We don't want to give ourselves away."
"I vote we ask old Topham to see us through," said Naylor.
Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. "Greek epigrams
on the fellows' names," he said. " Small beer in ancient bottles.
Let's get a stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."
"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington. "One in
each number. It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classieal
tradition. And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise
them. Of course--we've got to dcpartmentalise. Writing is only one
section of the thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school.
There's questions of space and questions of expense. We can't turn
out a great chunk of printed prose like--like wet cold toast and
call it a magazine."
Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
"There's to be a section of sports. YOU must do that."
"I'm not going to do any fine writing," said Shoesmith.
"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note
to their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the
place for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as halfback.'
Things like that."
"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and
manifestly hecoming pregnant with judgments.
"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington,
"is to mention just as many names as you can in each number. It
keeps the interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their
own little bit. Then it all lights up for them."
"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from his
meditation.
"Rather. With comments."
"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home,"
said Shoesmith.
"Shut it," said Naylor modestly.
"Exactly," said Cossington. "That gives us three features,"
touching them off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section,
Sports. Then we want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a
notice of anything that's going on. So on. Our Note Book."
"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent
disapproval of every one.
"Then we want an editorial."
"A WHAT?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
"Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front
page. It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something
manly and straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism,
say, or ESPRIT DE CORPS, or After-Life."
I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington
mattered very much in the world.
He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of
energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly
at a disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and
detailed vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most
acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about
us, and had determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of
instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every successful
magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life.
He was elected at his own suggestion managing director, with the
earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine
so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page
of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the
printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their
own which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up
space. The only literary contribution in the first number was a
column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of
some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that
noble old quotation:--
"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."
And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on
the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely
thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School
Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."
Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any
grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
ADOLESCENCE
1
I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and
interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, everdeepening,
ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints,
its subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day
the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every
morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I
started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the
factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of
subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the
nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his
dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first
intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused
avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by
such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously
crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must
be. One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of
blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home
a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience to
unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of
one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of
partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and
distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad
prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by
night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic
contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of
appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in
receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood
succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an
utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its
necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite
space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the
pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of
reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now
irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these
broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.
Life crowded me away from it.
I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that
passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for
some permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time
to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that
endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute
confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which
must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT,
feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite
clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days
were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite
like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father
and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must
needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but
failure, no promise but pain. . . .
But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was
comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies
of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that
it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early
training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant
thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of
life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The world was
never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the
Victorian time. . . .
I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I
knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to
keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for
all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my
upbringing. . . .
The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle
and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first
intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.
As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those
gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously
and askance. Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a
shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them. . . .
The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to
me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that
strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced
me about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say
blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by
shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an
ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like
a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was
indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead
there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a
new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the
twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of
the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather
than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a
picture.
All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked
avoided chamber. . . .
It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down
the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret
broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged
suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I
can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative
talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted
Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but
we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named,
if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's
rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and
deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings--
he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge French
May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on
a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the
floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face
downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and
our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like
an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of
mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from
his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs,
except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank
a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk,
and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient
fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was
responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to
conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away
from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the
instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman
of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice
and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one
evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--" Look here, you know, it's
all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them.
What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all
festering inside about it. Let's out with it. There's too much
Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"
We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was
clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember
Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and
Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought
them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and
the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.
And all that sort of thing."
Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of
those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for
decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the
less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of
India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and
Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a countytown
spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case was
too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and
his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together,
carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the
monasteries of Thibet.
"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."
We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and
dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this
spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it
makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things,
until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or
think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business
at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of
dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch
his image in the air--" oh, a confounded buttered slide of
sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and
talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at
present. I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You
men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and
marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.
You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly,
sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge
humorists. . . . I mean to know what I'm doing."
He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But
one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than
one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not
know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am,
however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were
pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common
property of our set was developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid
down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there
were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and
the man who subdues his mind to other people's.
"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory
tones; "that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to
run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to he able to think
of anything. And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's
another servant's saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us.
If we see fit, that is."
A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are
we up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't
to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these
extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we
won't use 'em. Good God! what do you think a university's for?" . . .
Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of
us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were
going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in
and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately
experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent
psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within
a fortnight of our great elucidation.
The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of
sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our
intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our
imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went
round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall
prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy
November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from
Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we
weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The
fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the
inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of
Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular
associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech,
that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and crappled and
sometimes crippled ideas.
And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called
Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that
goes under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we
boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the
body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to
restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition of tailors and
outfitters.
Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething
minds! We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs
towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen
moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with
one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were
no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world. But
Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was
gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of
her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!
Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be
married to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot
now imagine why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A
sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal
intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such
talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if
by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's
daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or
obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that
one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless
conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?
We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially
this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the
Cam. We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase
that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword,
namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if
they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I
disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak,
and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a
companion I never cared for in the slightest degree. . . .
This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped,
our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and
three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was
Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was
Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken
the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three
years later I got a lectureship in political science. In those days
it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.
2
It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream
of undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our
beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be
differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except
Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an
appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the
other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre,
deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild
undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the
manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our contemporaries.
We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new,
and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the same
things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a
similar weakness in these our brothers.
There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a
little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--
for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys,"
intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal
measure. The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly did
not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and
all that we secretly dreaded becoming.
But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant
so much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading
party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk
in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile
pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We
improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied
deep notes for the responses.
"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said
some one.
"Damned prig! " said Hatherleigh.
"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a
light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he
cannot go on because of the amusement he extracts."
"I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said Hatherleigh.
"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're
all being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something
now.'"
"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never
be a responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous."
"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.
"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said
Hatherleigh. "They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the
Guts to get hold of things. And so they worry up all those silly
little jokes of theirs to carry it off." . . .
We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to
keep outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters'
shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out
funny, and not be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had
titles."
"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than
most Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side."
"Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women."
"'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man
condescended."
"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old
Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the
Pinky Dinky.
We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky Dinky goes to
King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh
HUSH! He wouldn't tell you--"
"He COULDN'T tell you."
"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads
about it, never thinks about it. Just feels!"
"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a
doubt--"
Some one protested.
"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation
whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call
good form. . . . There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the
world somehow. SOMEBODY put it there. . . . And anyhow there's no
particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him. He's
jolly Awful of course and all that--"
"The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind."
"A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!"
"If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at
croquet?"
"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's
what's the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice
dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is
soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing
that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made
into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice
disposition not to take on the job! How the Devil is a great Empire
to be run with men like him?"
"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on
the fender, "it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid. . . .
Oxford's no better."
"What's he afraid of?" said I.
"God knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
"LIFE!" said Esmeer. "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a
thoughtful silence for a time.
"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos,
"what is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?"
But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the
thought that had arrested our flow.
3
I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and
the organisation of the University. I think we took them for
granted. When I look back at my youth I am always astonished by the
multitude of things that we took for granted. It seemed to us that
Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having
eyebrows or a vermiform appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of
middle age I can entertain very fundamental doubts about these old
universities. Indeed I had a scheme--
I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of
the political combinations I was trying to effect.
My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big
project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I
wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the
governing class out of a consolidated system of special public
service schools. I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I
was given in the new government. I could have begun my plan from
the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the
Education Office. I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of
reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs
of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost
would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have
sought a way round this invincible obstacle. I do think it would be
quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole
system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific
boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public
service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public
without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.
Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new
college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern
history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
science, education and sociology.
We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut
the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should
have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old
public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I
had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found
others. I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable,
intellectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would
have been made subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on
the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have
contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could have seen to
it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis
with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom
fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it
isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so
forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I
should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard--where there
wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high
pressure douches. . . .
I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those
two places. . . .
Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an
underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling
of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow
ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas.
Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic
system and none of its evil. . . .
Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but
their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among
them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle
humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but
it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary
between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of
literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal
like no other scandal in the world--a covetous scandal--so that I am
always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays
of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the
great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her
wet umbrella upon the writing desk." . . .
We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last
thing to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind.
One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a
line of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like
those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in
its peculiar and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear
old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from
the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for
Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable
as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in
Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has
become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump
childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile
fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too
high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court
with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive
undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. He lectured walking up
and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and
with the utmost lucidity. If he could not walk up and down he could
not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of
some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round anything and
overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies were wonderful! Or again I
recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his neck
and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very judicial, very
concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last
thing he would have told a lie about.
When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some
occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly
innocent than his--"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger
began to display the early promise of scholarship at the age of
eight or more, had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had
been to lecture here and lecture there. His student phase had
culminated in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had
gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism
that had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured
ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has become plumper,
more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent
visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to people as
part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He
has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish
world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port
wine. Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special
knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he
claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever
entered the Union Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable
rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged
with playfulness. Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the
works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and
Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those
ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of
relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their
books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field,
their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for
Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook
to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the
changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain
by the nearest and cheapest routes. . . .
Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta
Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable
Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly
absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing
to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import
with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he
waged a fierce obscure war. . . .
It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the
intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff
like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with
itself. It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active
childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor
feared nor passionately loved,--a web of iridescent threads. He had
luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd
matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven
thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as
flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet
spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of
a gun. . . .
4
All through those years of development I perceive now there must
have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself
all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious
impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the
statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the
protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for
Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order,
civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I
have set out to present. It was growing in me--as one's bones grow,
no man intending it.
I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a
multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of
course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think I
ever saw the world at large in any other terms. I never at any
stage entertamed the idea which sustained my mother, and which
sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe,
whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact
"all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and
unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and
that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel
and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against
disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments,
suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my experience
I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.
The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my
mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible
Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existenc and the
survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to
survive.
The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the
Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert
Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I
laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City
Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous questionbegging
word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out.
Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten
lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and
skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only
through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for
us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was
a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man
sets itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that
persuasion.
I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen
or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters,
just as children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at
eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the
thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality.
So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their
social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in
the twenties. Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious
types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't that
there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been
prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the
theoretical boy.
The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still
centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as
distinguished from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic
science and the stars and future time. I had travelled scarcely at
all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I
had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its
mountains and wildernesses and forests and all the sorts and
conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface. It
was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing,
and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond
measure.
I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to
the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of selfdeception
write down compactly the world as it was known to me at
nineteen. So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the
world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains
and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I
have now. But its intension was very different. All the interval
has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing
crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.
In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to
Cambridge in September--my vision of the world had much the same
relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a
mask has to the direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked
at our world and saw--what did we see? Forms and colours side by
side that we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no
conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things. It
did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do
with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues
of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were
guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.
Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it
with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of
intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.
We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests"
came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely
intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or
dishonest (in which ease they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We
knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a
whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We
were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of
history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and
Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or
Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set
about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed
French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once
in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN
MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.
We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of
employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed
bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing
whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and
orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's
Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and
not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I
remember quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully
fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools;
it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of
the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective
intention. . . .
I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one
did not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's
general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of
quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent
puerility. Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along
Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white
defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning
and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul
and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all
inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-
Grand! . . .
I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I
believe the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from
London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my
imagination. I got outside London. It became tangible instead of
being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.
At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial
friends. I got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to
speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all pretty busily
sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's
interpretations. Cambridge made politics personal and actual. At
City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we
boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor
among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such
distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive
and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in
earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the
ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that
I touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came
down to debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college
intimates, their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them
real to us. They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for
the first time in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my
secret vice had become a virtue.
That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and
various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors
who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their
place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more
athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to
the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The
brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to
propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre
professional men, as assistant masters in schools. Cambridge which
perfects them is by the nature of things least oppressed by them,--
except when it comes to a vote in Convocation.
We were still in those days under the shadow of the great
Victorians. I never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old
Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to
Trinity, and the Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip
about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the gladiatorial
stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such
sets as mine. The ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was
glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties
had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to
come to the Union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke
of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals
brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One
heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses. Some of
us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political
memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward. From
gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something
of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how
permanent officials worked and controlled their ministers, how
measures were brought forward and projects modified.
And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political
stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as
men as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was
getting them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity,
and their motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also
acquiring in my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching
conception of the world of men as a complex of economic,
intellectual and moral processes. . . .
5
Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my
generation it came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never
heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and
Morris, the Chicago Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic
Federation (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds.
Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in
Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, blackhaired
toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary
barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound.
Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and
were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.
They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish
like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise,
giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of
Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a
Perfectly Splendid Time.
I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with
ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings,
titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties
we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they
were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and
princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors
in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on
the part of the few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling
scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed
themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on
a curtain that was presently to be torn aside. . . .
It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things,
I think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm.
Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I
forget the circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness
with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the
material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic
interpretation of human affairs.
I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working
man I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change,
and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to
change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely
as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at
first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete
misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.
I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at
Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great
contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that
multitudinous majority of people who toil continually, who are for
ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed,
ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually
suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses through the want of
money. My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing
minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew
shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university
education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond
the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand that
it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive
radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost
naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself
at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs
that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor
did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of
poverty. It was a personal independent thing. The dingier people
one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and
Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street
loafers, grimy workers that made the social background of London,
the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very
slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We
could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the
triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a
sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous
old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an
ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed
her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the
streets, were really material to such questions.
Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or
plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became
unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our
gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or
poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as
we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor
quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and
very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!--
if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming
that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,
who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish
fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we
ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the
Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow. . . .
And also I had never been in Lancashire.
By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder
verities of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very
much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss
my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley
Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at
close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid
Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and
presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system
of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a
limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of
people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should
be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of
beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly
obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the
tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a
limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable
wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the
poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--
"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very
urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions
decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a
spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose
it than to use it in any way whatever.
The complete development of that realisation was the work of many
years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did
have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that
followed the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded
by such heroic anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not
anticipated.
Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial.
It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile
attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who
used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to
rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in
Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers
of twenty men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in
those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.
And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the
poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made
clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and
invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout
boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer
and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on
tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except
upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only other chair
whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen
comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were
all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him,
and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly
having the same difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.
"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a
north-country quality in his speech.
We made reassuring noises.
The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an
uncomfortable pause.
"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what
with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red
reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the
meeting.
But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined
conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a
different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what
socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of
social conditions. "You young men," he said "come from homes of
luxury; every need you feel is supplied--"
We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we
listened to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs
that made us indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had
been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent
became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his
indignations. We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the
various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a
front of judicious severity. We felt more and more that social
injustice must cease, and cease forthwith. We felt we could not
sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and
wanted badly to cheer.
Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson,
that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning.
He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs
crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with
a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that
hid his watery eyes. "I don't want to carp," he began. "The
present system, I admit, stands condemned. Every present system
always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men. But
where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been
thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."
"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and
Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely.
"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting
his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I
don't. I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you
after this fine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug
made acquiescent and inviting noises--"but the real question
remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There
are the admimstrative questions. If you abolish the private owner,
I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting
businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered,
but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know."
"Democracy," said Chris Robinson.
"Organised somehow," said Denson. "And it's just the How perplexes
me. I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a
sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have
got now.
"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson.
"I have seen little children--"
"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily
be worse--or life in a beleagured town."
Murmurs.
They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming
out from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold
daylight of late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in
conflict with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, and
he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into
untimely pathos and indignation. And Denson hit me curiously hard
with one of his shafts. "Suppose," he said, "you found yourself
prime minister--"
I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little
ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the
huge machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was
perplexed!
And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands
that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the
cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive
talk with him.
"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.
Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and
again he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your
learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children
suffer and die. They don't pick holes up north. They mean
business."
He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
going to work in a factory when he was twelve--" when you Chaps were
all with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights
until he would fall asleep at his reading.
"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all
that clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter
to read a bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for
it, I said. And I couldno' get the book."
Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with
round eyes over the mug.
"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris
Robinson. "And one learns to go straight at a thing without
splitting straws. One gets hold of the Elementals."
(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)
"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of
Denson, "while men decay and starve."
"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the
alternatve is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently
futile."
"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose
anything futile, so far as I can see."
6
The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but
Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic
professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly
Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's
Burden."
It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively
mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently
exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down.
But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little
figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement
gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective
force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very
odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton
waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic
dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us
wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he
stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the
very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his
"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
What did he give me exactly?
He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he
provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion
and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express,
that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to
express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore
something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it
back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and
the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and
inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:--
"Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"
And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my
mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been
born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South
Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain
the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that
time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt
with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle
that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are
justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and
assumption. . . .
South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting
newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to
the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself
human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant
officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the
first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent
men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and
co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they
were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden
magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor
disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained and fairly plucky and
wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And how it lowered
our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and
then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste
of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso--
Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in
Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long
unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching,
unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your
enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of
fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our
scheme of illusion.
All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the
rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and
the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses,
stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent
wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I had looked at
it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated
papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the
ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki,
the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great
lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses
and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless
miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last,
though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils.
If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those
battle-fields.
And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of
yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker
of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the
doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate
rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than
defeats. . . .
7
A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me
immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit
of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's
ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me.
In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the
first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever
encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years
when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to
the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our
people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a
book justified. The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined
each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered
against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe to
me, as watching and critical.
But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and
discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the
continent there were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert
while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and
preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely
novel and distasteful to me. It set me worrying of nights. It put
all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new
uncomfortable footing. It made them no longer merely desirable but
urgent. Instead of pride and the love of making one might own to a
baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the
continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our own
world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense as it
were of busy searchlights over the horizon. . . .
One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was
an attempt to belittle his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow,"
I said.
The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity.
It professed to be a study of the English situation in the early
nineties, but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was
confused by the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to
vindicate the woman he had loved and never married. Now in the
retrospect and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do
Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was not only essential but
cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich
aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the
"infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the
central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail.
So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once
remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly face and
understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing
whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
was altogether outside my range of comprehension. . . .
8
As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension
of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments
that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out,
as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did
not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and
the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.
I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to
myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of
the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the
London School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support
of the "advanced" people had placed him. He had, like myself, a
small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn
a living, and he had a kindred craving for social theorising and
some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance after
reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on
the limits of pure democracy. It had marched with some thoughts of
his own.
We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa
Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno
(where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the
Val Maggia and over to Airolo and home.
As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness
and enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant
excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people
with hand baggage and laden porters along the platform of the
Folkestone pier, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored boat
beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion
of standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish
cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to
feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people
directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the
east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the
little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children
upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of
nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with
pleasing little stimulations. The custom house examination excited
one, the strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the
French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and
then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the
rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world
in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers,
police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically
cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green
shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of
neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike
artless cries.
It was a real other world, with different government and different
methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with
one's oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the
German official, so different in manner from the British; and when
one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled
to get coffee in Switzerland. . . .
I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still
revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of
cheerful release in me.
I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran
on to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply
sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on
platforms and from little differences in the way things were done.
The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean
stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the
vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It
came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all
wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and
our empire might be developing here--and I recalled Meredith's
Skepsey in France with a new understanding.
Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of
greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather
impending, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember,
like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about
us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him
below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied
askew. He did not want to shave in the train, but I made him at one
of the Swiss stations--I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses--and
then confound him! he cut himself and bled. . . .
Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed
to have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the
monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and
there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then
dark clustering fir trees far below.
I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of
being outside.
"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having
perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
9
That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view
of the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example,
which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and
the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our
night's crouching and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our
stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over
Lake Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down
and down to Antronapiano.
And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions.
Willersley's mind abounded in historical matter; he had an
inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see
and trace and see again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding
valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the warring
tribes of men. . . .
In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our
outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the
same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the
question: "What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as
importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice was
largely made and mine still hung in the balance.
"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that
calls one, calls one away from something else."
Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we
are up to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one of those
questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long
words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate
humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to
intensify.
"You've made your decision?"
He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
"How would you put it?"
"Social Service--education. Whatever else matters or doesn't
matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase,
and that is the number of people who can think a little--and have "--
he beamed again--" an adequate sense of causation."
"You're sure it's worth while."
"For me--certainly. I don't discuss that any more."
"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work
is all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern
state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England
rising out of the decaying old . . . we are the real statesmen--I
like that use of 'statesmen.'. . ."
"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course. . . ."
Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a
deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very
fairly kept his word. He has lived for social service and to do
vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of
the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still
more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little
affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the
most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous
intonations have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old
coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and
they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended
into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and
followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to
all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any
chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to
distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any
hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable
Rationalist. No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of
recognition. No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power,
from the spending and husbanding of large sums of public money, and
from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine,
well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop. "But for me,"
he can say, "there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and
that subject or this would have been less ably taught." . . .
The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not
to content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the
notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of
his mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get
credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they
were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself selfconscious
while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or
other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work
were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre. Why
shouldn't it? But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes
on anyhow. Most men don't.
But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish
even then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age.
Long may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the
world! He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more
now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already
understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things
like callosities that come from a man's work.
Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood
smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snowfields
and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep
gorges far below. It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses
and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and
Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that
I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of human
service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether
unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent selfforgetfulness,
did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in
their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. It
is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present in a page or two
the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation,
conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges
carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly
resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and
jest and go and come back, and all the while build.
We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose
beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline.
"Muddle," said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this
day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know
for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly
painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us
the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial countryside,
muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations,
wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember
myself quoting Kipling--
"All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."
"We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we
are for--servants of the new reorganisation!"
We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social
Service.
We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such
unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We
spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive
resistances, the hostilities to such a development as we conceived
our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in
the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is natural to young
and scarcely tried men.
We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was
known to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far
better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and
possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive
movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had
occasioned. We would sink to gossip--even at the Suetonius level.
Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I
capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We were
particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers,
because about that we knew nothing whatever. We perceived that
great things were to be done through newspapers. We talked of
swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.
Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects
were thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write,
and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the
particular in our minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others,
writing and speaking that moving word. We had already produced
manuscript and passed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a
frequent speaker in the Union, and Willersley was an active man on
the School Board. Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led
up and up. He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated
our individual careers in terms of bold expectation. I had
prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for
Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this
committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the
declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the
government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams.
Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time
wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas about
town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised
internal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the
latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.
The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How
many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of
realisation before they failed?
There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming
exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little
solicitudes about our prospects. There were times when one surveyed
the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet,
and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed--it must have
been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix
where--and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a
K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.
But the big style prevailed. . . .
We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for
a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about
this prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we
could think of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to
me I could never be anything but just the entirely unimportant and
undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even
think of myself as five and thirty.
Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why
they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much
about failures.
10
Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I
knew my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our
socialism that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything
in life could have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic
cry we had done with for ever. We were socialists because
Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated,
undisciplined little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing
things jarringly, each one in his own way. "Each," I said quoting
words of my father's that rose apt in my memory, "snarling from his
own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart's tail."
"Essentially," said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription,
in peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public
official and has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as
I understand it."
"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, " and replaced by some
better sort of official. A man's none the less an official because
he's irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people
just the same. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw. . . .
Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a
splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an
ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern
science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as
sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it
ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.
Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his
predominant duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in
mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and
undisciplined wealth to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal,
King, was the continuing substance of our intercourse.
11
Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and
the flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight
along some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for
national re-organisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as
though the world was wax in our hands. "Great England," we said in
effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers!
England renewed! The country has been warned; it has learnt its
lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in.
England has become serious. . . . Oh! there are big things before
us to do; big enduring things!"
One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage
church, I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the
head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the
houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had
been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the purple
mountain masses where Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift
of our talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head.
I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been
accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the
phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the
substance remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our
measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased
with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common
necessities were given us for nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't
modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched
us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.
"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his
judicial lecturer's voice.
"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years
before us. . . . We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty,
to do things."
"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face;
"I've got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why
should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there,
seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then
take credit for modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have
imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest
things in life I am a damned shirk. The very biggest! Somebody has
to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little
perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself. . . ."
The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the
distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing
triangular wakes of foam, the long vista eastward towards
battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged
with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward
waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at
last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle.
It was as if one surveyed the world,--and it was like the games I
used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted by it; I felt
larger than men. So kings should feel.
That sense of largness came to me then, and it has come to me since,
again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once,
I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind
the town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width
and abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was
steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the
towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood
rose to its quintessence. And once it came to me, as I shall tell,
on Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have thought of England
as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a
nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales
and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes
has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity. For a brief
moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still
to make. . . .
12
And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there
was another series of a different quality and a different colour,
like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the
red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn
from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with
the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you
going to do for the world? What are you going to do with yourself?
and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of
my averted attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what
are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty
of girls and women and your desire for them?
I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of
my upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had
not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have
known any girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will
tell a little later. But I can remember still how through all those
ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence
in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their
intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a
room when one is occupied by other things. I busied myself and
pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full
half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes
that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes
Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who
stoops and allures.
This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in
my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of
the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those
disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all
about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians
one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at
the hotel tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more
zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair
girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She
came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped
her as she approached.
"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent
face.
That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept
there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty
years. . . .
I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and
was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest
I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria
Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise
and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley
to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities
five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or
six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside
them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She
watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
We passed.
"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that
winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of
parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to
me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew
it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.
Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so
sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all,
that agricultural work isn't good for women."
"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous
cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I
wonder why I stand it!"
"Stand what?"
"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world
and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and
we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in
us! . . ."
"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with
a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque
scenery is altogether good for your morals."
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume
and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly
because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station
that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of
the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or
four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in
the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or
thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very
abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavyfaced
man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over
his coffee and presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like
that," she confided startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I
never knew such a man to sleep."
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My
husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot
manage the hills."
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she
conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to
write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.
I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people
one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved
beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in
my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as
I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she
remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we
compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George
Moore's Woman of Thirty."
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to
understand.
That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and
Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of
her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a
problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, and
how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He
strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he's
a retired drysalter."
Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that
provocative quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at
lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private
thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one
another. We talked for a time of insignificant things.
"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a
siesta?"
"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a
steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.
"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My
friend's next door."
She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian
Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what
that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost
exactness the purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would
lend it to me and hesitated.
Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that
afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I
rejected abruptly. " I shall write in my room," I said.
"Why not write down here?"
"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he
looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some
notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and
feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people.
Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring
out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an
instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.
"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.
I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for
anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her
towards me.
"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
awkward and yielding.
I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then
turned upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew
her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she
made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat
will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and
tender.
She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who
had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured. . . .
That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I
was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of
adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world
before had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried
things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the
dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I
wanted to give him derisive pokes. After dinner and coffee in the
lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come
with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there
drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under
the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon.
All the time something shouted within me: "I am a man! I am a
man!" . . .
"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
"I'm for loafing," I said. "Let's row in the morning and spend tomorrow
afternoon just as we did to-day."
"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can
start about five."
We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a
place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and
dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their
generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man
who has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I
felt, if one took it the right way.
Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I
kept him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we
decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a
little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman
whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have
forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and
rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the
first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake
of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous
appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she
had worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her
attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved.
She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my
initiative. "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully,
an odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You
have liked me, haven't you?"
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless
and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a
rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it,"
she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards
(which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free
Masonry and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the
Riviera. Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was
eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the
great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers
modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of that
aspect of them. . . .
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather
than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever
in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely
have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less
if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of
course--finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I
have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a
thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the
time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been
so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I
was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood
of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went
along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat
of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the
corner of his spectacles.
"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
unpremeditated achievement.
"She came to your room?"
I nodded.
"I heard her. I heard her whispering. . . . The whispering and
rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday. . . . Any one
might have heard you."
I went on with my head in the air.
"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless
trouble. You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What
did you know about her? . . . We have wasted four days in that hot
close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were
talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity
will be first among the virtues prescribed."
"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged
if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at
nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to
work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not
discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens
to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so.
If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss
it,--out you go from political life. You must know that's so. . . .
You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've
a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things. . . .
Only--"
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
"I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I'm going to get
experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if
sexual proclivities," he said drily, come within the scope of the
parable."
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I,
"is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at
Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it--
and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must
take their chances of that. It's part of the general English
slackness that they won't look this in the face. Gods! what a
muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding
is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that.
The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics--"
"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb
case against him.
BOOK THE SECOND
MARGARET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
1
I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I
have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my
class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my
experience that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in
this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give
something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some
intimations of the forces that went to her making. I met her in
Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have
already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my
mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.
It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so
much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at
once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol. . . .
But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
served as a foil for her.
2
I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to
talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me
to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.
I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered
anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first
time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless
supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose
daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to
be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and
nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and
travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the
district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the
magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.
The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns
before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a
coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the
gardener and the coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and
a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached
equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle
manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the
house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright
shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy
corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a
dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and
electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality. There was a
fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas
and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the
English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the
penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out
of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in
their season. . . .
My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years
her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything
nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after
their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.
They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than
pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost
black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was
shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and
Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit
with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little
younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than
herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of
unfathomable allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk
over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense
of superiority.
I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six
o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I
heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski,
with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis
foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my
presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable
book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some
veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of
England, there was very little to be found. My anut talked to me in
a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness. The
two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no
secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the
cause of the estrangement. The only other society in the house
during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in
constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took
myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable
knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was countryside
and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I
turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar
of men's activities. And in such a country as that valley social
and economic relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the
limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can
trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in
which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can
see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and
here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a
little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the
big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram--
after the untraceable confusion of London.
I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets
of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of
mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising
against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed
vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks,
heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon
slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains
at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark
intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of
iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and
learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one
day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one
of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back
I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period,
to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less
furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It
was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the
expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as
jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions
of building and development that had surrounded my youth at
Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.
I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."
There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing
the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I
can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless
white--and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak
and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot
water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.
He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and
dismissed. And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.
That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to
believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact,
and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in
the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was
smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal
hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by
for help, for help and some sort of righting--one could not imagine
quite what. There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system
that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels
and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's
house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.
My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt
and animosity he felt from them.
3
Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed
that every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself
to blame. He was rich and he had left school and gone into his
father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age
at which everyone's education should terminate. He was very anxious
to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued
intermittently through all my visit.
I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding
destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting
my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half
herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind.
I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he
seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of
red and much less radiantly aggressive. This altered effect was due
not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts
that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken
in hand by his adolescent daughters who had just returned from
school.
During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word
is rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or
thereabouts, he had maintamed his ascendancy over them by simple
old-fashioned physical chastisement. Then after an interlude of a
year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteriously departed
from him. He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found
their mother financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental
to my uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely. Not
to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it. So
that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time Sybil
and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm. It had
been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at
the school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the
Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had
never recoiled from the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both
girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations a
gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier
thing than the power of the raised voice that had always cowed my
aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you
really must not say --" and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a
great advantage, they resumed the discussion. . . .
My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned
foolery. Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of
it. He gave instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him
"false ideas." Some men said that at college a man formed useful
friendships. What use were friendships to a business man? He might
get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed out, a lord's
requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a
common man's. If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there
might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament,
Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world
where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts
of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and
tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money,
and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great
solicitors among my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by
themselves," said my uncle. It isn't so. Not unless they take
their coats off. I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a
year."
We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think
men lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was
throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully
obtuse, but just failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City
Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates
had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale
of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the highest good. It
was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid
chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my
own," was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own
chosen career.
I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak
"reet Staffordshire"--his rather flabby face with the mottled
complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy
gestures--he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his
finger--the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of
plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He
tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise
me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its
organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men
worked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in
which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,--"They'll
risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle,
quite audibly--to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so
round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying
spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office,
and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two
subordinates and the telephone.
"None of your Gas," he said, "all this. It's Real every bit of it.
Hard cash and hard glaze."
"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my
mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use
lead in your glazes?"
Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's
life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except
the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said. "Let me tell
you, my boy--"
He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the
matter at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead
poisoning. Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and
it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as
they had it--and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects
of lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in
a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to
get lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused
abortion. I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact.
Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the
danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of
risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they
get." Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a
simple and generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks.
Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from
excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.
Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead
poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had
generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he
hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
chimneys, might be advantageously closed. . . .
"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the
table on which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a
time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works
blowing his girls noses for them. That's about what it'll come to."
He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug,
and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and
interested enemies of our national industries.
"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then
we'll see a bit," he said. "They'll drive Capital abroad and then
they'll whistle to get it back again." . . .
He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a
ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of
the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a
peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour,
and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors
stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children
played in the kennel.
We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her
limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as
partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there
was plenty of room for us.
I glanced back at her.
"THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.
"What?" said I.
"Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what
d'you think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked
piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all
over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if
you please, and eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!
"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones,
and punched me hard in the ribs.
"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles. And the fools up in
Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton
fools have. . . . And then eating their dinners out of it all the
time!" . . .
At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against
evening dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a
concerted demand for a motorcar.
"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for
you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he
remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.
Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room
with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike
litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.
"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.
"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go
to Trinity. It is a great college."
He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.
I made no answer.
"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do
it. You could have come here--That don't matter, though, now. . .
You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor halfstarved
clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and
afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or
some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap.
That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind not to let
you. Eh? More than half a mind. . . ."
"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and
likely it's what you're fitted for."
4
I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge
days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of
hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.
He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific
construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have
understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense
rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive
hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of
acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of
efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have
no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no
charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had strong
bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and
occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"
to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these
occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the
valley. And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights
of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the
unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly
contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters
tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money
to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every
man who came near them.
My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was
an illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them
through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden
antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more
complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral
state.
With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,
rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweedclad
form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he
strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and
occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable
unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.
Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and
despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he
personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He
hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education
after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until
he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except
football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people
who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but
Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and
all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated
particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,
Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he
hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet." He
wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a
call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the
best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away
magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His
billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very
inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered
with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople
because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his
bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He
was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of
collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
negro.
There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern
industrial world. You will find the same type with the slightest
modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey
or North Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men
have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,
uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.
To drive others they have had first to drive themselves. They have
never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social
life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of
survival that they should ignore such cravings. All the distinctive
qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his
conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that
expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls
they were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously
limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire
several times. My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go
into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me. I was his
nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman
learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner,
"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews
merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town. Every
time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations,
and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't
think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors. There
is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming
mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and
nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and
good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary
for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was
controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat
cap. The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened
dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and
after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his
foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.
"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.
The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,
"dressed up like --"--and had arrested himself and fumbled and
decided to say--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every
fool to stare at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.
He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his
house when he came home tired. So such calling as occurred went on
during his absence in the afternoon.
One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of
the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous
insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five
Towns. All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from
economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor
means for hospitality. Social intercourse centred very largely upon
the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people
together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their
chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the
acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less
prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley. A
number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept
up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the
day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and
interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings
that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard
table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved
friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for
glory and the girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so
far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic
conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering
connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends'
houses on the way. There was a tennis club that formed a convenient
afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier
visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in
taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled
vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the
apparition of motor-car's.
My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters
at all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which
they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to
them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy,
had cut their children off from the general social sea in which
their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening
any other world in exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with
the works and his business affairs and his private vices to
philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls,
preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and
make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they
would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed
to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The
tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the
bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas
whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had
indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as
they came.
I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in
life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for
their development. They supplemented the silences of home by the
conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular
fiction. They had to make what they could out of life with such
hints as these. The church was far too modest to offer them any
advice. It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they
were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive
passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of
certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.
N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same
thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next
visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I
came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a
negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer
flaunted quite so openly in my face.
My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe
that the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the
phrase. That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of
endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of
American girl. When some years ago I paid my first and only visit
to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I
entered the train at Euston. There were three girls in my
compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being
seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the
"steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very
soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a good time, as
my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young
women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that
you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of
its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself
and presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying
about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common
currency. My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle
caressed them with parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he
exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the
new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how
to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel
encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But
then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.
Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything;
I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was
romantic and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married
state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them,
composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old. I
don't know what they thought about children. I doubt if they
thought about them at all. It was very secret if they did.
As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were
always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware
of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that
circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as
disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper. They
knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were
"Agitators." It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators
were not more drastically put down. But they had a sort of
instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might
breach the happiness of their ignorance. . . .
5
My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook
a stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in
everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by
surprise.
It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand.
Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she
became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with
those violet eyes of hers. She passed me things I needed at
breakfast--it was the first morning of my visit--before I asked for
them.
When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become
intensely aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had
always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was
something in her temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had
not noted it on my previous visits.
We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for
the house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various
starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a
little breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea summerhouse
at the end of the herbaceous border.
We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she
became anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily
disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a
hairpin. I had never in my life been so near the soft curly hair
and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and
I was stirred--
It stirs me now to recall it.
I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.
"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.
She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot
the little electric stress between us in a rather meandering
analysis of her principal girl friends.
But afterwards she resumed her purpose.
I went to bed that night with one propostion overshadowing
everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was
a difficult, but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any
shadow of a doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing. The
thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting its
flow exactly as a fever does. Sybil had infected me with herself.
The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs
sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.
I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the
outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain,
when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a
book.
I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget
what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I
might kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her
face.
"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"
That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed
a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil,
combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I
hungered and thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy
persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far
as she was concerned, was played and won. It wasn't until I had
fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the
commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that
dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at
cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my room at nights, damning her
and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved,
while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"
"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."
But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well,
for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a
rational man to seek it. . . .
"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling
back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have
been a compelling embrace.
"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision. "You STARTED
this game."
"Oh!"
She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and
excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I
should renew my attack.
"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. "I don't
know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just
thought you wanted me to."
I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.
"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."
"Very well."
And that ended the affair with Sybil.
I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She
developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft
hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her
arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.
They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I
controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and
entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.
What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget
about what--with Sybil.
"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."
And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this
theory of my innate and virginal piety.
6
It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I
think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual
disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and
Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the
slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the
bleaker midland surroundings.
She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not
in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a
small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as
much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work
that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon schoolgirls.
She really learnt French and German admirably and
thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry
can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to
Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to
work for the History Tripos.
There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls
do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and
school training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining
of the mind. She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to
see it as a whole, she felt herself not making headway and she cut
her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and
worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious
thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.
It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is
celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and
soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure
her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed,
and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her
half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years
later, for a journey to Italy.
Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of
them had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her stepfather,
played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the
moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence,
equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from
sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy
there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome. They returned,
if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months
or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem,
in health again and consciously a very civilised person.
New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon
celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short
notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the
garden if the weather held.
The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of
comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had
been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich
blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of
nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely
mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse
into lawn or glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above
her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our
rather too consciously dressed party,--we had come in the motor four
strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing
flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the
fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful
Primavera.
It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer,
and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures
and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and
garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house
with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea
drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.
Seddon had planned.
The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate
with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was
obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands
still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One
of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond
curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a
refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie
of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,
and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There
were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one
father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old
school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and
consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters
were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable
humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very
gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers
with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,
and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and
regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
all the time, though not formally absent.
Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and
the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and
croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of
rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted
and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a
disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a
state of gentle revival--while their mother exercised a divided
chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,
stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and
preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous
resumption of stirring.
We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was
a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret
had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her
breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness
of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and
personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic
about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing
himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story
illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pureminded
kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on
the way to Grantchester.
I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh
fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow
always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy
but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an
even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a
lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.
"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under
the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down."
(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the
Pitti and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but
it isn't like real study," she was saying presently. . . . "We
bought bales of photographs," she said.
I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land,
and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a
different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, highcoloured,
black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed
translucent beside Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her
slender body was a grace to me.
I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest
and please her as well as I knew how.
We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of
Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to
Bennett Hall also--and our impression of him.
"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.
I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter
of social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged
attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The
little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and
general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and
intelligent.
"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm
glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."
Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from
the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a
state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady
in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined
our little group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not
disposed to play a passive part in the talk.
"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word. "It's well Pa isn't
here. He has Fits when people talk of socialism. Fits!"
The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at
Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.
But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred
himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of
expression. He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply
appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole
system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we
got to put in its place?"
"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I
said.
The little curate looked at it for a moment. "Precisely," he said
explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one
side, to hear what Margaret was saying.
Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring,
that she had no doubt she was a socialist.
"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of
eggshell! I like that!"
I came to Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow that because one's
a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."
The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by
prodding me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his
teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be
consistent."
I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We
began an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions
of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and
Margaret supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and
the initial maintained an anti-socialist position, the curate
attempted a cross-bench position with an air of intending to come
down upon us presently with a casting vote. He reminded us of a
number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that
in a big question like this there was much to be said on both sides,
that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them there
would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and
above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves.
My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being
unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious
to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't
see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't;
they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said
that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they
wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were
so fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and
expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism,
everything would be just the same again in ten years' time. She
also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful
world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to
upset everything. She was contented with things as they were, thank
you.
The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now,
and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which
Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then
stood beside me on the edge of the lawn while the others played. We
watched silently for a moment.
"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential
undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.
"It's want of imagination," I said.
"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go
on dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!" She
seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole
world of industry and property about us. "But what is one to do?"
she asked. "I do wish I had not had to come down. It's all so
pointless here. There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas,
no dreams. No one here seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of
need there is for MEANING in things. I hate things without
meaning."
"Don't you do--local work?"
"I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think--
if one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"
"Could you--?" I began a little doubtfully.
"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment. "I
suppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much
to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing. . . . I
want to do something for the world."
I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning,
her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. "One
feels that there are so many things going on--out of one's reach,"
she said.
I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality
of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of
weakness in her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her
background. She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a
cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with
the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening. That
came absurdly. Indirectly Margaret was responsible. My mind was
running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set
clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions
I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings. . . .
7
What a preposterous shindy that was!
I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to
be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions
conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called
me a "damned young puppy."
It was seismic.
"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of
making a civilisation."
"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward
over his cigar.
I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets,
ugly population, ugly factories--"
"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle,
regarding me askance.
"Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it
meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all
swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances--"
"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by
chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.
I went on as though I was back in Trinity.
"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I
said.
My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and
grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place?
He showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once
Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's
three times over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business,
some of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces
quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any
success under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor
any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't
YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it
possible to organise production on an altogether different scale.
You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being
the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to be the
requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to
take advantage of them--"
It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy,
and became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover
him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a
little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten
off in his last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared
as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he
considered to be the contents of his mind upon the condition of
mine.
Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an
outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to
him. We went at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he
supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all
ownership--and also an educated man of the vilest, most
pretentiously superior description. His principal grievance was
that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again and
again. . . .
We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my
resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had
accumulated between us. There had been stupendous accumulations. . . .
The particular things we said and did in that bawlmg encounter
matter nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near
we came to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent
reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to
stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of
puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he,
with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.
"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying
reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to
me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the
established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of
thumb. The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and
my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to
annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We question everything,
disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our
questioning, because we believe inherently that our sense of
disorder implies the possibility of a better order. Of course we
are detestable. My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept
everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis
as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose
experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; and all
history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this
conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will
destroy it.
But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
MARGARET IN LONDON
1
I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening
five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of
very remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself
a grown man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely
grown than I was. At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had
"got on" very well, and my ideas, if they had not changed very
greatly, had become much more definite and my ambitions clearer and
bolder.
I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had
published two books that had been talked about, written several
articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY
REVIEW and the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club
and learning to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger
uses. The London world had opened out to me very readily. I had
developed a pleasant variety of social connections. I had made the
acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER,
and who talked about it and me, and so did a very great deal to make
a way for me into the company of prominent and amusing people. I
dined out quite frequently. The glitter and interest of good London
dinner parties became a common experience. I liked the sort of
conversation one got at them extremely, the little glow of duologues
burning up into more general discussions, the closing-in of the men
after the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine
gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk with some pleasant
woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range of houses;
Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of artistic
and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me
the big vague world of "society." I wasn't aggressive nor
particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and
if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible,
and I had a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses.
And the other side of my nature that first flared through the cover
of restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop
along the line London renders practicable. I had had my experiences
and secrets and adventures among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic
or discredited women the London world possesses. The thing had long
ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and had become a
question of appetites and excitement, and among other things the
excitement of not being found out.
I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed
I find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any
real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven.
It seems to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and
clarification. All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I
am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five
years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others,
filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended
sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals
and the forces in the world about me. It was evident that many men
no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had
raised themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the
worlds of politics and thought. I was gathering the confidence and
knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found
I could write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as one
having authority and not as the scribes. Socially and politically
and intellectually I knew myself for an honest man, and that quite
without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy
for me. People trusted my good faith from the beginning--for all
that I came from nowhere and had no better position than any
adventurer.
But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twentyseven
than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any
one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to
me now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during
that time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had
supposed. It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--
took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of
emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality.
It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood. I had
never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the
world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality
of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood.
My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished
altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It seemed to me
I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to work hard,
to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my
constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with
that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was
attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me
an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a
convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my
purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine,
"I've done you no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise
way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and
wreck the career I was intent upon.
I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it
was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a
thousand ambitious men see it to-day. . . .
For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My
political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one
constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and
the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and
discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of
my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse education with
public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a
collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in
every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, worldmaking,
world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial
enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I
had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all
I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a
swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of power.
My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it
gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate
purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward
through the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between
politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where?
Always I seem to have been looking for that in those opening years,
and disregarding everything else to discover it.
2
The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two
active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public
service. It was natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed
to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better informed
expression of all I was then urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of
their friends were politicians or public officials, they described
themselves as publicists--a vague yet sufficiently significant term.
They lived and worked in a hard little house in Chambers Street,
Westminster, and made a centre for quite an astonishing amount of
political and social activity.
Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost
pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passagehall,
papered with some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate
wood, was choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine
wrap. Motioned rather than announced by a tall Scotch servant
woman, the only domestic I ever remember seeing there, we made our
way up a narrow staircase past the open door of a small study packed
with blue-books, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before the
fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a tall commanding figure,
splendid but a little untidy in black silk and red beads, with dark
eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost
visible prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that
was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the head feathers of
an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her back, and
talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with Blupp,
who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat
white hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to
us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender
girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one
foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled
propitiation. A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a
man in a trance completed this central group.
The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding
doors, and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the
first floors of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or
three indifferent water colours, there was scarcely any furniture
but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with
matting, was crowded with a curious medley of people, men
predominating. Several were in evening dress, but most had the
morning garb of the politician; the women were either severely
rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed out to me the
wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess
of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I looked
round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on
some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.
B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my
apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most
delightful traits, and resumed his discussion. Beside him was
Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days. . . .
Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon
the company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was
nibbling, he said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might
bring him down to London. He wanted to come to London. "We peep at
things from Cambridge," he said.
"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary. It's the
oddest gathering."
"Every one comes here," said Esmeer. "Mostly we hate them like
poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at
times--but we HAVE to come."
"Things are being done?"
"Oh!--no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British
machinery--that doesn't show. . . . But nobody else could do it.
"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an
original way. And by Jove! they've done it!"
I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer
showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of
the fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a
rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, cleanshaven
face that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-
Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian
in his type. He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over
gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of
different refractive power, and he talking in an ingratiating
undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements
of the hand.
People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly
the same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He
had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and
prizes capturned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--
and had made a name for himself as the most formidable dealer in
exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter.
From Oxford he had gone on to a position in the Higher Division of
the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made
a place for himself as a political journalist. He was a
particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and
sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory for facts and
a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for
these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social
discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of
the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as
a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the
socialism of that period. He won the immense respect of every one
specially interested in social and political questions, he soon
achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and
at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if
he had not encountered Altiora.
But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who
could make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of
the vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women
who are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage
and initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and
she could be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely
unfitted for her sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor
hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and aggressive for
any gentleman's hours of ease. Her cookery would have been about as
sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and
she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you
mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she
is inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine
garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity
gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness
that was partly a protest against the waste of hours exacted by the
toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy
splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in
the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter
of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to
cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a
Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she
had a tolerable independence. She came into prominence as one of
the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into
politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier
novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward--the Marcella crop. She went
"slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those
days--and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl
with clear and original views about the problem--which is and always
had been unusual. She had not married, I suppose because her
standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive
appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father by
speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and
successful manner. After her father's smash and death she came out
as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the
Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a
little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the
CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated
by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all
sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to
discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind,
the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took
occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had
sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic
at her attentions, marry him.
This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The
two supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their
subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She
was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas,
while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do nothing
with ideas except remember and discuss them. She was, if not exact,
at least indolent, with a strong disposition to save energy by
sketching--even her handwriting showed that--while he was
inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy
that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by. She had a
considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people--
and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be. He was always
just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude
and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
experience, good social connections, and considerable social
ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her
opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large,
novel, rather startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which
shocked her friends and relations beyond measure--for a time they
would only speak of Bailey as "that gnome"--was a stroke of genius,
and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable
and distinguished couple conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was
engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant
it to be no idle threat. She had discovered very early that the
last thing influential people will do is to work. Everything in
their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of
confidently administered detail. Their business is with the window
and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the
stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that
the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an
invincible power over detail. She saw that if two people took the
necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration
with precision, to gather together knowledge that was dispersed and
confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and what
avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a
centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and
political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.
Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil
Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of
public information she had conceived as their role. They set out to
study the methods and organisation and realities of government in
the most elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever
hitherto dreamt of doing it. They planned the research on a
thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost
entirely for it. They took that house in Chambers Street and
furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch
domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their
declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "The
Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and
their two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an
amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred
directions the history and the administrative treatment of the
public service was clarified for all time. . . .
They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they
lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise"
or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he
served, he said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway
director for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at
home to various callers, and in the evening came dinner or a
reception or both.
Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or
about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one
room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than
had ever met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity
that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and
mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but
whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.
Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that. She boasted
how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for
fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an
additional private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one
extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the
British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together,
Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes
between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient
public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of
secretaries."
"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"
Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.
Imagine what it means in washing! I dare most things. . . . But as
it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."
"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer,
and the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is
nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or
want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of
concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither
good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the
Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge
of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced an effect of
having found themselves--completely. One envied them at times
extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzled--and at the same
time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his
lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil
preoccupation I could not endure. . . .
3
Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.
It fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I
doubt if they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my
conclusions. It was their weakness to claim excessively. That
irritation, however, came later. We discovered each other
immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and
cooperation.
Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of
such constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by
one another.
"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and
presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."
"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a
rather badly joined tunnel."
"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all
want to find out each other. . . ."
They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me
to lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A
woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New
Banksland and his wife were also there, but I don't remember they
made any contribution to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that.
They kept on at me in an urgent litigious way.
"We have read your book," each began--as though it had been a joint
function. "And we consider--"
"Yes," I protested, "I think--"
That was a secondary matter.
"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going
right over me, that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable
development of an official administrative class in the modern
state."
"Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.
That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of
their lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. "We want to
suggest to you," they said--and I found this was a stock opening of
theirs--"that from the mere necessities of convenience elected
bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the services of expert
officials. We have that very much in mind. The more complicated
and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected
official have in himself. We want to suggest that these expert
officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very
powerful class in the community. We want to organise that. It may
be THE power of the future. They will necessarily have to have very
much of a common training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid
precursors of such a class." . . .
The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of publicspirited
endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised
version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things
more organised, more correlated with government and a collective
purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing
collective understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative
change, and methods of administration. . . .
It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very
anxious to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first
to identify their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own,
and so we came very readily into an alliance that was to last some
years, and break at last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked
me, I was soon discussing with her the perplexity I found in placing
myself efficiently in the world, the problem of how to take hold of
things that occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out careers
for my consideration, very much as an architect on his first visit
sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts before you this
example and that of the more or less similar thing already done. . . .
4
It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys
and me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant
visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises.
It is not nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit
that also held between us. There was a difference in texture, a
difference in quality. How can I express it? The shapes of our
thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different. It was
as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in
transparent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly from my
point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their
ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but
visible always through mine.
I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth,
order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead
straight to beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got
that or they didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things
harsh and ugly. That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of
many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak,
were at times as dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture.
A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to
point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember
talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds
for the work he had in hand. I mentioned the possibility of
enlisting Bailey's influence.
"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running
us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the
end he had in view. "I'd rather not have the extension.
"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the
essentials."
"What essentials?" said I.
"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some
merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do
all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do
it wrong and mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know.
He's just a means. Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.
This isn't a plumber's job. . . ."
I stuck to my argument.
"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to
me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking. . . .
I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our
philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable
difference,--once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy
devoid of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised,
concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force
or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to
round off and shadow my outlines. I hate them hard. I would
sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to
me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If
they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the
trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.
Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great
mistake. . . . I got things clearer as time went on. Though it
was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by
way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been
Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism
that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial
of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The
Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense--
which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the wordó"Realists."
They believed classes were REAL and independent of their
individuals. This is the common habit of all so-called educated
people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical
training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the
world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody
as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a
chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air
to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its
nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that
only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of
actuality and the people one knew. . . .
At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the
very strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected
to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin
and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable
percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave
and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora
canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that
might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing
it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision;
and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about
you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and
mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready
obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim
termini.
And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into
the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and
avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers
Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour
of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of
mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise
of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton
crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative
unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of
the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite
conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that
held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage. . . .
Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire
uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with
prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire
disregard of the social suitability of the "types" they might blend
or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you
knew for the "type" that will charge with fixed bayonets into the
face of death, and you found yourself unable to imagine little
Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of
annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of types were
underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and
altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether
unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.
5
Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing
her as a "new type."
I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days,
for a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room
fire. One got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign
of appreciation she valued. She had every woman's need of followers
and servants.
"I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, "with a very
interesting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals.
Middle-class origin--and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her stepfather
was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the
end, I fancy--in the Black Country. There was a little brother
died, and she's lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own,
so to speak. She's never been out into society very much, and
doesn't seem really very anxious to go. . . . Not exactly an
intellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force of
character. Came up to London on her own and came to us--someone had
told her we were the sort of people to advise her--to ask what to
do. I'm sure she'll interest you."
"What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked. "Is she capable of
investigation?"
Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did
shake her head when you asked that of anyone.
"Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress
pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her
voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to
marry a member of Parliament and see he does his work. . . .
Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything
by herself--quite exceptional. The more serious they are--without
being exceptional--the more we want them to marry."
Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
"Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome,
"HERE you are!"
Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply
dressed. Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem
softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of
purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden
and brown lines. Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace
of mourning for her mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her
tall and slender body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all,
and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her. Her
sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and the
little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me. But
she had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name.
"We met," she said, "while my step-father was alive--at Misterton.
You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between
the apple blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the
daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself. I
recalled at once that I had found her very interesting, though I did
not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.
Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended
mixtures of people with ideas and people with influence or money who
might perhaps be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down
late with an air of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said
absolutely nothing to her--there being no information either to
receive or impart and nothing to do--but stood snatching his left
cheek until I rescued him and her, and left him free to congratulate
the new Lady Snape on her husband's K. C. B.
I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression,
except that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and
interested to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each
other. We made that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent
marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem generally, matter
for quite an agreeable conversation until at last Altiora, following
her invariable custom, called me by name imperatively out of our
duologue. "Mr. Remington," she said, "we want your opinion--" in
her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads of
conversation into her own hands for the climax that always wound up
her dinners. How the other women used to hate those concluding
raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that dinner,
nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in
any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with
Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been
thinking of our former meeting.
"Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing
things and learning things than Burslem?"
She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
confidences. "I was very discontented then," she said and paused.
"I've really only been in London for a few months. It's so
different. In Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without
any reason. One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At
least anything that mattered. . . . London seems to be so full of
meanings--all mixed up together."
She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the
end as if for consideration for her inadequate expression,
appealingly and almost humorously.
I looked understandingly at her. "We have all," I agreed, "to come
to London."
"One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had
completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
"What are you doing in London?"
"I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps
I might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go
perhaps as a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs.
Bailey thought perhaps it wasn't quite my work."
"Are you studying?"
"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a
regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology.
But Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."
Her faintly whimsical smile returned. "I seem rather indefinite,"
she apologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things
one can't do. One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to
be such a trust and such a responsibility--"
She stopped.
"A man gets driven into work," I said.
"It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied with a glance
of envious admiration across the room.
"SHE has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked.
"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received
great confidences.
6
"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.
I explained when.
"You find her interesting?"
I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora
was systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry
Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come
into politics--as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with
the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her
summer holiday. It was her pride and glory to put things down and
plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she
did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be
declared. If she did, I disappointed her. We didn't come to an
engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring
obviousness of everything, that summer.
Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired
or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went
on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in
the open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for
long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally
explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the
neighbourhood. One invaded type, resentful under research,
described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho
Panza--and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and
signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at things. This particular
summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near
Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked
me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora took them for
a month for me in August--and board with them upon extremely
reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a
hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were coming
and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but
these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between
Margaret and myself.
Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She
sent us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good
walker--she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to
croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst
stimulant for lovers in the world. And Margaret and I were always
getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the
kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with
a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.
Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather
than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such
excursions. But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected
at the river's brink to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so
much zeal and so little skill--his hat fell off and he became
miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled
brow--that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret,
while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as
possible drowned herself--and me no doubt into the bargain--with a
sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with
which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation
Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the
rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We
had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed,
and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my
canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively
harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.
Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the
books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me
forward at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember
one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that
produced them.
Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and
unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of
health, warmth and leisure. It happened with the kindly and
approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised
these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children
ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and
properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the
normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the
great bulk of the life about her.
One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating
to sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in
charity and imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards
at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be
any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and
one's physical phases affect one's interpretations. There is
nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem
supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or
disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye
that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill
the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished
from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing
on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in these
matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with
an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty. . . .
I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom
days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but
certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless
worldliness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her,
she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a
civilised person than--let us say--homicidal mania. She must have
forgotten--and Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married
him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of
the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great
majority of people with whom they come in contact. They loved in
their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond way--but it had no
relation to beauty and physical sensation--except that there seemed
a decree of exile against these things. They got their glow in high
moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid worldly
success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.
They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and
just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate
Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an
abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity. There was the girl,
rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous,
quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented,
ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just
the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide. We
were both unmarried--white sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there
ever a simpler situation? What more could we possibly want?
She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect
upon her judgment and good intentions.
7
I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and
I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite
in agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the
ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the
superficial covering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and
yet stupendously significant things.
I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora
did. Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep
unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite
as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none
the less a dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly
and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my
life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to
speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience. After
that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex
never left me for long at peace. I went on with my work and my
career, and all the time it was like--like someone talking ever and
again in a room while one tries to write.
There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of
men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and
curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world
all of women. I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in
girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking. But never--
even at my coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone. Was I
seeking help and fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with
beauty? It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always
desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness
arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of
gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed
thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on
with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this
solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet
a constantly recurring demand.
I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable
for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get
the right proportions of the forces I am balancing. I was no
abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be
built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget. You cannot have
a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.
Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.
"Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."
I echo Henley.
I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, wellexercised
and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated
classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when
Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when
civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in
the world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and
obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of
five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as
I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no
lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life,
and this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and
women have the courage to face the facts of life.
I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened
to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that
Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and
wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected
and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit
loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and
of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these
five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky
dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of
correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing
homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the
London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the
observant. . . .
How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without
qualification! Yet at the time there was surely something not
altogether ugly in it--something that has vanished, some fine thing
mortally ailing.
One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a
pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone
else. And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or
twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a
position to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar
effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of it.
Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of
streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by
a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with
curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of
paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fairhaired,
sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in
broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first
inadequate to understand. . . .
I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the
meaning came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and
she was telling me--just as one tells something too strange for
comment or emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister
outraged and murdered before her eyes.
It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you
know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite
brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,
with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful
adventure fading out of my mind.
"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten
and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a
detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of
what I was striving to say.
8
I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I
passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier
encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the
subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of
interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping
into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this
memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what
led to them and joined them together. And they are all mixed up
with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits
of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered
misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for Margaret
were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.
It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same
time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds
streams of thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same
time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person
quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to
level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had
no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret
was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to
certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to
matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of
vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from
her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive;
she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy,
confirmatory action.
I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I
seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I
would state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."
I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her
blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."
I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it by
saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always
delectably done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears,
and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue
velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light,
the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful. And it was
clear to me that I made her happy.
My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling
at last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed
to offer me something. . . .
She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it
seemed to me my hold was slipping.
She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition
in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the
career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.
All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather
ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a
shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my
darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I could understand clearly
that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political
thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all
the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.
Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen
in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl
haunted me persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting
amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while
her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended
meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this
was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any
permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous
degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled
by any ordered will.
"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I
ought to have thought!" . . .
How did I get to it?" . . . I would ransack the phases of my
development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the
last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to
find some disorganising error. . . .
I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these
things in the exact order of their dates because they were so
disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life--in an
intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated
intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her
husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we
quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and
jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of
our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable
interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,
except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us
back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and
unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality
of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions
against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in
illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent
irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine
and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,
this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had
made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of
our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
bodily love and wasted them. . . .
It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I
had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the
Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt
that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a
harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not
doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its
nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had
gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of
false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt
to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of
profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated with
moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I
was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were
times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.
Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three
and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but
myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse
intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied
five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that
might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those
incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was
losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in
life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, overmastering
me and all my will to rule and make. . . . And the
strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!
Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
like scars inflamed. . . .
I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,
poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE
angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!
I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted
a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see
her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental
vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the
Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into
relief and made a grace of every weakness.
Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental
quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging
the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are
times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground
she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency
at each extreme. But in neither phase could I find it easy to make
love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I
talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little
puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and
in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make
confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest
outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
9
I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and
with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs.
Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite
passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished.
It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret
absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils
from its dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and
qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.
She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or
perish.
I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in
passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying
with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett
Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down
to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept waiting for some
minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory
opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white
cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese
thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall. To
this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the
sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I
suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She
closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand
and stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.
The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way
vanished at the sight of her.
"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.
For some seconds neither of us said a word.
"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.
She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."
"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I
didn't. I didn't because--because you had too much to give me."
"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to
my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you
things, things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell
you."
She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining
through the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It
was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the
situation whatever I might say. I began walking up and down the
room between those cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little
gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each
had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or
something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in
my mind concerned itself with that quite intently. Yet I seem to
have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of
things. "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.
You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding. You know
my political ambitions. You know all that I might do in the world.
I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things
perhaps, in this wild jumble. . . . Only you don't know a bit what
I am. I want to tell you what I am. I'm complex. . . . I'm
streaked."
I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."
She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the
ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.
"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not
possibly understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as
women are. I have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs.
Passion--desire. You see, I have had a mistress, I have been
entangled--"
She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling
you," I said, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly
that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I
say, dirty. It didn't seem so at first--"
I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice
of words to have made.
I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and
stopped again.
She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"
"But how can you know?"
"I know. I do know."
"But--" I began.
"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know,"
and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not
know.
"All men--" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these
temptations."
I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession.
. . .
"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent
difficulty, "it is all over and past."
"It's all over and past," I answered.
There was a little pause.
"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now
in the slightest degree."
She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put
out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl
in the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not
what nor why. . . .
I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with
tears. She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met
in Misterton--six years and more ago."
CHAPTER THE THIRD
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, swannecked
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.
Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no
exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost
shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help
us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be
very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the
sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of
the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be
glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her
previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother
across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her
gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in
colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series
delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of
Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.
But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural
effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a
thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping
a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered
familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can
hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace
comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless
satisfaction these things gave her.
Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was
cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of
these things. She was passive, and I am active. She did not simply
and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for
it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and
lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did
in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to
it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points
me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty
as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal. . . .
And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
beautiful than any picture. . . .
So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases
and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such
things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,
New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned
to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.
Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had
gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to
me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation
behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England. The judgments
and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles
away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling
things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily
fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and
stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an
exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon,
unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret
would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English
newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and
watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the
little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.
Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the
sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops
that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an
extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she said, are
quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary
looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good
deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender
handle and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply
tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweetdishes,
water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like
afternoon of it.
I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the
TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get
hold of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former
paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now
upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil
appreciations more and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and
delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.
I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts
like the catspaws before a gale. I was alarmed at these symptoms.
One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time
through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and
went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.
"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm
restless."
"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling--I've
never had it before--as though I was getting fat."
"My dear!" she cried.
"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil
out of myself."
She watched me thoughtfully.
"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.
Do what?
"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk
in the mountains--on our way home."
I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."
"Isn't there some walk?"
"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach
fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got
beyond Malamocco. . . .
A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the
gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.
Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my
point, "but I have work to do."
She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.
"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have
remembered."
She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said,
almost apologetically.
She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,
like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has
been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has
been just With You--the time of my life. It's a pity such things
must end. But the world is calling you, dear. . . . I ought not to
have forgotten it. I thought you were resting--and thinking. But
if you are rested.--Would you like us to start to-morrow?"
She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
1
Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square,
Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly
adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been
very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions,
white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now
we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging
and--with our Venetian glass as a beginning--furnishing it. We had
been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most
part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and
just precisely where we would put it.
Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine,
and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us,
I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a
consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until
everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent
Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally
intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards
became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."
I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about
Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest
ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not
sway her. It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my
hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest
determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in
that great project of "doing something for the world."
"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You
don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"
"I want them so."
"Altiora has things hard."
"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and
uncomfortable things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow
they won't help me."
So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple
and very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was
a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson,
for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to
get some such expression for myself.
"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--
when we see one."
I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent
Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish
appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its
fine brass furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey
and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a
partially opened packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have
tea with her out of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told
to notice what was fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never
had a house before, but I had really never been, except in the most
transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as mine
promised to be. Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and
harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had a green dining-room with
gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints; above was a
large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing open
folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for
the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so
skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be
indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above
this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially
thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead
and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and
window, and another desk specially made for me by that expert if I
chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and
every sort of convenient fitting. There were electric heaters
beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to make tea at
any time--electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so
that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night. I
could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so
interested in the perfection of its arrangements. And when I
brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized
upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a fine
official-looking leather.
I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and
feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place
in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the
same large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den
with good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was
a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for
them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files.
And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or appear
noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide
open doorway. "Is everything right, dear?" she would ask.
"Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."
She would come to the hearthrug.
"I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.
"I'm not busy yet."
"Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table
as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"
Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious
young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house,
and discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all
tremendously keen on efficient arrangements.
"A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,
"still--"
It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day
of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager
for us. We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and
began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.
As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous
social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.
For a time I acquiesced in this. I went very little to my clubs,
the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor
dinners at all. For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous
literary and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put up for
the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious
and substantial political standing. I didn't go up to Cambridge, I
remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new
adjustments.
The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very
considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old
Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There
were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little
younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.
Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my
Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was
an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles
instead of being naturally there. They couldn't quite reckon upon
what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and
incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie
Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very
important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was
Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons
and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race,
able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in
revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and
inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an
old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of
the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these men,
but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they
opened their hearts to me and took me into their order. They were
all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that
the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing
near its close. They were all tremendously keen upon social and
political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a
simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in
political achievements and distinctions. The young wives were as
keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I--
whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits
of this set were very much in the background during that time.
We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but
perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and
less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was
customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there
was always good home-made lemonade available. No men waited, but
very expert parlourmaids. Our meat was usually Welsh mutton--I
don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge
of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas
and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in
those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the
intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.
The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and
generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very
earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder
still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in
that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to
be most remote from reality.
2
I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those
beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to
their proper order the developing phases of relationship. I am
struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited
insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.
It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest
experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,
shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they
appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level
barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter years
of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be
absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each
other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying
love between them. It is possible to love and be loved untroubling,
as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and intricate
chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union,
and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.
Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a
little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of
love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid
of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not
solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and
queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common
foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine
fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous
hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever
peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless
nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance
and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked
up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those
inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.
I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.
Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the
injustice our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us
and no understanding. We were drawn to one another by the
unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each
other. I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.
Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser
and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily
upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less
discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate,
meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage
was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid
things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and
temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But
now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,
unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete
association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of
understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands.
People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than
they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more
accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted
couples. . . .
Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use
the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;
she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was
loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to
ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves
in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of
extravagance. My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;
hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the
facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and
the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in
circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary
points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National
Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of
tempera-mental quality. In spite of my early training I have come
to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has
always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our
fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning
what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it
was not my "true self," and she did not so much accept the universe
as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest. And also I
had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of
rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a
catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship
that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.
This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to
either of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving
myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our
minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of
misunderstanding in her. . . .
It did not hinder my being very fond of her. . . .
Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say
that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with
one another during the first six years of our life together. It
goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of
my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I
would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations. I tried to
fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations. There are
people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to
conquer myself. I record that much without any note of approval. . . .
For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact
nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had
almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to
affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual
concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual
subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings. . . .
3
The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's
own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a
pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and
free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest
and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead
Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the
Great Western and the North Western railways. I was going to "take
hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I
was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched
constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.
The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to
discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,
would become plain as things developed.
A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to
the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead
Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went
about the constituency making three speeches that were soon
threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me;
two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number
of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger,
the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric
traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought
Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old
soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters in
each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased
temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and
going were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state
of suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country
was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and
deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a
momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of billsticking
or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or
an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a
sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was
scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies. Now
and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part
people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible
confidence in the stability of the universe. At times one felt a
little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving
the country.
My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied
upon his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we
should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a
gentlemanly spirit. He was always writing me notes, apologising for
excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the
undesirability of some course taken by mine.
My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch
with these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real
attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply
with a political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and
its destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life
and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and
constructive effort might do at the present time. "We are building
a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the
great age of mankind." Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear!
'ear!" Then having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I
turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and
brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the age;
discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South
Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian
squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's
resources. . . .
It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness
of method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my
phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating
gatherings. Even the platform supporters grew restive
unconsciously, and stirred and coughed. They did not recognise
themselves as mankind. Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage
in the history of humanity, had no appeal for them. They were
mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes,
and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.
This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think politics was a
great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.
They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted
also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable
manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great
constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of
hounding on the solar system.
So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of
the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my
review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call
them?--"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated me
on the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of
the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to
fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbitwitted
person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the
vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.
I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food
dearer for the agricultural labourer. I began to speak of Mr.
Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a
man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still
criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.
And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr.
John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I
fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high
gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and
readier applause.
One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one
must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road
nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets
there," I said, "then it is one begins."
But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache
and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and
wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great
political ideals. Why should political work always rot down to
personalities and personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose,
to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from
personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities
they return. All our social and political effort, all of it, is
like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation. The
broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and
irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the
marshals must begin the work over again!
My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines,
and there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no
place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element
of the population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic
Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking
in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some
special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each
special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the
distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible
silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us
declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and
one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he
will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and
stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine
how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting
indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I
realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I
brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold
at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go
into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against
the late Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my
first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute
and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her
strength. Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked
curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies. I felt she had
no business to be so sure of me. I had moments of vivid resentment
at being thus marched towards Parliament.
I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
her. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She
sounded amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly
costly furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she
appeared. She also made me a birthday present in November of a
heavily fur-trimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went
on to the platform, and hold over her arm until I was ready to
resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be
heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence a towering
self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,
provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a
little at the hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far
and taken so much trouble!
She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In
hotels she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she
rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely
nourishing dietary of her own, and even in private houses she
astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and
sustenance. I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess,
a little intent, but sweetly resolute and assured.
Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and
she had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone.
I don't think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality
with that of Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a
deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel
methods. I was to be Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to
lubricate his speeches with a mixture--if my memory serves me right--
of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should
take a leaf from that celebrated book. She wanted, I know, to hold
the glass in her hand while I was speaking.
But here I was firm. "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't
stand that. It's a matter of conscience. I shouldn't feel--
democratic. I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe
on the chairman's table."
"I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.
It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a
little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see
now how pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I
wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this
reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient
pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very
doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too
seductive for dalliance. . . .
4
And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of
her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting
schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin,
who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw
her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the
fork of the frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but
afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better--and
on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction
climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now
to have been a long sustained conversation about the political
situation and the books and papers I had written.
I wonder if it was.
What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that
time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my
life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to
tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph
to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself
and sketching faces on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage
is oddly like little Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist
amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low
wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She
is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a little
incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a
politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I
sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian
fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which
it had spread gigantic across the skies. . . .
I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring
ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulderknot--
and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.
Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of
the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to
us. "One of the best workers you have," he said. . . .
And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross
from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'
house. It seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white
panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace
between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave
and fine--and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like
a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow
under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss
Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of
thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase
and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man,
who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest that
he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion
she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite
of the taunts of either him or her father. She was, they discovered
with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for
them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that
brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal
and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I thought
at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl
reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue
moon Isabel is well-behaved. . . .!"
Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly
unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of
Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type,
the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was
only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later. He
interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I
had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle. After lunch we went
for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and
looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even
in its winter desolation. And there the conversation suddenly
picked up and became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the
doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking
an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals
will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you
think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."
"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."
"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts
of your predecessors," said the doctor.
There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is
broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue
eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and
then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him
out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke
out of the big arm-chair.
"We'll do things," said Isabel.
The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his
fish at last. "What will you do?" he asked her.
"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.
"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.
"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.
"But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.
The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
"In some review," the girl went on. "After all, we're not going to
elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a
Remington-ite!"
"But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--"
"In front of Mr. Remington!"
"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor. "Let him hear
the worst."
"I'd like to hear," I said. "Electioneering shatters convictions
and enfeebles the mind."
"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly. "I mean--Well, anyhow I take it
Mr. Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this
muddle."
"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
windows.
"Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us
already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"
"They do," agreed Miss Gamer.
"Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."
"And you?" said the doctor.
"I'm a good Remington-ite."
"Discipline!" said the doctor.
"Oh!" said Isabel. "At times one has to be--Napoleonic. They want
to libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in
time for meals, can she? At times one has to make--splendid cuts."
Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham. "Excellent things!
But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about
something called liberty."
"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur
from Margaret, and took up the defence. "The old Liberal definition
of liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal
restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated,
underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the
possibility of liberty. There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A
man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the
liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for
it--until he gets out."
Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing
qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,
extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or
less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and
occasional interjections. "People won't SEE that," for example, and
"It all seems so plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but
unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop
of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.
Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement;
occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a
lizard's tongue into the discussion. I remember chiefly that a
chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet. . . .
After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift
in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should
offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual
temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.
On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private
satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics,
and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach
too much importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her.
And it's odd to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that
from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of
that encounter.
And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps
in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I
could to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in
the world, and she interested me immensely--and before the polling
day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast
friends. . . .
That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early
relationship. But it is hard to get it true, either in form or
texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and
refracting memories that come between. One forgets not only the
tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that
intervening haze, one forgets them altogether. I don't remember now
that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the
possibility of such love between us. I may have done so again and
again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever thought
of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,
seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had
if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into
my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my
previous experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have
laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating
experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but
I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many
other men of my class. I thought of women as pretty things and
beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at
times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but,
because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting,
subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of
Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I
had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly
empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation
or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.
With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in
impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy,
decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to
measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have
foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we
might have been such friends.
She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me
since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained
emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply,
clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that
marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free
directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy
freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me. She would touch
my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a
breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she loved me always
from the beginning. I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her
mind those days. I used to find her regarding me with the clearest,
steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice
healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,
speculative, but singularly untroubled. . . .
5
Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The
excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired
out. The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank
mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and
repeating: "Nine hundred and seventy-six."
My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but
we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result
for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventysix
would have meant something entirely different. "Nine hundred
and seventy-six!" said Margaret. "They didn't expect three
hundred."
"Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a
paper. "It means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand,
you know."
A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came
into the room.
Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had
sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my
sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a
girl. "Got you in!" she said. "It's been no end of a lark."
"And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive."
"Now you must go and be constructive," she said.
"You've got to live here," she added.
"By Jove! yes," I said. "We'll have to house hunt."
"I shall read all your speeches."
She hesitated.
"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not
exactly the thing she was meaning to say.
"They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in
her face.
"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through
hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on
the balcony.
"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly
"Oh, RATHER!" said I.
The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great
belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
"It's all over," he said, " and you've won. Say all the nice things
you can and say them plainly."
I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood
looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with
swaying people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of
us, tempered by a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a
fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a
speech could not instantly check. "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!"
and then a brief "boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts
and cheers. The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing
of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and instantly sank to
peace.
"Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.
"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I
remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
"Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"
"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar
and reiterated cries of "Speech!"
Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. "I shall go to
Westminster," I began. I sought for some compelling phrase and
could not find one. "To do my share," I went on, "in building up a
great and splendid civilisation."
I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal
of booing.
"This election," I said, " has been the end and the beginning of
much. New ideas are abroad--"
"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a
wildfire of booting and bawling.
It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a
speech. I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead
speaking behind his hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill
caught my eye.
"What do they want?" I asked.
"Eh?"
"What do they want?"
"Say something about general fairness--the other side," prompted
Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled
myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my
opponent's good taste.
"Chinese labour!" cried the voice again.
"You've given that notice to quit," I answered.
The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed
hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no
student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to
determine. Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side
displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There
was not even a legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did
not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can
be no disputing.
6
Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we
came back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to
our house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first
intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a
sweeping one.
Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving
congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy
who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays.
The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded
the nurseries. All the children of one's friends had got big maps
of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were
busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism
that had hitherto submerged the country. And there were also orange
labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party,
and green for the Irish. I engaged myself to speak at one or two
London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid,
and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National
Liberal Club, which was in active eruption. The National Liberal
became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the
counting came dropping in. A big green-baize screen had been fixed
up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the
constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures
came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their
energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a
Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there was a
Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was
there.
How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and
whisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making
waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every
now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our
little set was much in evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis,
Bunting Harblow. We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement
and the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm.
Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I
did not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn
fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.
Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than
two hundred seats.
"I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic
speculating. . . .
After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find
it difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what
it was we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a
tremendous accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was
swirling in like a flood. . . .
I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I
don't clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the
fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that
my return would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I
found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague
majority. There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a
majority could be too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work
still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and
a very crowded opportunity it was at that. Everyone about me was
chatting Parliament and appointments; one breathed distracting and
irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be
asked to do it. I was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be
done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation to hold
us all together. I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and
etiquette particularly trying. We dined with the elder Cramptons
one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the
House liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impression and
what a bad one. "A man shouldn't speak more than twice in his first
session, and not at first on too contentious a topic," said Sir
Edward. "No."
"Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's
a sort of airy earnestness--"
He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could
name one man who spent three years living down a pair of
spatterdashers. On the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches
the eye of the PUNCH man, for example, may be your making."
He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to
like an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar. . . .
The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to
feel more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in
batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too
fresh under the inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us
carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats. It is one of
my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats
in the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club. At first I
thought there must have been a funeral. Familiar faces that one had
grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberalminded
wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets,
suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness,
from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There was a
disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good
Parliamentary style.
There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous
competition to get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory
hangs about me of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane
desolation inhabited almost entirely by silk hats. The current use
of cards to secure seats came later. There were yards and yards of
empty green benches with hats and hats and hats distributed along
them, resolute-looking top hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy
grin under them, sensible top bats brim upward, and one scandalous
incontinent that had rolled from the front Opposition bench right to
the middle of the floor. A headless hat is surely the most soulless
thing in the world, far worse even than a skull. . . .
At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I
found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the
Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless
after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its
ease amidst its empty benches.
There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see
over the shoulder of the man in front. ''Order, order, order!"
"What's it about?" I asked.
The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I
gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it
was Chris Robinson had walked between the bonourable member in
possession of the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him
blushingly whispering about his misadventure to a colleague. He was
just that same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at
Cambridge, but grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same
knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he
talked to us in Hatherleigh's rooms.
It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House,
and that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day
from the TIMES.
I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through
the outer lobby.
I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before
me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled
itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square
shoulders, the silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt
backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a
weak approval. "A MEMBER!" I felt the little cluster of people that
were scattered about the lobby must be saying.
"Good God!" I said in hot reaction, "what am I doing here?"
It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that
yet are cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme
vividness that it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as
that something had got hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound
of my mind. Whatever happened in this Parliament, I at least would
attempt something. "By God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed. I am
here to do something, and do something I will!"
But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a
chilling night, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over
my shoulder at the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember,
westward, and presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and
followed it, watching the glittering black rush of the river and the
dark, dimly lit barges round which the water swirled. Across the
river was the hunched sky-line of Doulton's potteries, and a kiln
flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted
line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station.
Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly changed to the
commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It was a big confused
world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching
the huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal
of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water
below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into
mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to
the barges. Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men
toiled amidst these monster shapes. They did not seem to be
controlling them but only moving about among them. These gas-works
have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a
livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange crimson streaks. . . .
On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the
lapping water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the
lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem
to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an
air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.
Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the
industrial monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably
with my memories of my first days as a legislator. Black figures
drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a
motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat
has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.
"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon
me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber
museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . .
Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all? . . .
Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of
the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet
close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!
I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water
turned to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief
perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of
my thoughts. It was then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that
night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not
live in vain. I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous
blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me
back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent things.
I knew myself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it
was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders,
and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a sense of
yielding feebleness.
"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me,
destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little
interests and little successes and the life that passes like the
shadow of a dream."
BOOK THE THIRD
THE HEART OF POLITICS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
1
I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this
next portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it
raw edged and ill joined. I have learnt something of the
impossibility of History. For all I have had to tell is the story
of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his
life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the
doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms
and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving
media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally
unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with
personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only
coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
treatment multitudinous. . . . For a week or so I desisted
altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit
through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this
little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with
Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the
effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.
Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This
main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have
looked to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young
couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's
auspices to make a career. You figure us well dressed and active,
running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses,
dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in
the lobby. Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must
have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.
We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I
thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten
thousand things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it,
as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes
occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible. Under
certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a
handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous
unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the
realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any
inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our
life. Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our
outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of
these so long-hidden developments.
That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of
these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether
broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the
cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the
fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This "subcareerist"
element noted little things that affected the career,
made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to soand-
so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the
least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his
charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the
appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean something greater and
not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.
In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora
Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in
the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a
man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am
tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of
how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such
frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent
contemporary. Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter
it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less
personal, less individualised, and broader in its references. Its
aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different
system of demands and satisfactions. It was critical, curious, more
than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.
It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more
subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its
relations to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental
and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,
from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the
window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible
existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for
that greater personality behind. And this back-self has its history
of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable
conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and
achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons and phrases,
it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new
realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to
the general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the
ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it
accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises
and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing
mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.
In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the
development of mankind.
2
It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,
lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked
with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams
and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow
frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that
back-self into relation with it.
I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him
which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of
his influence.
I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at
the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of
the moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced
ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy,
and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek
successfulness. But that disposition presently evaporated, and his
talk was good and fresh and provocative. And something that had
long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he
and I found ourselves of one accord.
Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to
become confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and
ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to
anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the
establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUPDE-
MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence
of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own
sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought. . . .
Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured
them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait
conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the
gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good
conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression
exactly like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as it were,
dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and
back to cover. They gave one twilight nerves. Their wives were
easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal
about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of
making observations upon sociological types. Lewis gossiped about
the House in an entirely finite manner. He never raised a
discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask what we
thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say
it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would
say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good,
and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless
statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in
our minds for some other topic of equal interest. . . .
On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young
Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and
her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with
us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle;
his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the
Bunting Harblows. There was also some other lady. I remember her
as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.
Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental
Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not
altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible
literature. At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.
After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause,
and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs.
Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her restand-
sun-cure in Italy. That led to a rather anxiously sustained
talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the
no-breakfast system. It had increased his power of work enormously.
He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.
"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.
"Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after
things."
"But publicly?"
"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to
consult nine books!"
We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of
dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken
were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had
refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and
was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young
Liberals thought we were up to?
"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to
hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"
Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of
the Community."
"HOW?"
"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.
"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know
where you think you are going."
"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.
"That's only a phrase!"
"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"
"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.
"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to
ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural
mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently
echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. "What
ARE we Liberals doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the
revolutionaries.
To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for
fundamentals--and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that
I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself
together with two different sets of people with whom one has
maintained two different sets of attitudes. It had always been, I
perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we
shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals. It had
almost become part of my morality to respect this convention. It
was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit,
tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico.
Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the
verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the
nature of confirmations. . . . It added to tbe discomfort of the
situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the
presence of our wives.
The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation:
"The country is with us."
My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases
about the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my
cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.
"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said. "We
haven't the same belief we used to have in the will of the people.
It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as
a matter of fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that
brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've
got to give it one--if possible with brains and a will. That lies
in the future. For the present if the country is with us, it means
merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."
Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his
system of pretences.
Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us
again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of
interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the
welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of
us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion
of the Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were
persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our
rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good,
while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political
intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. It is only now I
perceive just how perplexing I must have been. "Of course, she said
with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have
aims." And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."
"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her hsuband as the
wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an
indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising
Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit.
Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and
Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him
at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn.
We dispersed early.
I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards
Battersea Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.
"She's a dear."
"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too
safe."
"She was worked up," I said. "She's a woman of faultless character,
but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she
gives them a chance."
"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."
"Hansom cabs."
"She's wise," said Britten. . . .
"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your
other guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments--
Remington, those chaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It's part
of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.
How is he to understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to
think of your lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A
kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government. I don't
understand where YOU come in. Those others--they've no lusts.
Their ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at least a lust to take
hold of life and make something of it. They--they want to take hold
of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all the
stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to
stimulation!" . . .
He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through
most of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been
very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a
very horrible manner. These things had wounded and tortured him,
but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind
of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive,
so much better than I had any right to expect. At first I had been
rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the
stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding
faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he
showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.
I discovered at his touch how they irritated him. He reproached me
boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I
walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his
rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his
denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and
Progressivism.
"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that
the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and
beauty. There's a sort of filiation. . . . Your Altiora's just the
political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for
embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.
The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller
thing and a slower thing altogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed
to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy
prostitute stood lurking--" was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little
lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this
Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora
Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's makebelieve,
make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything
of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean
rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night
goes by outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all
this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or
is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children
in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really care,
Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they want to do, what
Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to
do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the
Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like
statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over
their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.
That's their Reality. That's their scope. They don't, it's
manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--
lust, and the night-sky,--pain."
"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"
"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but
dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.
That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have
good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their
hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring,
satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"
"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
"God help us!" said Britten. . . .
"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment
from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral
animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of
all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking,
temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, makebelieve,
Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."
He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:
"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this
set!"
"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "
You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.
Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.
There's depths in Liberalism--"
"We were talking about Liberals."
"Liberty!"
"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night
and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I
know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and
trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and
my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a
drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut
me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it any more. I've paid
something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."
He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he
cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."
"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat
gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room
and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and
Margaret's admirable equipment of me.
I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it
was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private
room. . . .
3
I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and
selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial
circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating,
men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual
temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply
party but school and college and county and country that lose their
glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of
the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or
that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the
Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense
of fair play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down--
freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by
propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses. . . .
There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example,
or Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the
fact that the party system has been essential in the history of
England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile
of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich
with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing
itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems almost
scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall,
thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once
held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible
profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I
think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at
most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On
this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."
Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on
the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he
murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety
even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily disposed
to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings
that have no grain of curiosity. His conception of perfect conduct
is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves
of the great recorded days. So infinitely more important to him is
the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.
Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl
is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY
GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail,
however, in their clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant
consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking,
they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few
of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the
discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West
End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday
resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."
The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and
exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly
judged. They do not talk of the things that are really active in
their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to
be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex
and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to
me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties
and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of
passionate interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields,
or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a
novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . .
It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the
great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we
are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the
greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future
that is possible to us. London is the most interesting, beautiful,
and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental
and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant
totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old
bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the
scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in
comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my
imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at
hand.
It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I
think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London
night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which
the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by
taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I
think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts
sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the
camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining
river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow
seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and
corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished
little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the
tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast templestudded
plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and
fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and
corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria
Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one
another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and
scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace,
witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests
along it from every land on earth. . . . Interwoven in the texture
of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the
gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your
kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the
destiny of Man!"
4
My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.
The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very
ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and
quite out of touch with the mass of the party. For a time
Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old
quarrels. The early Educational legislation was sectarian and
unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the
attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was altogether
for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the
Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting. I was
recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the
Government so early as the second reading of the first Education
Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my
intention in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced
man. I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies
of sects and little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods
with the manifest needs of the time.
I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I
worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.
I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were
already a little curious about me because of my writings. Several
of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr.
Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that
engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an
approving "Hear, Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two
futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to
begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the
effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what
I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was
getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of
having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt
for that encouraging cheer.
Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in
the world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being
easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and
hesitations of members behind the chair--not mere audience units,
but men who matter--the desolating emptiness that spreads itself
round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined
crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering
movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary
Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic
background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a
confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a
pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A
misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily
disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak
with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House
imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into
the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of
an auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such
as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose
one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose
one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with
qualifications.
5
My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold,
wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous
paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the
late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy,
crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of
men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just
that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me
the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and hears perplexing
dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the
clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches
profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or
Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .
I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the
Club to doubt about Liberalism.
About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the
great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of
the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some
are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely,
dissociated men. At first one gets an impression of men going from
group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches
closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at
the outside, and know nothing of the others. One begins to perceive
more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human
mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different
quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.
Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the
Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a
clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island
of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant
from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a
group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or
so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of
eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.
Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised
chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging
with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions
over long cigars. . . .
I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract
some constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of
politics. It was clear they were against the Lords--against
plutocrats--against Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers. . . .
It was tremendously clear what they were against. The trouble
was to find out what on earth they were for! . . .
As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample
but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in
little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and
narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.
What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes
together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half
of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct
and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the
commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative
imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.
The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great
and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart. . . .
I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality
very vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a
waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the
sackload and drown by the million in ditches. . . .
Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!
he was saying something about the "Will of the People. . . ."
The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I
forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a
lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a
ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye
could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like
grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was
there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling
individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant
synthesis, still to come--or present it might be and still unseen by
me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of
mankind? . . .
I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is
implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of
would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the
ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life,
has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the
indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and
comprehend individual lives--an effort of insidious attraction, an
idea of invincible appeal. That something greater than ourselves,
which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between
being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and
visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in
stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more
clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile
in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men. It is
something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is
withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever
been. . . .
6
I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the
club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with
speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came
up. I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle
and his Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or
Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within
seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.
Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant
or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still
livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He overate
himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special
Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar
wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards,
in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black
coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the
brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room. I would
sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder,
wonder. . . .
An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of
him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying,
sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance
furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen
his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.
We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only
in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser
lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed
self-justification of the dull.
I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment
realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with
me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were
jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and
mankind? . . . How on earth could any one get hold of him, make
any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond his newspaper. He
never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart. He never
discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.
He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and
quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist
an impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look
here! What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and
the empire and mankind? You know--MANKIND!"
I wonder what reply I should have got.
So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone
could be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete,
sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species
and varieties and dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I
could be considered as representing anything in the House, I
pretended to sit for the elements of HIM. . . .
7
For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an
air of coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into
politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a
tremendous ECLAT. There was visibly a following of Socialist
members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in
soft felt hats and short coats and square-toed boots who replied to
casual advances a little surprisingly in rich North Country
dialects. Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as
Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender
twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a fire
that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip Snowden, the
member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty strong
altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a
big national movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were
springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about
Socialism and discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities
with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest
intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly
against. For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously
sympathetic. . . .
When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
evening gatherings at our house. . . .
These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a
discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and
uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed
that even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the
other side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do
that?"
"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora,
"totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them. Or they
won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their
table manners. They just make holes in the talk. . . ."
I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's
outburst. The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very
greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders;
the want of intimacy didn't at first appear to be more than an
accident, and our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance
and easy intercourse afoot among them and between them and the Young
Liberals of our group. She gave a series of weekly dinners,
planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's model, and
after each we had as catholic a reception as we could contrive.
Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful
of insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one
got a nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one
should be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the
tie or the shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent
aggression should alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A
number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that never
came, and stood and sat about silently, mildly amused but not a bit
surprised that we did not discover their distinctive Open-Sesames.
There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in
shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy social
intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to become
oracular. One was in a state of tension from first to last; the
most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and
replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young Liberals
went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked. The
Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting
Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats
indicative of the House, or in what is sometimes written of as
"faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they and
their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives,
like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.
I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just
as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects
should appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional
personalities. On one of these evenings a little group of rather
jolly-looking pretty young people seated themselves for no
particular reason in a large circle on the floor of my study, and
engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning,
the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper. It must have been
that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before
the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an
anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue--visible ends of cress
having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with
doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be given handbills
and printed matter by our guests, but there I had the
advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver.
So that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact
little woman in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive
black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her
heart upon my contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil
interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and
care in evading her.
Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their
manner was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the
approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and
there engage in discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be
Determinism--which became heartier and noisier, but never
acrimonious even in the small hours. It seemed impossible to settle
about this Determinism of theirs--ever. And there were worldly
Socialists also. I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant,
lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black
ribbon, who swam about us one evening. He might have been a
slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat,
and the sort of black and white check trousers that twinkle. He had
a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to
be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are we all he-a
for?" he would ask only too audibly. "What are we doing he-a?
What's the connection?"
What WAS the connection?
We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We
tried to get something like a representative collection of the
parliamentary leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of
Socialist thought and a number of Young Liberal thinkers into one
room. Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared
for ten minutes and talked charmingly to Margaret and then vanished
again; there was Wilkins the novelist and Toomer and Dr. Tumpany.
Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, and
Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members. And on our
side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow, Crampton,
Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as they
possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to
mingle or dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening
was a failure. Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists
one had supposed friendly. I could not have imagined it was
possible for half so many people to turn their backs on everybody
else in such small rooms as ours. But the unsaid things those backs
expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the
various organs of the various sections of the party next week.
I talked, I rememher, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair
hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We
discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at
that time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal
party. I was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed
less vividly in many others of these Socialist leaders, and which
gave me at last a clue to the whole business. He behaved exactly
like a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who wants to be
dealt with. He had an air of having a corner in ideas. Then it
flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an
attempted corner in ideas. . . .
8
Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris
of the gathering.
I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white
and weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
"Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.
I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.
"Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."
Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she
was accustomed to wait for clues.
"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of
the Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I
explained. . . . "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out
of the obvious common sense of our present conditions. It's as
impersonal as science. All these men--They've given nothing to it.
They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big
intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feel quite sure of the law.
There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness. . . . If we professed
Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of them!
They'd feel it was burglary. . . ."
"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I
felt about them all the evening. . . . Particularly Dr. Tumpany."
"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's
the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a
mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated
everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist
leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what
it is to-day--a growing realisation of constructive needs in every
man's mind, and a little corner in party politics. So, I suppose,
it will always be. . . . But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"
I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said,
smiling indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)
I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an
excellent word in that connection. . . .
But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great
brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking
them! . . .
"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."
I sat taking in this proposition.
"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.
"Us?"
"The Liberals."
"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said. "They'll never even help
themselves."
"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,"
said Margaret, after a pause.
She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel,
perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I
did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed
me and went rustling softly to her room.
I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts
crystallising out. . . .
It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and
the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social
affairs. The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in
embodying them. The reality of human progress never comes to the
surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in
silence while men think, in studies where they write selfforgetfully,
in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal
curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of
emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday
affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair,
are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation,
personal feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his
immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he
simply turns himself into something a little less than the common
man. He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve
him from a frontage. That is the essential error of the specialist
philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They
repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is what
bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had
prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an
official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the
first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like
gifts to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deepside
shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To
understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to
join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not
even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for
which it stands. . . .
I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had
taken me some years to realise the true relation of the great
constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but
to myself. I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one
party with social construction, and to regard the other as
necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow
the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be
wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual
freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and
that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in
himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its
possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be shaping
immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and
have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are
held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the
stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for
progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,
except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular
method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for
the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of
classes in the exciting community, and every party has its
scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with welldefined
hinterlands formulating its social functions in a publicspirited
form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its
meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression
upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern
affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway
and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve
themselves for all--in spite of every one. . . .
The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of
two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends
in the event of a small Government majority. These two main parties
are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has
certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative Party has
always stood quite definitely for the established propertied
interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church,
and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has
been created by temperance legislation, are the essential
Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the
families of the great international usurers, and a vast
miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of
resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has
always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any
other party. The great landowners have been as well-disposed
towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to cooperate
with the Church in protective and mildly educational
legislation for children and the working class, as any political
section. The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager
for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared
to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and
public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation. A
certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally
characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads to
no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.
All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably
inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised
population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners
and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,
jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the
power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party
as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely
confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective
control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or
the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended
municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of
property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine
bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in
these affairs.
Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose
immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,
increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man
tenant and working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt
constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally
suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher
education, and--except for an obvious antagonism to employers and
property owners--almost destitute of ideas. What else can it be?
It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and
difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and
organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and
capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;
but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of
individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and
quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in
recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the
huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a
very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous
assemblage.
For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.
It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the
party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and
planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so
constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to
hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.
Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a
system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times
an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together of all the
smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against
the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the
landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the
moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small
employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man
without introductions and broad connections against the man who has
these things. It is the party of the many small men against the
fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving
the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is
doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it
resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the
king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"
because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party
that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it
represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only
so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than
its jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation
is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses
in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to
wealth and hostility to public expenditure. . . .
Every modern European state will have in some form or other these
three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and
unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;
the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,
struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a
third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes
reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,
the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to
Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in
the United States. The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the
Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,
the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and
confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in
the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the
less for that. . . .
And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
some great brain beyond our understanding. . . .
So it was I sat and thought my problem out. . . . I still remember
my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like
clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course,
couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not
ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of
Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily
claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of
disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the
Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity--of
human confidence in humanity--of all that mattered in human life
outside the life of individuals. . . . The only real party that
would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the
entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
anything in the world.
Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
before? . . . I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
9
My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to
the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of
my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and
administered territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from
that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a
more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my
uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive
Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of
organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated
methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent
industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my
perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But
something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these
determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,
always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of
vitally important omissions.
I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political
associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,
priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were
attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own
theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more
than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was
seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits
of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his
illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited
triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to
point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal
all along with human progress as something immediate in life,
something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups
pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in
my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, selfseeking
careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled selfconsciously
through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely
growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have
called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is
also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
continually upon human experience and influences human action more
and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the
stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it
was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't
understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying
to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,
and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of
silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most
acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human
life altogether in social organisation.
In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange
and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,
leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that
they can think out the whole--or at any rate completely think out
definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and
finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that
assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions
of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,
pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of selfsufficient
energy. In the passion of their good intentions they
have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush
disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that
any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.
Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective
mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman
and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and
becomes accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer
to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces
to the development of that needed intellectual life without which
all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to
build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring
only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process
fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give
cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality
and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of
a contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion,
vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity
that lurks more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt
there must go an emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last
something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the
spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress--
love and fine thinking.
(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
without the repetition of that phrase.)
My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I
as a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an
adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that
had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the
secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of
City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky
Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and
tradition-worship of my political associates. None of these things
were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.
I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame. The
real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the
enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of
human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the
invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs has
or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life
of politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still
against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to
their essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went
nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire
fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward
appearances whose ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions,
hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and
prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men. How are we through
politics to get at that confusion?
We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create
a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all
educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues,
and the evasion of life.
We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and
literature, and its exploration through research.
We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free
criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike
degenerate into tradition or imposture.
Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the
scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually
beautiful, become--EASY. . . .
It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
engage would be those which most directly affected the Church,
public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature,
and the channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my
position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and
conduced to this essential work.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
SEEKING ASSOCIATES
1
I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits
of party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.
Regarding the development of the social and individual mental
hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on
very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may
call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the
changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who
dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a
possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by
habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must have an
aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose--or
mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I
look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.
I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and
the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and
finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far
beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively
invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale
than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very
much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.
We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and
education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here
my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If
humanity at large is capable of that high education and those
creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and
more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and
leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot
be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of
humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has
become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people,
amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that selfconscious,
highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic
culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the
development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the
spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary
needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human
interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and
acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and
redirected by literature and art. . . .
But now the reader will understand how it came about that,
disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and
disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed
Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big
people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism
pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all,
it was not my particular job to work through them and not against
them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-? Weren't
there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack,
and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were they really
the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible
new braveries of life?
2
The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of
Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the
financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against
the consumer. The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it
was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to
all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief,
and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that
after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism
might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression
of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational
and philosophical movement such as no formula of Liberalism
supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed
to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness and
humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social
efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise. There
suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a
new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the
slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small
boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing,
earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and
occasionally a little beyond his strength--the Boy Scout. I liked
the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it
mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate
national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and
had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.
3
In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some
lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the
Pentagram Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir
Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the
big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya,
and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us. We were
men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was
to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. We
dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of
years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen. The
dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd
how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering
became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the
waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us
would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of
some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one
present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare
we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my
house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me
and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three.
We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the
end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our
closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.
I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of
such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New
Imperialists who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey
Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all
mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it
were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of
constructive policy. They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams
of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the
Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think
mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.
They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a
curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that
side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were
disposed to spend money much more generously on education and
research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed
likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the
Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the
universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of
the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line with
these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's
sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in
such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of
Progress." It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than
their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time
are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that
I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important
to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them. By 1908 I had
already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a
transfer of my political allegiance.
These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory
of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy
bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed
central trophy of dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and
cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton
sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had
while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and
Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for
confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the
Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and
round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths
of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to
conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes
in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as
people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to speak at
me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly
for an after-talk.
He opened his heart to me.
"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are hornyhanded
sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do
that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as
constructive a twist as we can. That's MY Toryism."
"Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?"
"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs
out. You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why
aren't we working together?"
"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.
"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.
"What are the Confederates after?"
"Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
do." . . .
The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at
once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose
membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff
Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In
the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised
power. I have no doubt the rumour of them greatly influenced my
ideas. . . .
In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two
years I was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a
matter. I was not dealing with any simple question of principle,
but with elusive and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse
forces and of the nature of my own powers. All through that period
I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates
mere dreamers? How far--and this was more vital--are they rendering
lip-service to social organisations? Is it true they desire war
because it confirms the ascendency of their class? How far can
Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the
thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than a
mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the
community?
That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like
asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer
varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the
people I was watching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not
incidentally, but all round? How far can you educate sons beyond
the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, selfindulgent
class above the protests of its business agents and
solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class
possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible?
Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth
the retrogression that may be its price?
4
It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new
conceptions that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of
my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY
and our wing of the present New Tory party. I do that without any
excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's
production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very
large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed
that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts to pop.
The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very vividly in my
memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight
we went to finish our talk at my house.
We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and
so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced
Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now
the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember
his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile
at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic
entanglement that was destined to involve us both. Gane was
present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was
absent. Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely
characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on
my mind.
I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my
title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it
was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People." It is not the title
I should choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of
"mental hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The
World Exists for Mental Hinterland."
The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a
thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought
with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the
scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it
the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the
1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled
marginalia.
My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon
lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding
sections. I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and
tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were
treated to one of his platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in
his chair with that small obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling,
and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating--quite
regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others
in the debate--the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge
from reality. "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of
his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the
People. I do." And so on. Nothing in his life or work had ever
shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark.
He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.
After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show
that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either
recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is
aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the
reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment
of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and
understanding. There was a disgusted grunt from Dayton, "Superman
rubbish--Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed on over him to my next
propositions. The prime essential in a progressive civilisation was
the establishment of a more effective selective process for the
privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise
scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a
reward for virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an
invitation to capacity. We had no more right to drag in virtue, or
any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the
tallest man. We didn't want a mere process for the selection of
good as distinguished from gifted and able boys--"No, you DON'T,"
from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world
concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate
Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in
educational, artistic, and legislative work. "Good teaching," I
said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic about
character."
Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of
agonised aversion.
I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that
is really serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the
thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter,
are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned
by--how many?--by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said
Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or
four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain
no illusions as to their innate rarity. We know that they are just
the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and
confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate
moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the
crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become
commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry
commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous
pollen in a pine forest is waste."
"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his
chin in his necktie. "WASTE!"
"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
understanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is
needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and
undifferentiated a public. Most of the good men we know are not
really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a
little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.
Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,
futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal
problem of the state--to discover, develop, and use the exceptional
gifts of men. And I see that best done--I drift more and more away
from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity--by
a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but
by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep
literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all
science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism
going. You know none of these things have ever been kept going
hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an
expression of mystical profundity.
"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to
darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to
darkness again--and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went
on to attack the present organisation of our schools and
universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the wellbehaved,
uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the
authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon
lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this
story. . . .
So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
combination of groups these developments of science and literature
and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I
looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
There I left it to them.
We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we
emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.
The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.
I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way
we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a
lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a
walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he
said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible
movement. It's not only possible, but necessary--urgently
necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in
education and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our
neglect of the higher levels."
Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called
the spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community
needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken
seriously," I remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either
dull responsibility or merely witty art."
I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown
out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate
these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind
went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and
how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers
nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some
defensive devices.
"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said
Crupp, with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The
Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or
literature."
"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said
Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were
made of," he added.
"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've
got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make
it work. But he's certainly suggested a method."
"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to
the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't
do without it."
"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes,
aristocrats indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said
Britten.
"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.
"I agree," said Gane.
"No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."
It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with
ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out
suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we
tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I
think, got more said than any one. "You all seem to think you want
to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,"
he insisted. "It isn't that. That's the standing error of
politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a
matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.
The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question
for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help
this culture forward."
"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You
yourself were asking that a little while ago."
"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a
movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords,
they'll call the political form of it."
"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
"The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said
Thorns.
He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of
those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady
jet of ideas might produce enormous results."
"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
"I believe we could do--extensive things," I insisted.
"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said
Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."
"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the
peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently
progressive and rejuvenescent."
I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection
was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the
table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he
said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.
They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."
"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
"Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm,
and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to
happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock,
and barrel, who comes in?"
"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.
"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.
"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns.
"I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in
three years."
"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing
emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and
almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all
the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march
with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.
Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I
concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want
to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."
"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long
time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.
"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by
transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the
liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except
a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other
progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams
of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no
free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid
ugliness,--that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to
discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls--
and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people
say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in
which the living element may be saved."
"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult
that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do
immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.
And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was
only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist
in our hands. . . .
We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in
that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration,
and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the
indications of that opening talk.
5
I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new
trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I
had already hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other
men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that
otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality
than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other
questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that
came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy,
Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the
imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little
Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just
a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official
by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said
he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens
then--and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional
representation to let in the wild men." I opened my eyes--the lids
had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds--to
see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
predominant nose.
The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium,
that sooner or later something must happen there--something very
serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He
was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is
inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be
annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his
chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of
the utmost moral fervour, is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse."
Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and
seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement
we could still go on talking of war.
All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses
that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental
journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."
That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness,
mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and
sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands
of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly
civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a
good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the only thing
capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained
constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced
the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a
wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 1909, for
example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts--
"We want eight
And we won't wait,"
but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent,
our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous
criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the
quality needed to carry on the modern type of war. Almost
universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility
and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have
poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because
our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost
unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in every
matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended
sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because
in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for
quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my
paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had
flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is like some
of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the
Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character;
its backbone, that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is
bigger than its cranium. It's no accident that things are so.
We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, and if the
joints are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half
awake to our error. You can't change that suddenly."
"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."
And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which
haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to
blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as
I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and
brains, crept nearer and nearer. . . .
I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but
I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing
class as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in
English life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial
endurance--is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and
diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where
we can and assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing that our
upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest
character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite
honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man,
that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage
upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity of
evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a larger population,
a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual
training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to
a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all.
The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may
end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall
proudly but very firmly take the second place. For my own part,
since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of
soul, I pray for a chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the
dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was able to
shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable
destruction truncating all my schemes. At the most, a European war
would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.
In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see,
disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most
extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are
there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an
elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until
something happens he remains. Our functions in India are absurd.
We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make
nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. We
suppress our own literature there. Most English people cannot even
go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it. If
Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester
operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average
English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the
Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I
have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,
viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what
India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought
we were up to there. I am not writing without my book in these
matters. And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and
look at our sedition trials!--they told me nothing. Time after time
I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who,
when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a
week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee
nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as
our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve
the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic
inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and
sword than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without
plans, without intentions--a vast preventive. The sum total of our
policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would
enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for
themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men held
back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth
gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection
breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for
inaction develops stupendous absurdities. The other day the British
Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for
seditious emblems and inscriptions. . . .
In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our
chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness
of our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything
with India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in
the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about
"character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for
the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact,
if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we great schools
and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit
of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be
different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to
justify it.
It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from
India. That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our
bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be
able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there. It is
our new method. We train our future rulers in the public schools to
have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power
arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a
native state, we shall he willing to deal with it. We may or may
not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when
we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy,
and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such
as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror DE
FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home
will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I am no
believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and
less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of
an abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral
constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.
6
I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--
this morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still
not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and
the torrent that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try
to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious
time, before I went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying--
chaotic task--to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of
the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of
wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled
with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big
facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large
fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of
representative picture to set off against those other pictures of
Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge
assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at Stamford House. The
place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge
clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished floors and
wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a Gargantuan
scale. And there she sought to gather all that was most
representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those
brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of
our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon
the political and social side.
I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big
saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful
rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done
nothing and to be capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--
uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State ball--and
exchanged information. I told her about the politicians and
intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we
sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful
people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of
tallness was or was not an illusion.
They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of
people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
individualised. "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared
for. I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant
consideration for each other."
"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said,
"like big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What
else can you expect from them?"
"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an
achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a badtempered,
sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I
couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief
surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time
is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty. I confess
I admire them. Oh! I like them. I wouldn't at all mind, I believe,
giving over the country to this aristocracy--given SOMETHING--"
"Which they haven't got."
"Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in
the world."
"That something?" she inquired.
"I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done
all sorts of things--"
"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken--
you remember?--at Spion Kop."
"It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove
resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a
little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's
got the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown
pluck, you know--brought something off."
"Not quite enough," she suggested.
"I think that's it," I said. "Not quite enough--not quite hard
enough," I added.
She laughed and looked at me. "You'd like to make us," she said.
"What?"
"Hard."
"I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."
"We shan't be so pleasant if we do."
"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an
aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm
not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want
to better this, because it already looks so good."
"How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.
"Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying
to answer that! It makes me quarrel with"--I held up my fingers and
ticked the items off--"the public schools, the private tutors, the
army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of
the country towards science and literature--"
"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at the
beginning," she added.
"Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a
movement?
"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked
a gleam of curiosity. . . . "You want," she said, "to say to the
aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember
what happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"
"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen
are off the stage. These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the
blues. . . . They cost a lot of money, you know."
So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people,
charitable minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and
there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I
liked extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, finethinking.
Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as
a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden
delicacies of perception few men display. I liked, too, the
relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance,
their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the
middle-class order. . . .
After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a
type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings,
but much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for
instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent
presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering
blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and
chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps
and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue
and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would
expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be
aristocratic. I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the
intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the
great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She
affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the
governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all
a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained.
"That's my remedy."
In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic
theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet
unformulated intentions.
"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady
Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get
a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's
what we're all after, isn't ut?
"It's not an ideal arrangement."
"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
education, Lady Forthundred scored.
We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington,
my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair
of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap
of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group
of daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile
to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any
nonsense about nobility."
She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a
practical people. We assimilate 'um."
"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
"Then they don't give trouble."
"They learn to shoot?"
"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on.
Sometimes better than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends
very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."
I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty
thousand a year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,
courageously. . . .
Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in
the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and
fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing
themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and
valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to
them?
7
Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham
with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face,
his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing
oratory. He led all these people wonderfully. He was always
curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing
frankness--and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.
For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the
throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the
Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants
of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break
against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed
he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the
last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that
he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early
papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered
liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.
He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in
British political life. Some men one sees through and understands,
some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay,
but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth
and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. No
other contemporary has had that effect upon me. I've sat beside him
at dinners, stayed in houses with him--he was in the big house party
at Champneys--talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat
beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a
rare sense of being understood. Other men have to be treated in a
special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,
flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.
Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of
stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.
And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with
Mankind? That I thought worth knowing.
I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a
dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost
forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive
purpose in politics.
"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party
converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do,
and people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion
become matters of science--and cease to be party questions."
He instanced education.
"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
"Apart from the religious question."
He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his
general theme that political conflict was the outcome of
uncertainty. "Directly you get a thing established, so that people
can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people
can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no
more to be said. The thing has to be done. . . ."
And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely
tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing
constructive conviction, there are other memories.
Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive,
indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning
over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it,
or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a
diabolical skill to preserve what are in effect religious tests,
tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the
consciences of a quarter--and that perhaps the best quarter--of the
youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?
In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham
displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his
subtle mind. I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and
listen to his urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care?
Did anything matter to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why
did he trouble to serve the narrowness and passion of his side? Or
did he see far beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was
justified by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?
They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly
well cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate
intimacy; he pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think
at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily
circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics.
And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight
of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond
question he was great! No other contemporary politician had his
quality. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great
contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of
statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only
interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the
conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at
times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the
reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own
thoughts, who waits behind a lesser master's chair. . . .
8
Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as
to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke
quite after my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise
that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly. But
neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist of my story.
And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and
Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was
possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of
constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely accept
the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to
make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the
great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa,
Framboya--Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So
far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they
had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the
perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little
glorious, a little too simply bold. They wanted to arm and they
wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them
far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of
heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in
a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained
men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the
things that matter in England. . . . There were also the great
business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord
Paddockhurst). My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the
scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the
perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar
competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of
gain. For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington--I wish I had kept
a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day
to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and
wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity of sweeping
actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent
ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed
him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in
him--but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day
after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound
meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem
to light the whole interior being of a man. "Some day," he said
softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some
day I will raise the country."
"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the
little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette. . . .
Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and
again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and
their big lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement. And
below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods,
young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen
service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers,
keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.
Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside
the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their
chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than weltpoliticians;
contemptuous of school and university by reason of the
Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, lighthearted,
patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for
bullying. They varied in insensible gradations between the noble
sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our
Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man might exercise
his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public
serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed
up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose
predominant idea was that the village schools should confine
themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying,
and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request. . . .
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the
figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the
library of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of
those things--I think they are called gout stools. He had been
playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he
had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted
to irascible important men whose insteps are painful. Among other
things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand
statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly
that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in
population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and
circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who
pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of
upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established
Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue
about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered
his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to
the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an
appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable,
responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a
number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive
retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to
the forensic mind. Now he reposed. He was breathing heavily with
his mouth a little open and his head on one side. One whisker was
turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump strong hands
gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.
How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence,
respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his
unguarded expression!
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake
him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
9
One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days
was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised
that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even
then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last
incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as
nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative
side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that
witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly,
I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it
is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more
vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite
beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and
the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,
chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden. . . .
Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember
it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine
for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I
know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and
reality again."
"But aren't these people real?"
"They're so superficial, so extravagant!"
I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so
extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite
as much as any other woman's in the house.
"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale
and spirit of things."
I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before
her out of the window.
I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was
also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also
with us. "You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy
girl. Every one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He
seems--oh! like something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and
say little things to me."
"Offensive things?"
"No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite
right. That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have
helped--all that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't
like him. But none of the others make the slightest objection to
him."
"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."
"That's just it," said Margaret.
"Charity," I suggested.
"I don't like that sort of toleration."
I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I
said. "No! . . .
But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's
their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class
conspiracy against the mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit
at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white
reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful
service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums
and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the
table."
I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
increment.
"But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.
I was moved to question her. "Do you really think," I asked, "that
the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social
injustice as we have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a
struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
"They MUST know," said Margaret.
I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must
have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at
the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view
and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest,
hardest lines that were possible. It was perfectly clear that she
saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs. The thing showed
in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion
with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library
at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the
Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete citizen sucking
at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton
discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially
hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat
pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and
wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put
the truth to her?
"I don't see things at all as you do," I said. "I don't see things
in the same way."
"Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
"Think of every one," I said. "We Liberals have done more mischief
through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the
world could have done. We built up the liquor interest."
"WE!" cried Margaret. "How can you say that? It's against us."
"Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to
prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with
industrial regularity--"
"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was
talking mere wickedness.
"That's it," I said.
"But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"
"Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?"
"But think of the children!"
"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its halfcunning,
half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout
fashion. If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an
offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and
restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some
cases lead to a neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence,
punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that
perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't intensify
the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit
for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the
public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real publichouse.
If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently
want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt
men to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post
because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of
thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid. . . ."
I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty
fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of
yew. Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great
blaze of yellow flowers. . . .
"But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our
work."
I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no
antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine,
make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better
people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains
of the piece? The real villain in the piece--in the whole human
drama--is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's
virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If
I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the
world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. It would matter
about as much as a slightly neglected dog--in an otherwise wellmanaged
home."
My thoughts had run away with me.
"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest
distress. "I can't understand how it is you are coming to see
things like this."
10
The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will
permit the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has
an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency
with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of
life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be
silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the
sight of all men. Those who have no real political experience can
scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is
between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the
"thinking-out" process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult
to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex,
to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under
jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the
platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs. . . .
The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the
elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record
of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations
between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the
bleak lucidities of sleepless nights. . . .
And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,
to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,
experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is
to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to
feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to
choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent
questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use
dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the
whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a
poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get
something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to
put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement. . . .
One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to
conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position
that this should happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no
power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I
had stage-managed our "serious" conversations. Now I was too much
in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk
with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and
sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic
apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes
distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right,
and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling
to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I
could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than
our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be
reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the
finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and
disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in habits and
gestures of thought coming between us again.
The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon
myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone;
an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening,
a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and
more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I
maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during
that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow
acquisitions.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SECESSION
1
At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision
distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of
the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would
go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the
side of such forces on that side as made for educational
reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and
intellectual development. That was in 1909. I judged the Tories
were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought
them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their
strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a
period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was
entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense
opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by
conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification
by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and
high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the
now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there
would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that
we reckoned. . . .
At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and
Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together. . . .
I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very richlooking
and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of
gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned
these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had
been escapes me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her
room. I remember I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to
the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the
railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf
gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric
standard in the corner.
"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
"I'm out of touch," I explained. "Altogether."
"Oh! I know."
"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself
in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of
stoppered bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to
this," she said.
"In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I
couldn't have gone into Parliament. . . ."
"I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she
interrupted.
There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table,
lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were
possible that you shouldn't do this." She stopped abruptly, and I
did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making
to control herself.
"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament--"
There came another silence. "It's all gone so differently," she
said. "Everything has gone so differently."
I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the
Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how
perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to
her.
"I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.
"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming.
But--I still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go
over."
"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader--"
She could not finish it. "All the forces of reaction," she threw
out.
"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I
can find work to do--better work on that side."
"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if
it didn't call upon every able man!"
"I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of
her. "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had
said nothing.
There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff
dissertation from the hearthrug. "I am going over, because I think
I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side.
I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and
altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that
will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into
an energetic revival. They will set out to win back, and win back.
Even if my estimate of con-temporary forces is wrong and they win,
they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war
abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The effort
at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe I
can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion
in the world of politics at the present time. That's my case,
Margaret."
She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw
aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her
sentence remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone
over, they will welcome you."
"That hardly matters."
I made an effort to resume my speech.
"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.
Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could
see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative
range. . . ." I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence
broke up my disquisition.
"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my
writings."
She made no sign of admission.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear.
Then either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to
a General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and
provoke a quarrel."
"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
"I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
On that we halted.
"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't
quite tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either
resign my seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand
again."
"It's political suicide."
"Not altogether."
"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like--like
undoing all we have done. What will you do?"
"Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of
course, there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion--
it has been more than a religion."
I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the
implications of that.
"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of
going over, almost lightly--to those others." . . .
She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had
captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself
protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's
because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
"I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
There was another pause between us.
"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it
should have come to this!"
She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She
was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her
ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I
could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had
brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual
temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to
say? A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was
a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed
before everything else the relief of weeping.
"I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said
with an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note. . . .
I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big
landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I
heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in
her bedroom door. Then everything was still. . . .
She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the
thought.
"Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can't people at least
THINK in the same manner?"
2
And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations
that we never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the
air for some time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach
between us was confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided.
It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only
became evident to me with this quarrel. The changes of the heart
are very subtle changes. I am quite unaware how or when my early
romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-principled devotion
evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite early in my
parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at
the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of
private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and none the
less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles. So
long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now,
since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and
I could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent
upon her for house room and food and social support, as it were
under false pretences. I would have liked to have separated our
financial affairs altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue
would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost
furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the
private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her
motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at
breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon her cheek. The locking
of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I
understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure
process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed the landing to her
room again.
In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret,
I perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder
is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in
many ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control
her. After our marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let
her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and
ineffective and unfortunate things she said and did to me. She
wasn't clever enough to justify that. It wasn't fair to expect her
to sympathise, anticipate, and understand. I ought to have taken
care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the difficult
places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if
there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on
her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me
from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she did not get
any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It must
have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew--for
surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and
perplexed. A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and
business of the man she has married for love to help her to help and
give. But I was stupid. My eyes had never been opened. I was
stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding
morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though
present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrongdoing,
the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.
3
I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine
piece of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected
display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this
movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the
Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the
floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven
the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once
manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals
in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.
The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public
service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.
I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most
strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and
attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in
an utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals
was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate
values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to
give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class
upon which we had hitherto relied--not unjustifiably--for certain
broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective
judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish
landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to
a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and
wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state. You have
taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged
Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now propose to do
the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which has many
fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is
nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense
of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you
are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at
it not only in the House, but in the press. . . .
The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
defection.
Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was
treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in
provocative terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings
at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a
correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which
ended in my seeing a deputation.
My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty
people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were
manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There
was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark
his sense of the occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect
for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the
KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of
Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never
abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten
years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was
part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick
Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of
dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway
between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey
style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and
a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been
taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation,
which included two other public-spirited ladies and several
ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus
going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill
forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say
"Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't
upon them at the time.
I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but
quite definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision.
Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand
for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed
at the present time. The whole process of politics which bulks so
solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth
of petty motives above abysms of indifference. . . .
Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll
resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if
there is I shan't stand again. You don't want the bother and
expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.
But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be
necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the
better for the party. The Lords are in a corner; they've got to
fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.
Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last for
years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You
Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it
is sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords--and I don't
see why he shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to
fall back upon. You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The
country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give
it. I don't see what you will do. . . . For my own part, I mean to
spend a year or so between a window and my writingdesk."
I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all
this with very great regret. . . ."
4
My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something
that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor
Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and
fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms
and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new
developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation,
in the nascent state, as a chemist would say. I was free now, and
greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous sense of released
energies. I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to
the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.
Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial. We
meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and
life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a
revised and renovated ruling culture.
For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted
to do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to
create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work
forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including
Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which
should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about
me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general cooperations.
We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of
our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue
Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our
deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in
my editorial decisions. My only influential councillor at first was
old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was curious how we two
had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give
and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the
necessary instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper
right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at
this with extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our
political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust
storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we
made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good
writing. It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords
were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the
longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and
tumult of that immediate conflict were over. Meanwhile we had to
get into touch with just as many good minds as possible.
As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly
conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain
later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused
Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's
House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic
virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow
excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had
been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In addition,
without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and
Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself
to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the
confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the
general need of metaphysical training. . . . The great mass of
people--and not simply common people, but people active and
influential in intellectual things--are still quite untrained in the
methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of
method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy
patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by
a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to
their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that
minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general
terms and a certain use for generalisations. They are--to fall back
on the ancient technicality--Realists of a crude sort. When I say
Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not
Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to
Idealist. Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great
prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are
whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied
contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of
definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest
belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are
using. They are Realists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact;
sentimentalists in behaviour. The Baileys having got to this
glorious stage in mental development--it is glorious because it has
no doubts--were always talking about training "Experts" to apply the
same simple process to all the affairs of mankind. Well, Realism
isn't the last word of human wisdom. Modest-minded people, doubtful
people, subtle people, and the like--the kind of people William
James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical
happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms.
They are truer--and less confident. They have reached scepticism
and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new Nominalism.
Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of
intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind,
that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can
only function properly upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always
been her side of our mental co-operation rather than mine. Her mind
has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power;
she has a wonderful art in illustration, and, as the reader probably
knows already, she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm
and vividness. So far there has been no collection of her papers
published, but they are to be found not only in the BLUE WEEKLY
columns but scattered about the monthlies; many people must be
familiar with her style. It was an intention we did much to realise
before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY to
maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last
scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large
imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
mine. . . .
I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in
London. I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good
criticism; I was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider,
if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and
had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that
draws in the unattached reader. The chief danger on the literary
side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some
particular school, and this I watched for closely. It seems
impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view
together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise editor to
secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected the
shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous
piece of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out
with him. Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal. . . .
Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat
persistent appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the
BLUE WEEKLY was printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements,
and went into all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the
country houses where week-end parties gather together. Its sale by
newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily. One got more and more the
reassuring sense of being discussed, and influencing discussion.
5
Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of
Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided
window of plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the
corner of the Hotel Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and
the long sweep of south bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past
Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge below the
Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just floated into view on the left
against the hotel facade. By night and day, in every light and
atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a
throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed
the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things
became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror of
steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of
smoke reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a
marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a
mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details,
minutely fine.
As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back
there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old
desk. I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is
a green shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and
letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the
shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a
rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window seat black in the
darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window. How
often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from me
slowly out of sight. The people were black animalculae by day,
clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom
face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and
shade.
I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work.
Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful
of time until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp
to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower
Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with the dawn.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE BESETTING OF SEX
1
Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned
with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a
contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the
social organism in relation to that man. To tell my story at all I
have to simplify. I have given now the broad lines of my political
development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to
the conception of a constructive aristocracy. I have tried to set
that out in the form of a man discovering himself. Incidentally
that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife. One
has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two
different languages and coming to an understanding. But Margaret
and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my
own, diverged.
I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended
for me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me
up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement,
tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in
which these interests break upon the life of a young man under
contemporary conditions. I do not think my lot was a very
exceptional one. I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates,
but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small
families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I
was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were encounters of
sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them
things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish
disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had
passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time
Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and
so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a
little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She
didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from
my world. . . . And then came this secret separation. . . .
Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development
of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to
have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I
thought these things were over. I went about my career with
Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly
strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished
sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would
not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest
degree if we had.
And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and
her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life
returned. The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its
invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy. I have already
compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in
his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these
high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the
beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and
woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the
light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting,
demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I
feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my
time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere
physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she
is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to
the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a
thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came to me
and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once
trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest,
most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,
explicitness of understanding. . . .
2
In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed
either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow
they didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they"
were, had to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was
possible then. But even before 1906 there were endless intimations
that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were
crumbling. We political schemers were ploughing wider than any one
had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction. We had
also, we realised, to plough deeper. We had to plough down at last
to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and examine and
decide upon them.
The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the
metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one
clamorous aspect of the new problem. The members went about
Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset. A good
proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an
isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would
presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who sought more than
comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and
money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle
fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventions of
relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and
that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that
were absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except
for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was
amazingly effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed,
I think, to the forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple
argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude
expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a
widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the
conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly,
dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had not merely adopted
the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that,
given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even
vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had
every reason to hate. . . .
I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in
the session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went
to prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I
came down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a
confusion outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with
an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a
silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part
white-faced and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces
upon me. It was quite different from the general effect of staring
about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of
men. There was an expression of heroic tension.
There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout
that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was
shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an
ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and
sympathetic. When at last we got within sight of the House the
square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of
police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a
revolutionary outbreak. There were dense masses of people up
Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The scuffle that
ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such
stupendous preparations. . . .
3
Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night,
and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the
piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch,
stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we
went to and fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course,
the independent worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed
old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; batteredlooking,
ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness
of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory
girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of
families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,
hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very
dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast,
with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those women looked
defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never
ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or
cease. I found that continual siege of the legislature
extraordinarily impressive--infinitely more impressive than the
feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section. I thought
of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the
women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to
Westminster.
I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past
with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards
the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
4
There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat
the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,
irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political
life. We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it
thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it
insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to
the essential things. . . ."
We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient
children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That
conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its
essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder
treatment of political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly
as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent
preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality
he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to littleness. The
world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he
adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of
tea. . . .
The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.
It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And
at any particular time only a small minority have a personal
interest in changing the established state of affairs. Habit and
interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious
change and adjustment in these matters. Drift rules us. The great
mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential
people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their
compromise. Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to
be thought about. They have given up any aspirations for intense
love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a
cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as
their compensation. It's a settled affair with them, a settled,
dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest
reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to the
Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving
all these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice,
"Leave them alone! Leave them all alone!"
That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and
went out.
For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.
I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music,
for the human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape. I
wanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable
until I found the effective sneer. In matters of private morals
these were my most uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of
these things any more for ever. I hated the people whose talk or
practice showed they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe
that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible,
because I had decided to treat them as at that level. I was, in
fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.
And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds
it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still
dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty
suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer
nights, the sweetness of distant music. . . .
It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the
present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and
so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to
unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married
for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling
has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't
understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children
or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the
supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other
affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most
fundamental aspect of existence. . . .
5
It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of
the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about
all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was
bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the
last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid
discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences,
no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful
emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of
things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment
of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism. Now
that I am exiled from the political world, it is possible to
estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a
universal education grew to paramount importance in my political
scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the
quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again
to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and
the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had
been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on
the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit
were staples of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent
scolding of prosperous childless people in general--one never
addressed them in particular--nothing was done towards arresting
those adverse processes. Almost against my natural inclination, I
found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the
conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.
It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and
well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised
state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its
intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some
very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old
haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly
discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or
good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.
Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a
puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.
No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present
question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and
sits at every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional
except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more
doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and
beautiful and courageous people must come together and have
children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be
freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to
be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom
need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances
have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to
whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the
family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies
in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant--
and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead. . . .
The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it
can get the best possible increase under the best possible
conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent
family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and
owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,
subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up
or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable
conditions. We want to modernise the family footing altogether. An
enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put
upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out
to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to
social and material considerations.
The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition
of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is
changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy
everything is changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls
and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best
adapted classes in the community. The species is recruited from
among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.
Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their
possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery. In the
United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely
increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries
the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements
in the community. The women of these classes still remain legally
and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
excuse for their dependence gone. . . .
The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless
effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a
solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes
that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great
social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married
women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and
asylums for the heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly
proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in
houses.
What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying
boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities,
improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging
wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the
biological outlook? . . .
It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion
until I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had
it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than
participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied
in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage
and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance
in the life of the community. In a world in which everything
changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas
perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that
we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content
to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.
Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together,
are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out
from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to
say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of
individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must
become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this
works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and
sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become
more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to
the collective purpose. Or, to express the thing by a familiar
phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it
is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled
family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and
freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.
After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows
clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and
mothering is their special function in the State, and that a
personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power
of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No
contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to
recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her
freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice
and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.
This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.
Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a
pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.
Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood
struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears. . . .
I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the
matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I
want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full
participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, I am
convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are
capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them
citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for
their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's
satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children
in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,
choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way
enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched
mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to
change the respective values of the family group altogether, and
make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner
and responsible guardian of her children.
It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it
is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social
organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human
expericnce--as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.
Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage
profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not
believe that particular assertion myself, because I am convinced
that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass
of civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still
keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will
prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological
decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way
which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at
which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the
life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must
be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is
not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral
inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only
alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human
quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented
rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must
presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as
Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim
Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may be in the
attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
6
I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt
monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a
politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The
Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social
reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter. It
only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.
There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project
in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my
speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a
complex piece of music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I
would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to
biologise Imperialism.
I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced
people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to
phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be
done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood
forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that
anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left
untouched by these proposals.
I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE
and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of
State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,
upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE
WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the
public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more
struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation
of this suggestion.
And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I
returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of
Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval
of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me
on my way to the table between the whips.
That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
purposes in the national life.
Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of
this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third
Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and
complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to
confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.
Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay
of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the
basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must
be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and
further ennoblement of individual lives. . . .
I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this
book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have
called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a
dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic
motives more and more into a disciplined and understanding relation
to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this
great clarification of our confusions. . . .
Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal,
and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of
mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as
it pleases them.
BOOK THE FOURTH
ISABEL
CHAPTER THE FIRST
LOVE AND SUCCESS
1
I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is
to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint
lives.
It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was
a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our
destruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if
we had been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected
and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two
friends and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to
our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The
thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of
thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive
effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two
men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a
considerable time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable
to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.
Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.
In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in
steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the
telling. In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my
sins with a penitence I am very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have
got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel
unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure whether, if we could be put
back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two
years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over
again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do not want to
justify the things we have done. We are two bad people--if there is
to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer
humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again
and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as
unpremeditated as it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a
morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every
other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the
fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel
so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my
book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may
read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric
and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this
business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely
formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell
you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were
this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
account for its extreme intensity.
I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of
wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that
eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the
real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
menageries of human reason. . . .
We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find
myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.
But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of
Eugenics between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive
passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,
but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising
afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us
whatever--at that the story must stand.
But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that
passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious
compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of
anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our
literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddleheadedness,
leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous
possibilities of destruction and little effective help. They find
themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly
commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up
Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,
scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any
possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about
whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are
FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is
inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more
initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that
can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial
and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster
as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,
many more than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all
our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest
open scandal ends a career. England in the last quarter of a
century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,
I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it
wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the
cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It
not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I
am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
2
Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel
kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,
with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which
fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would
turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk
all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of
the day. In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a
savage. She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret
lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long
ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the
constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that
unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a
man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude
for my welfare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked. We
discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history,
pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.
She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly
sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a
girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt
there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless
place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not
have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with
me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.
I favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At
that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of
passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It
seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship
in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher,
and friend. People smiled indulgently--even Margaret smiled
indulgently--at our attraction for one another.
Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going,
liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm,
as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never
supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the
friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we
kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it
did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it
wasn't there.
Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should
have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.
It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for
the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and
fresh with the new sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking
with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of
the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the
daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees,
and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our
own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay
window. There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed
the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some comments upon the
spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it
had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having
it out with me.
I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She bad been lying prone on
the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully,
and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I
turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear
cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight
and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something--
an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical
feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of
tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life
another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my
very heart.
Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned
back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her
intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.
From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that
this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told
how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at
my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where
there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate lovemaking.
I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a
girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's
daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO,"
and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the
world. Perhaps that is the way to live. Perhaps there is no other
method than this effectual annihilation of half--and the most
sympathetic and attractive half--of the human beings in the world,
so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. I am quite convinced
anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into
the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an
invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is
no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women are to go so far
together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go,
without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the
basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the
liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to
love, then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept
apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of
lovers.
Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into
the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more
urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that
comes to a young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of
that unfolding. She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and
watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the
substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems
instinctive in a natural-minded girl. There was even an engagement--
amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities. I
never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair,
to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy. She
struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself,
and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became silent
about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for
all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and
me than I was to know for several years to come.
We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but
we kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she
wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to
say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I
combined it with one or two other engagements--somewhere in
February. Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make
journeys for her.
But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There
was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;
the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously
to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute
of chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one
or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.
C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of
Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who
was in a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a
game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was
impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration
possible in a rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember,
to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of
Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the
Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.
"Last months at Oxford," she said.
"And then?" I asked.
"I'm coming to London," she said.
"To write?"
She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that
quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to
work with you. Why shouldn't I?"
3
Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a
handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on
my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and
all that it might mean to me.
It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so
elusive as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her
gripped me, fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing
filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no
doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It made it none the
less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was
transitory, and bound to go out of my life again. It is no good
trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is
gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a
multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich
curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly
weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear
preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much
deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.
Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the
train: "Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I
can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind. . . .
If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I
could have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage
and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had
been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation--no telling
is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and
passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel
things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we
had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always
mattered enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as
badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would have hunted
shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never have had
the patience and readiness for one another we two had. I had never
for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of
understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She
gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious
effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that
it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners
of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to
explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice
heard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased
my ears.
She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent
the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of
all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to
London for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady
Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she
wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every
one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her
sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a
scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the
undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly
the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,
developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She
was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but
she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the
management of elderly distinguished men. It was an odd experience
to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room
and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a
shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and
lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she
professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my
views and sought me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY
began to link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and
sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's
articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory
scalpel. Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade. Her
writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the
phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little
shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at
Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those
days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or
so, and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things
were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being
innocently mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a
monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to
have her as my pupil. Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at
that distance for a long time--until within a year of the Handitch
election.
After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for
comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less
formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their
cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with
them in Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men
who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the
frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her
kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck
up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking
to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked
upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had
some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of
him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with
her work. If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's
writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our
talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
4
Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find
it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed
pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply
that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been
wearing down unperceived.
And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the
cycle of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an
uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters
with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the
earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told
me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all
she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers',
and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing
amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately
possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to
happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge
generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.
No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same
quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things
it seemed to open to her.
"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I
suppose every woman does."
She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to
these things. "Some one presently will--solve that," I said.
"Some one will perhaps."
I was silent.
"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have
to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master. . . . I'll be
sorry to give them up."
"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts
of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas. . . . You
can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."
"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently
I've begun to doubt about it."
I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each
other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon
after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,
with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had
happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any
declaration. We just assumed the new footing. . . .
It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there
was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other
people had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression
of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very
much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the
Tropical House. But I also remember very vividly looking at certain
orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not
have been there. It is a curious thing that I do not remember we
made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as
though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been
patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy between
us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and
wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes. We wanted to
know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in
the most perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession
of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very
little passion. But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we
faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It was as if we had
taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like
people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.
I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the
ordinary observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous
contrast with all that really went on between us. I suppose there I
should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl
succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur
to us that there was any personal inequality between us. I knew her
for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison
cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her
mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction
wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from
little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile,
so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds
we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of
joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to
discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all
the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances
of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had
left not a shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate
love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with
the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out
for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and
the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings
of teachers, and all the social and religious influences that had
been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of
conviction. The code had failed with us altogether. We didn't for
a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for
all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.
Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people,
and particularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality
hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They
may render it lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There
are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its
prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly
suppressions. You may, if you choose, silence the admission of this
in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it
working out in lives. People come up to the great moments of
passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really
civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be
unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customs that
have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous
spirits are disposed to despise.
Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are
trying to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush"
without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything
about love and marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in
enforced darknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient
tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We
affect a tremendous and cultivated shyness and delicacy about
imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What
did ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a great desire,
robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of
love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the
disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in
the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the
effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit by the
intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,
irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We
might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a
sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions
to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.
Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive
terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but
neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores
of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it
were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing
against it. And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love
in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep
everything to ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one
persistent obstacle that mattered to us--the haunting presence of
Margaret.
And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people
scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to
ourselves. Love will out. All the rest of this story is the
chronicle of that. Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love. It
is just exactly the point people do not understand.
5
But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and
a sudden journey to America intervened.
"This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and I am too
big to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility
of being found out! At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost
of parting."
"Just because we may be found out!"
"Just because we may be found out."
"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you.
I'm afraid--I'd be proud."
"Wait till it happens."
There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is
hard to tell who urged and who resisted.
She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY,
and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms;
she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life
possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could
not endure other people for the love of me. . . .
I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to
America that puzzled all my friends.
I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my
strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit
the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among
other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the
world.
Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical
my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to
prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I
crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with
ungovernable sorrow. I wept--tears. It was inexpressibly queer and
ridiculous--and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!
New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things
slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I
remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of
desperate voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself--
no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.
Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that
the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and
everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the
end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to
London.
Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust
and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had
strength to refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the
separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her
jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind--the haunting
perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the
Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour, discretion, the careers of both
of us, became nothing at the thought. I couldn't conceive my life
resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in short, stand it.
I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have
kept upon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted
Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the
world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you
have never wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.
But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the
reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual
happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon
them and a wonder. Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure,
the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, I
can't tell--I can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing
LARK--it's the only word--it seemed to us. The beauty which was the
essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear
justification, eludes statement.
What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties
evaded and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say
that one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart
throb and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand?
Robbed of encompassing love, these things are of no more value than
the taste of good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing
of music,--just sensuality and no more. No one can tell love--we
can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences. Given
love--given mutuality, and one has effected a supreme synthesis and
come to a new level of life--but only those who know can know. This
business has brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever
expected to bear, but even now I will not say that I regret that
wilful home-coming altogether. We loved--to the uttermost. Neither
of us could have loved any one else as we did and do love one
another. It was ours, that beauty; it existed only between us when
we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save
ourselves.
My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme
vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within
me. It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of
it yet except Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in
upon Britten and stood in the doorway.
"GOD!" he said at the sight of me.
"I'm back," I said.
He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his.
Silently I defied him to speak his mind.
"Where did you turn back?" he said at last.
6
I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive
lies to Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her
from Chicago and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to
be on the spot in England for the new session, and that I was coming
back--presently. I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made
a calculated prevarication when I announced my presence in London.
I telephoned before I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She
was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came
back to Radnor Square I had been at home a day.
I remember her return so well.
My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from
my mind much of our long estrangement. Something, too, had changed
in her. I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it
plainly. I came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the
turmoil of her arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened
gladness. It was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar
dark furs that suited her extremely and reinforced the delicate
flush of her sweet face. She held out both her hands to me, and
drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed me.
"So glad you are back, dear," she said. "Oh! so very glad you are
back."
I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too
undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness.
I think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.
"I never knew what it was to be away from you," she said.
I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement.
She put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
"These are jolly furs," I said.
"I got them for you."
The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage
cab.
"Tell me all about America," said Margaret. "I feel as though you'd
been away six year's."
We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the
fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.
She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I
had expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this
sudden abolition of our distances.
"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes
scrutinising me. "Why did you come back?"
I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat
listening.
"But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?"
"I wanted to come back. I was restless."
"Restlessness," she said, and thought. "You were restless in
Venice. You said it was restlessness took you to America."
Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea
things, and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the
teapot. Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage
with expressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table
tremble slightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness
possessed me. What might she not know or guess?
She spoke at last with an effort. "I wish you were in Parliament
again," she said. "Life doesn't give you events enough."
"If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative
side."
"I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful.
"Lately," she began, and paused. "Lately I've been reading--you."
I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I waited.
"I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I
didn't know. I think perhaps I was rather stupid." Her eyes were
suddenly shining with tears. "You didn't give me much chance to
understand."
She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I
want to begin over again!"
I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. "My dear!" I said.
"I want to begin over again."
I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and
kissed it.
"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward
with her arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my
face. I felt the most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned
her gaze. The thought of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a
physical presence between us. . . .
"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell
me plainly what you mean by this."
I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with
an odd effect of defending myself. "Have you been reading that old
book of mine?" I asked.
"That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down
to Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't
understand--what you were teaching."
There was a little pause.
"It all seems so plain to me now," she said, "and so true."
I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in
the middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. "I'm tremendously
glad, Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether
perverse," I began. I launched out into a rather trite and windy
exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the sofa, looking
up into my face, hanging on my words, a deliberate and invincible
convert.
"Yes," she said, "yes." . . .
I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the
lives of all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the
audience is at their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't
their business to admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on
talking. And I was now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions,
qualifications, restatements, and confirmations. . . .
Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my
political projects to her. "I have been foolish," she said. "I
want to help."
And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I
think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had
brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with
it, and put it down on the table and turned to go.
"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was
compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly
about my neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them
very gently, and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her
hands.
"Good-night," I said. There came a little pause. "Good-night,
Margaret," I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind
of sham preoccupation to the door.
I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me.
If I had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to
me. . . .
At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel
and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
7
The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to
pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.
We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep
this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps
through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world
about us! Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this
belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the
fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in
love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end
of time. They will continue to believe out of existence every
consideration that separates them until they have come together.
Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.
I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world.
The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure
and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to
have done"--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is
that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the
time for doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little either
of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the
situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or
acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad
people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians--
provocative guardians. . . . And when at last there came a claim
against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the
full tide of passionate intimacy.
I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's
return. She had suddenly presented herself to me like something
dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of
feeling. I was amazed how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt
for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for
me there was such a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and
near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was
my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.
I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel
and putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did.
Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending
what had so freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished
next day at the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the
darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our
resolution again. We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."
Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If Margaret did
not know, then no harm whatever would be done. We tried to sustain
that. . . .
For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell,
magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and
then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that
the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us,
threatening us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore the
injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. I tried to
maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the
now irreparable breach between husband and wife. But I never spoke
of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case. How could
I? The time for that had gone. . . .
Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements
crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be
secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm
conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.
Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and
falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed. Together in our
secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it
was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to
snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light,
familiar touch.
Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always
meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had
to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and
go back to this or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of
idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.
It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and
over again, and each time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be
very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people
who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable
things together. We had achieved--I give the ugly phrase that
expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind--"illicit
intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our
style. But where were we to end? . . .
Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we
could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the
glow of our cell blinded us. . . . I wonder what might have
happened if at that time we had given it up. . . . We propounded
it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering
passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity. . . .
Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from
all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in
the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a
little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful. With
imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that
realisation is inevitable. We hadn't thought of that before--it
isn't natural to think of that before. We hadn't known. There is
no literature in English dealing with such things.
There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in
their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first
bright perfection of our relations. For a time these developing
phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us,
little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid
and luminous cell.
8
The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not
trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be
quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge
stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.
For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a
comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.
We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet
been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist
and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was
definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for
the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large
extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much
one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I
was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-
Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance
at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the
seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal
majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.
The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible
Socialist candidate were providential interpositions. I think,
however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to
fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going
to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until
the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a
battlefield as a hoarding. And so it was the Endowment of
Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English
politics.
Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the
Family," he said.
"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said;
"is that queer?"
"Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it. And
about marriage--?"
"I'm all right about marriage--trust me."
"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather
inconsiderately. . . .
They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the
HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I
spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy
of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest
exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever
been made up to that time in England. Its effect on the press was
extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space
under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang
myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the
whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the
subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls
within three days. It sold enormously and brought me bushels of
letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone. At
meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long before
polling day Plutus was converted.
"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished
the Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our
side!"
But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was
won. No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by
over fifteen hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from
apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A
renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily
on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives
had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.
I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
train.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
1
To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel
and myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most
successful and enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an
uncongenial start in political life; I had become a considerable
force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly
influential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament with quite
dramatic distinction, and in spite of a certain faltering on the
part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in
our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making
me a power in the party. People were coming to our group,
understandings were developing. It was clear we should play a
prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a
Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world
opened out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape
in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years
ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise
of immense achievement.
And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret
of my relations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and
thrusts, thrusts relentlessly.
From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her
had been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation.
It had innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we
wanted to be together as much as possible--we were beginning to long
very much for actual living together in the same house, so that one
could come as it were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy
perhaps about some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in
the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively sterile passion,
you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as
our individual lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew
an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us. We
brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see
them in each other's light. It is hard to convey that quality of
intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it. I
thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her
possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!--with
the very sound of her voice.
I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going
about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of
her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The
morning of the polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw
her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee rooms.
"Going?" said I.
She nodded.
"Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember--the other
time."
She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. "If I see her smiling
there like a queen by your side--! She did--last time. I
remember." She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face
impatiently. "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool! . . .
Good luck, old man, to you! You're going to win. But I don't want
to see the end of it all the same. . . ."
"Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in
the passage. . . .
I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse
with victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's
flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping
about her eyes. I came into the room to her and shut the door.
"You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.
She hugged me closely for a moment.
"My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing--without you--nothing!"
We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold.
"Look!" she said, smiling like winter sunshine. "I've had in all
the morning papers--the pile of them, and you--resounding."
"It's more than I dared hope."
"Or I."
She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was
sobbing in my arms. "The bigger you are--the more you show," she
said--" the more we are parted. I know, I know--"
I held her close to me, making no answer.
Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her
eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down
beside her.
"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the
coals, "when we went love-making."
I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in
my hand and kissed it.
"You've done a great thing this time," she said. "Handitch will
make you."
"It opens big chances," I said. "But why are you weeping, dear
one?"
"Envy," she said, "and love."
"You're not lonely?"
"I've plenty to do--and lots of people."
"Well?"
"I want you."
"You've got me."
She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I want you," she said,
"just as if I had nothing of you. You don't understand--how a woman
wants a man. I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would
be enough. It was nothing--it was just a step across the threshold.
My dear, every moment you are away I ache for you--ache! I want to
be about when it isn't love-making or talk. I want to be doing
things for you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me.
All those safe, careless, intimate things. And something else--"
She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to bother you. I just want you to
know I love you. . . ."
She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up
abruptly.
I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--"
"And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.
"You're insatiable."
She smiled "No," she said. "I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a
woman in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is
necessary to me--and what I can't have. That's all."
"We get a lot."
"We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of
one another--and I'm not satisfied."
"What more is there?
"For you--very little. I wonder. For me--every thing. Yes--
everything. You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more
than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is
sometimes very one-sided. Fearfully one-sided! That's all. . . ."
"Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.
"I suppose I do."
"You don't!"
"I haven't thought of them."
"A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have. . . . I want them--like
hunger. YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you!
That's the trouble. . . . I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't
have you."
She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'm so
discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come
between us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything--with
all my brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master,
never you fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This
election--You're going up; you're going on. In these papers--you're
a great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my
mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow
presently for myself--I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to
keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening. It's
a sort of habitual background to my thought of you. And it's
nonsense--utter nonsense!" She stopped. She was crying and
choking. "And the child, you know--the child!"
I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
clear and strong.
"We can't have that," I said.
"No," she said, "we can't have that."
"We've got our own things to do."
"YOUR things," she said.
"Aren't they yours too?"
"Because of you," she said.
"Aren't they your very own things?"
"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of
children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy,
hopeful children, working to free mothers and children--"
"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.
"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too
much altogether. . . . Children get into a woman's brain--when she
mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.
Think of the child we might have now!--the little creature with
soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it
haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear
it in the night. . . . The world is full of such little ghosts,
dear lover--little things that asked for life and were refused.
They clamour to me. It's like a little fist beating at my heart.
Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at
my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with
both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to
my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit
with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
and your lover! . . ."
2
But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more
and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification,
clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,
impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together
and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that
were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily
difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against
those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one
found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if
we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we
wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or
even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part a value set
upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;
to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like
killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't
want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We
wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other
openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.
We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every
helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be
handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a
solitude.
And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us. . . .
I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with
that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel
almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it
her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us
both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel
admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom
of action."
Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces
and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends
ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we
knew not how--a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an
amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it
seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering
exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.
It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The
long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had
flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be
altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal
irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging
respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the
thing as far as I had done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a
leak, and scandal was pouring in. . . . It chanced, too, that a
wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those
waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally
in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had
been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,
and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition
in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had
been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting
an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the
private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an
extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters. . . .
I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly
one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One
walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of
inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out
into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you,
turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made
extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world
and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step
of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod,
retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto
spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation when
I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the
Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching
him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and
bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond
comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open
slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were
disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential
confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my
heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on
working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of
implacable forces against us.
For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this
campaign. Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the
Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment
of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and
organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile
depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week
Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other
causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a
dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find
them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think
Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had
not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their
power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their
spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical,
antagonistic. I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I
had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they
displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political
intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow
they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers
of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed,
roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after
dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time
with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was
open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports
that came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six
articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the
POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite
her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers,
and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded
columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless
influential. Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and
vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose
and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training
behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clearheaded
man. "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of
malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with
the writing!"
She revealed astonishing knowledge.
For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I
had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I
bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my
supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on
to her before the days of our breach. "Of course!" said I,
"Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair,
a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and,
I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one
day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty
Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot
indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air
between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same
time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed
him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and
cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem
him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any
man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were
looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And
Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young
undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone
one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to
the bottom of it,--it must have been a queer duologue. She read
Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this
proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service
of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political
breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no
public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in any
public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man. She knew she was
behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved
worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her
information was irresistible. And she set to work at it
marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals,
had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest
that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to
stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and
lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has
made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I think, that she
couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also--I
realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to
her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable. While such
things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in
and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired,
and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit
her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and
sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and
interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at
the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was
overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately
organising.
"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up,--
part! You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each
other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're
not circulating stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told
us anything--Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite
excellent young man. You misjudged him altogether." . . .
I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch
in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where
he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I
gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and
incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told
HIM. He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old
Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real
scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. I've still
the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the
inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspirationbeaded
forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be
exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous ugly
hands.
"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've
done everything to shield you--everything." . . .
3
Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She
made a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big
window. I sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I
talked.
"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said. "They mean
that every one in London is to know about it."
"I know."
"Well!" I said.
"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for
things to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways."
"What are we to do?"
"They won't let us go on."
"Damn them!"
"They are ORGANISING scandal."
"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they
have overtaken us." I turned on her. "What do you want to do?"
"Everything," she said. "Keep you and have our work. Aren't we
Mates?"
"We can't."
"And we can't!"
"I've got to tell Margaret," I said.
"Margaret!"
"I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it.
I've been wincing about Margaret secretly--"
"I know. You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her."
She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
"We've had some good times, Master;" she said, with a sigh in her
voice.
And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
"We haven't much time left," she said.
"Shall we bolt?" I said.
"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
"And that?" And her head indicated Westminster. "No!"
I said no more of bolting.
"We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender," she said.
"Something."
"A lot."
"Master," she said, "it isn't all sex and stuff between us?"
"No!"
"I can't give up the work. Our work's my life."
We came upon another long pause.
"No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers--if we simply do,"
she said.
"We shouldn't."
"We've got to do something more parting than that."
I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming to something.
"I could marry Shoesmith," she said abruptly.
"But--" I objected.
"He knows. It wasn't fair. I told him."
"Oh, that explains," I said. "There's been a kind of sulkiness--
But--you told him?"
She nodded. "He's rather badly hurt," she said. "He's been a good
friend to me. He's curiously loyal. But something, something he
said one day--forced me to let him know. . . . That's been the
beastliness of all this secrecy. That's the beastliness of all
secrecy. You have to spring surprises on people. But he keeps on.
He's steadfast. He'd already suspected. He wants me very badly to
marry him. . . ."
"But you don't want to marry him?"
"I'm forced to think of it."
"But does he want to marry you at that? Take you as a present from
the world at large?--against your will and desire? . . . I don't
understand him."
"He cares for me."
"How?"
"He thinks this is a fearful mess for me. He wants to pull it
straight."
We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately
refused to take up the realities of this proposition.
"I don't want you to marry Shoesmith," I said at last.
"Don't you like him?"
"Not as your husband."
"He's a very clever and sturdy person--and very generous and devoted
to me."
"And me?"
"You can't expect that. He thinks you are wonderful--and,
naturally, that you ought not to have started this."
"I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself. I'm
quite ready to think it myself."
"He'd let us be friends--and meet."
"Let us be friends!" I cried, after a long pause. "You and me!"
"He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, he can go round
fighting these rumours, defending us both--and force a quarrel on
the Baileys."
"I don't understand him," I said, and added, "I don't understand
you."
I was staring at her face. It seemed white and set in the dimness.
"Do you really mean this, Isabel?" I asked.
"What else is there to do, my dear?--what else is there to do at
all? I've been thinking day and night. You can't go away with me.
You can't smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd
rather die than that should happen. Look what you are becoming in
the country! Look at all you've built up!--me helping. I wouldn't
let you do it if you could. I wouldn't let you--if it were only for
Margaret's sake. THIS . . . closes the scandal, closes everything."
"It closes all our life together," I cried.
She was silent.
"It never ought to have begun," I said.
She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her
hands upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.
"My dear," she said very earnestly, "don't misunderstand me! Don't
think I'm retreating from the things we've done! Our love is the
best thing I could ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal
it; nothing could ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have
had together. Never! You have loved me; you do love me. . . .
No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one
could ever love me as you have loved me, my king. And it's just
because it's been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die
rather than have a tithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for
it's made me, it's all I am--dear, it's years since I began loving
you--it's just because of its goodness that I want not to end in
wreckage now, not to end in the smashing up of all the big things I
understand in you and love in you. . . .
"What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" she went on. "All
the big interests in our lives will vanish--everything. We shall
become specialised people--people overshadowed by a situation. We
shall be an elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone!
People will always think of it first when they think of us; all our
work and aims will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it
good enough, dear? Just to specialise. . . . I think of you.
We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, but do we
want to spend all our lives defending it and justifying it? And
there's that other life. I know now you care for Margaret--you care
more than you think you do. You have said fine things of her. I've
watched you about her. Little things have dropped from you. She's
given her life for you; she's nothing without you. You feel that to
your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things. Oh,
I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love you in
relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us,
another thing worth saving."
Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into
my face. "We've done wrong--and parting's paying. It's time to
pay. We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track. . . . You
and I, Master, we've got to be men."
"Yes," I said; "we've got to be men."
4
I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable
dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid
and clumsy informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from
her.
I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in
that large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to
come home. It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's receptionroom;
only it was for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel
hands. I had left the door open so that she would come in to me.
I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in
the doorway. "May I come in?" she said.
"Do," I said, and turned round to her.
"Working?" she said.
"Hard," I answered. "Where have YOU been?"
"At the Vallerys'. Mr. Evesham was talking about you. They were
all talking. I don't think everybody knew who I was. Just Mrs.
Mumble I'd been to them. Lord Wardenham doesn't like you."
"He doesn't."
"But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then I went on to
Park Lane to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's."
"Yes."
"Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I
came on here. They'd got some writers--and Grant was there."
"You HAVE been flying round. . . ."
There was a little pause between us.
I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace
of her golden-robed body. What gulfs there were between us!
"You've been amused," I said.
"It's been amusing. You've been at the House?"
"The Medical Education Bill kept me." . . .
After all, why should I tell her? She'd got to a way of living that
fulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd never hear. But all that
day and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.
"I want to tell you something," I said. "I wish you'd sit down for
a moment or so." . . .
Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.
Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of
unusual gravity. She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat
down slowly in my armchair.
"What is it?" she said.
I went on awkwardly. "I've got to tell you--something
extraordinarily distressing," I said.
She was manifestly altogether unaware.
"There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently
heard of it--about myself--and Isabel."
"Isabel!"
I nodded.
"What do they say?" she asked.
It was difficult, I found, to speak.
"They say she's my mistress."
"Oh! How abominable!"
She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our eyes met.
"We've been great friends," I said.
"Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?"
She paused and looked at me. It's so incredible. How can any one
believe it? I couldn't."
She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression
changed to dread. There was a tense stillness for a second,
perhaps.
I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful
of paper fasteners.
"Margaret," I said, " I'm afraid you'll have to believe it."
5
Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was
very white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips
quivered as she spoke. "You really mean--THAT?" she said.
I nodded.
"I never dreamt."
"I never meant you to dream."
"And that is why--we've been apart?"
I thought. "I suppose it is."
"Why have you told me now?"
"Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you."
"Or else it wouldn't have mattered?"
"No."
She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she
looked about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently,
with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed
distress upon her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her
dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over
the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no
effort to stay or staunch her tears. "I am sorry, Margaret," I
said. "I was in love. . . . I did not understand. . . ."
Presently she asked: "What are you going to do?"
"You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know
what you--what you want."
"You want to leave me?"
"If you want me to, I must."
"Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this
fine movement of yours?"
"No." I spoke sullenly. "I don't want to leave anything. I want to
stay on. I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--
have got to drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know
how far things may go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I
can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to any revelation--"
She made no answer.
"When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a
thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself,
wouldn't unfold--consequences. . . . People have got hold of these
vague rumours. . . . Directly it reached any one else but--but us
two--I saw it had to come to you."
I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with
Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful
if she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her
and shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't
get at her, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my
movement she moved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and
made an effort to wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes.
"Oh, my Husband!" she sobbed.
"What do you mean to do?" she said, with her voice muffled by her
handkerchief.
"We're going to end it," I said.
Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair
beside her and sat down. "You and I, Margaret, have been partners,"
I began. "We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't
have done it without you. We've made a position, created a work--"
She shook her head. "You," she said.
"You helping. I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it
shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you
to have--all that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you.
I've made an immense and tragic blunder. You don't know how things
took us, how different they seemed! My character and accident have
conspired--We'll pay--in ourselves, not in our public service."
I halted again. Margaret remained very still.
"I want you to understand that the thing is at an end. It is
definitely at an end. We--we talked--yesterday. We mean to end it
altogether." I clenched my hands. "She's--she's going to marry
Arnold Shoesmith."
I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of
her movement as she turned on me.
"It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation. "We're doing
nothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right--as things
can be now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing
things straight--now. Of course, you know. . . . We shall--we
shall have to make sacrifices. Give things up pretty completely.
Very completely. . . . We shall have not to see each other for a
time, you know. Perhaps not a long time. Two or three years. Or
write--or just any of that sort of thing ever--"
Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying
uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child. I
was amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was
on her knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping
with mine. "Oh, my Husband!" she cried, my poor Husband! Does it
hurt you so? I would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love
you. I love you over and away and above all these jealous little
things!"
She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of
a son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. "Oh! my dear,"
she sobbed, "my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you
cry. Ever! I didn't know you could. Oh! my dear! Can't you have
her, my dear, if you want her? I can't bear it! Let me help you,
dear. Oh! my Husband! My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!" For
a time she held me in silence.
"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two,
I mean. It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen you
together, so glad with each other. . . . Oh! Husband mine, believe
me! believe me! I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise
how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to give my
life to you." . . .
6
"We can't part in a room," said Isabel.
"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we
should meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk
ourselves out. I still recall that day very well, recall even the
curious exaltation of grief that made our mental atmosphere
distinctive and memorable. We had seen so much of one another, had
become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with
a sense of incredible remoteness. We went together up over the
cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the
white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland. There,
in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a
spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water
remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came
presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls
and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and
swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually
disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose.
We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our
relations. It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that
scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that
we did not at least touch upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I
have become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem
between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to
solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way. .
. . The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves
until we were something representative and general. She was
womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."
"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.
"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have
turned back from America."
"I'm glad we did it," she said. "Don't think I repent."
I looked at her.
"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to
her life in saying it.
I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us
then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible
for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the
scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow
such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of
marriage. We criticised the current code, how muddled and
conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and
concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of
women. "It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said;
for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose
dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right in
the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day
must practise a tainted goodness."
These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of
discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective
hold upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already,
will never hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us.
Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,--
the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its
purpose. "You and I, Isabel," I said, "have always been a little
disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes
to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate
strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish humbugs would leave duty
alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime. That's where the
real mischief comes in. Passion can always contrive to clothe
itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That carried us. But for
all its mean associations there is this duty. . . .
"Don't we come rather late to it?"
"Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do."
"It's queer to think of now," said Isabel. "Who could believe we
did all we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who
could believe we thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it
all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness
in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love. . . . Master, there's
not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will
credit. And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our
story. . . .
"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked--"shield
you--knowing of . . . THIS?"
"I'm certain. I don't understand--just as I don't understand
Shoesmith, but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is
just thin air to us. They've got something we haven't got.
Assurances? I wonder." . . .
Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life
might be with him.
"He's good," she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic.
He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You
can't say a thing against him or I--except that something--something
in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice--fails for
me. Why don't I love him?--he's a better man than you! Why don't
you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's
the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,--a gentleman.
You're your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will
trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time. . . ."
We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It
seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to
the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held
between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder
half the substance of their lives. We felt ourselves crushed and
beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in
the service of jealousy. "The mass of people don't feel these
things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said. "Is it
because they're different in grain, or educated out of some
primitive instinct?"
"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more
than the gateway," I said. "Lust and then jealousy; their simple
conception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in
hand. . . ."
I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of
gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the
blue. And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear
far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the
rest should leave it so serene.
"And in this State of ours," I resumed.
"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking
out at the horizon. "Let's talk no more of things we can never see.
Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall do--after we
have parted. We've said too little of that. We've had our red
life, and it's over. Thank Heaven!--though we stole it! Talk about
your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doing--just as though we
were still together. We'll still be together in a sense--through
all these things we have in common."
And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to
the pitch of self-forgetfulness. We weighed persons and forces,
discussed the probabilities of the next general election, the steady
drift of public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism
towards us. It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the
EXPURGATOR, we should come into the new Government strongly. The
party had no one else, all the young men were formally or informally
with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord Tarvrille, I . . . and very
probably there would be something for Shoesmith. "And for my own
part," I said, "I count on backing on the Liberal side. For the
last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive
legislation between the parties. The Liberals have not been long in
following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to give
votes and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY,
they say, are Liberals. . . .
"I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley,"
I said, "ever so many years ago. It was some place near Locarno,
and we looked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we
look over the sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless
way of all that you and I are doing now."
"I!" said Isabel, and laughed.
"Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent,
thinking of Locarno.
I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal
things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and
wonderful again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic
problems. I began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her,
as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to
recover again the purpose that lay under all my political ambitions
and adjustments and anticipations. I saw the State, splendid and
wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was
no mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but populous with
fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people. It was as if I had
forgotten for a long time and now remembered with amazement.
At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do
anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had
wanted a clue--until she had come into my life questioning,
suggesting, unconsciously illuminating. "But I have done nothing,"
she protested. I declared she had done everything in growing to
education under my eyes, in reflecting again upon all the processes
that had made myself, so that instead of abstractions and blue-books
and bills and devices, I had realised the world of mankind as a
crowd needing before all things fine women and men. We'd spoilt
ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had our lesson. Before
her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing with the nation
as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women and
children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which
must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the
State is to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose
factors of a great realm together, to create a mind of literature
and thought in it, and the expression of a purpose to make it selfconscious
and fine. I had it all clear before me, so that at a
score of points I could presently begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a
centre of force. Already we had given Imperialism a criticism, and
leavened half the press from our columns. Our movement consolidated
and spread. We should presently come into power. Everything moved
towards our hands. We should be able to get at the schools, the
services, the universities, the church; enormously increase the
endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted, a
criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press
and creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify,
strengthen the public consciousness, develop social organisation and
a sense of the State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant
young peers like Lord Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell.
It filled me with pride to win such men. "We stand for so much more
than we seem to stand for," I said. I opened my heart to her, so
freely that I hesitate to open my heart even to the reader, telling
of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my consciousness of great
powers and widening opportunities. . . .
Isabel watched me as I talked.
She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while. For it is
curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had
become lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that
had once so strongly gripped our imaginations.
"It's good," I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth
and great ambitions with you. There have been times lately when
politics has seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for
mean ends--and none the less so that the happiness of three hundred
million people might be touched by our follies. I talk to no one
else like this. . . . And now I think of parting, I think but of
how much more I might have talked to you." . . .
Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand
things.
"We've talked away our last half day," I said, staring over my
shoulder at the blazing sunset sky behind us. "Dear, it's been the
last day of our lives for us. . . . It doesn't seem like the last
day of our lives. Or any day."
"I wonder how it will feel?" said Isabel.
"It will be very strange at first--not to be able to tell you
things."
"I've a superstition that after--after we've parted--if ever I go
into my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll be--somewhere."
"I shall be in the world--yes."
"I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. Here we are,
here we remain."
"Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who
didn't live in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't
part, and here we lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who
did meet, poor little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met
and loved too much and had to part, they part and go their ways, and
we lie here and watch them, you and I. She'll cry, poor dear."
"She'll cry. She's crying now!"
"Poor little beasts! I think he'll cry too. He winces. He could--
for tuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a
little while ago. I suppose all love is hysterical--and a little
foolish. Poor mites! Silly little pitiful creatures! How we have
blundered! Think how we must look to God! Well, we'll pity them,
and then we'll inspire him to stiffen up again--and do as we've
determined he shall do. We'll see it through,--we who lie here on
the cliff. They'll be mean at times, and horrid at times; we know
them! Do you see her, a poor little fine lady in a great house,--
she sometimes goes to her room and writes."
"She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still."
"Yes. Sometimes--I hope. And he's there in the office with a bit
of her copy in his hand."
"Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she
wrote it? Is it?"
"Better, I think. Let's play it's better--anyhow. It may be that
talking over was rather mixed with love-making. After all, lovemaking
is joy rather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that
even. . . . Let's go on watching him. (I don't see why her writing
shouldn't be better. Indeed I don't.) See! There he goes down
along the Embankment to Westminster just like a real man, for all
that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What is running round
inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past the
Policemen, specks too--selected large ones from the country. I
think he's going to dinner with the Speaker--some old thing like
that. Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?--I can't quite
see. . . . And now he's up and speaking in the House. Hope he'll
hold on to the thread. He'll have to plan his speeches to the very
end of his days--and learn the headings."
"Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?"
"No. Unless it's by accident."
"She's there," she said.
"Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel.
Never any more adventures for us, dear, now. No! . . . They play
the game, you know. They've begun late, but now they've got to.
You see it's not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are
here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love
accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven. It isn't
so VERY hard. Rather good in some ways. Some people HAVE to be
broken a little. Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?"
"She's too little to be seen," she said.
"Can you see the sins they once committed?"
"I can only see you here beside me, dear--for ever. For all my
life, dear, till I die. Was that--the sin?" . . .
I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to
Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt,
return to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little
station of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken
fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.
"None of this," she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree
real to me. I've got no sense of things ending."
"We're parting," I said.
"We're parting--as people part in a play. It's distressing. But I
don't feel as though you and I were really never to see each other
again for years. Do you?"
I thought. "No," I said.
"After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you."
"So shall I."
"That's absurd."
"Absurd."
"I feel as if you'd always he there, just about where you are now.
Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so much of our lives
joggling elbows." . . .
"Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall
begin to when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in
imagination, Isabel?"
"I don't know. We've always assumed it was the other way about."
"Even when the train goes out of the station--! I've seen you into
so many trains."
"I shall go on thinking of things to say to you--things to put in
your letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in
that way now? We've got into each other's brains."
"It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real. The world's no more than
a fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?"
"I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to.
Can't we meet?--don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?"
"We'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said.
"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel. . . . "Dream
walks. I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you
again."
"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked
long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."
"Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel. "And anyhow--"
She stopped short. I looked interrogation.
"We've loved," she said.
I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the
compartment. "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the
people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky,
looking at me very steadfastly.
"Come here," she whispered. "Never mind the porters. What can they
know? Just one time more--I must."
She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down
upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE BREAKING POINT
1
And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and
Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away
together.
It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin
to see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a
rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her
two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter
but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every
duty. It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my
work, forgot everything but that we two were parted. I still
believe that with better chances we might have escaped the
consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both.
But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our
circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in
delaying his marriage until after the end of the session--partly my
own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But
we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete
restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's
marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I
should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret
in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we
visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my
presence at the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a
weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last
moment which would justify my absence. . . .
I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of
my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all
my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think
of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one
intimate I had found in the world. I came back to the House and the
office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty,
and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as
I had never felt before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the
daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two
occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to
me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in
a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.
I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something
in that stripped my soul bare.
It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that
the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a
men's dinner--" A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he
invited me; "everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author,
and Heaven knows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards
Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner
a marvel and a memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I
suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should
have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the
others. There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester,
the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men,
Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't
remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord
Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several
others. We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the
conversation was already becoming general--so far as such a long
table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.
It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of
burning rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.
The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres
that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the
end of the table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.
"Something must be burning," said Panmure.
Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just
see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his
left.
Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of
the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that
followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in
history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of
protestation by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break in
the general flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the
robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me
when I was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing
quite unexpected backgrounds. I had never given the business a
thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures
to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how
section after section of the International Army was drawn into
murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives
of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and
crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It did
not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were
outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves
with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed.
Now it was all recalled.
"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as
bad as any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one--flushed
like a woman at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to
her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh,
bother!' and threw it aside and went back. . . ."
We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not
to seem to listen.
"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord."
"Upstairs, m'lord."
"Just overhead, m'lord."
"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."
"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."
"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. Go on!
It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five
minutes. Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured.
They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The
Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet
things--hidden away. Susan went straight for them--used to take an
umbrella for the silks. Born shoplifter."
It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
loyally.
"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,--" practically. It makes
one wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example."
But nobody touched that.
"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and
indicating the table generally, "champagne. Champagne. Keep it
going."
"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.
"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his
story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it
happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the
excitement of plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a
boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very
strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China,
too, they murdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to
speak, from mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt
of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from
German high schools and English homes!"
"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases. . . . Some of the
Indian troops were pretty bad."
Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory,
so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns
and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various
distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen,
above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants
with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the
dimness behind. Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my
aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our
talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme. We
seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness
and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning
rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added
enormously. Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was Evesham--drank
rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our
situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere
thin net of habits and associations!"
"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.
"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.
"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins
speculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest
manner." . . .
Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden
cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling
began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new
suit!" cried some one. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of
blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool
upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would arrange catchment
areas of plates and flower bowls. "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw
up. That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the
imperturbable butler. "Take round bath towels," he said; and
presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible dignity--
"Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of
blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated
dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency
of the new French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a
little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a blacksplashed
shirt front who presently silenced them all by the
immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.
Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon
drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into
a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South
Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our
water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the
same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery."
That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the
table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood
schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston
Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY
didn't get dysentery."
I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more
closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed
along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned
to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and
baths. Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say
startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer
clamour to a listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to
begin baiting me. "Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said
Burshort. "Remington has made it the Obstetric Party."
"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming;
"I shall use that against you in the House!"
"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,"
said Tarvrille.
"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch
babies instead," Burshort urged. "For the price of one Dreadnought--"
The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined
in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.
Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it.
"Love and fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking
over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking.
Two things don't go together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came
out of excesses of love. Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone
again--no works to matter."
Everybody laughed.
"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant. "Love and fine
think'n pretty phrase--attractive. Suitable for p'litical
dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white
flow's. Not oth'wise valu'ble."
I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to
the school of Mrs. F's Aunt--"
"What?" said some one, intent.
"In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"
"Hate a fool," said my assailant.
Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy
fist. "Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?--hate of rotten
goings on. What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners.
What's Radicalism?--hate of lords. What's Toryism?--hate of
disturbance. It's all hate--hate from top to bottom. Hate of a
mess. Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll.
There you are! If you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it
(hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for love!--no' me!"
He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
"Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed
with a tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a
mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking--what we want
is the thickes' thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone.
Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."
The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd
as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"
My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
"The Japanese did." Which was absurd.
I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk
of the whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary
revelation to me. Every one was unusually careless and outspoken,
and it was amazing how manifestly they echoed the feeling of this
old Tory spokesman. They were quite friendly to me, they regarded
me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable party assets for Toryism, but it
was clear they attached no more importance to what were my realities
than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy.
They were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in
their resolves to draw me, but they left the impression on my mind
of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political
life. For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters
were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just every
one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which
their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how
exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent
attack on me chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart
and fierce, perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille,
with that quick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then
for a time I sat silent and drank port wine while the others talked.
The disorder of the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the
displaced ties and crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my
tormented nerves. . . .
It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille
coming with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go
upstairs to see the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering
candles for us. One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings,
several chairs and tables were completely burnt, the panelling was
scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare
and gutter, and some scraps of broken china still lay on the puddled
floor.
As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,
a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes
beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her
surprise.
2
I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my
way alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for
a long way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too
miserable to go to my house.
I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods
are dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that
wild confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can
understand, oh! half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength
in vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory
party had higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like
a thing newly discovered that the men I had to work with had for the
most part no such dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no
atom of the faith I held. They were just as immediately intent upon
personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as the men in
any other group or party. Perhaps I had slipped unawares for a time
into the delusions of a party man--but I do not think so.
No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon
the abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that
gave this fact that had always been present in my mind its quality
of devastating revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen
before nor suspected the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims,
the routine, the conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of
the personal life, and that clearly conscious development and
service of a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts
aimed. I had thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw
they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven. I
saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon
interests close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the
provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy
timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare
exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer
will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable
planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted
across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought
too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the
uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.
All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads
of thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God
against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man,
scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate
pride of his soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his
box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of
flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch. I realised for
the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith
of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little
strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished
from my life. She had been the incarnation of those great
abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.
There was no support that night in the things that had been. We
were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was very
pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me
now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to
touch me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky
gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.
We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman
into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and
characteristic sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how
satisfying it had been! That was just where we shouldn't remain.
We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is
to forget. We should go out to other interests, new experiences,
new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious
understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the
first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross
memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements. . . .
I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life
for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That
infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse
thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of
inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the
vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis
of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his
emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was
overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all
possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;
you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and
aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine
thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a
balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a
justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest men," as
Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out
decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists
"blaggards and scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords
were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all
Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails
and justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the
sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign
punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I
perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was
fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician. . . .
Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat
me down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all
along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I
had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how
all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in
life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product
of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that
science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the
passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness
of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of
contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that
greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily
lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like
a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere
effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we
who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to
our own for the next two thousand years?
It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.
Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of
confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish
temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,
catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a
nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to assuage
my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards
for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised
ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To console
ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and
our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though
those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the
germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition
shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my
real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an
unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be
by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal
would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting
relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should
follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and
follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good
comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I
should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I
should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much
absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and
missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming
flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem
sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because
I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not
mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think
finely. I remember how I fell talking to God--I think I talked out
loud. "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so
little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of
men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"
I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought
I had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away. Do you
really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in
darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half
dying?"
Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange
parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine
thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it
possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that
system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very
beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to
Christ? It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid. I
went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I
had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with
hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to
a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public
satisfaction in His fate. . . .
It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered
dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He
DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon
they'd made of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient
enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and
gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He
wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My
God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind
will, with an obvious repartee. . . .
I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about
that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the
PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the
prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can
still feel that transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of
weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the
concomitant of exhaustion.
"I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life
mocks me and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again. . . .
Why shouldn't I save what I can? I can't save myself without
her. . . ."
I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather
tediously asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood
of Holland Park. . . .
It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now
without any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of
returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is
one of the ugliest facts I recall about that time of crisis, the
intense aversion I felt for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her
injury and nobility, and the enormous generosity of her forgiveness,
sufficed to mitigate that. I hope now that in this book I am able
to give something of her silvery splendour, but all through this
crisis I felt nothing of that. There was a triumphant kindliness
about her that I found intolerable. She meant to be so kind to me,
to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all
she imagined Isabel had given me.
When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she
would meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled
shirt front, on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would
overlook that by an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it
should make no difference to her. She would want to know who had
been present, what we had talked about, show the alertest interest
in whatever it was--it didn't matter what. . . . No, I couldn't
face her.
So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the
foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression,
Margaret heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks
with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write
my note to Isabel. "Give me a word--the world aches without you,"
was all I scrawled, though I fully meant that she should come to me.
I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her
flat, she was with the Balfes--she was to have been married from the
Balfes--and I sent my letter there. And I went out into the silent
square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly
that if I left it until morning I should never post it at all.
3
I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting.
(Of all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the
bridge opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of
self pity, and eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the
ill-written scrawl in which she had replied had been full of the
suggestion of her own weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my
own selfish sorrows were altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful
tenderness. Something had happened to her that I did not
understand. She was manifestly ill. She came towards me wearily,
she who had always borne herself so bravely; her shoulders seemed
bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn. All my
life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters or
children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate appeal to me,
and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my life!--I
felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here was
something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more
than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me,
a new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed
fountain was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel
broken, Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could
love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't
care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I
should protect her. I trembled as I came near her, and could
scarcely speak to her for the emotion that filled me. . . .
"I had your letter," I said.
"I had yours."
"Where can we talk?"
I remember my lame sentences. "We'll have a boat. That's best
here."
I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and
I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree.
The square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through
the twigs, I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from
the pathway and the scrutiny of passers-by. And there we talked.
"I had to write to you," I said.
"I had to come."
"When are you to be married?"
"Thursday week."
"Well?" I said. "But--can we?"
She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open.
"What do you mean?" she said at last in a whisper.
"Can we stand it? After all?"
I looked at her white face. "Can you?" I said.
She whispered. "Your career?"
Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as
a child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep. . . .
"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now. I don't care. Damn the whole
system of things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I
want to take care of you, Isabel! and have you with me."
"I can't stand it," she blubbered.
"You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you. . . . I
thought indeed it was best for you. I thought even you wanted it
like that."
"Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?"
"No," I said, "you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've
thought of that; I've got to shelter you."
"And I want you," I went on. "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand
life without you."
She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and
looked at me steadfastly for a moment. "I was going to kill
myself," she whispered. "I was going to kill myself quietly--
somehow. I meant to wait a bit and have an accident. I thought--
you didn't understand. You were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ."
"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said. "We've gone
too far together."
"Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes.
"The horror of it," she whispered. "The horror of being handed
over. It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do.
He tries to be kind to me. . . . I didn't know. I felt adventurous
before. . . . It makes me feel like all the women in the world who
have ever been owned and subdued. . . . It's not that he isn't the
best of men, it's because I'm a part of you. . . . I can't go
through with it. If I go through with it, I shall be left--robbed
of pride--outraged--a woman beaten. . . ."
"I know," I said, "I know."
"I want to live alone. . . . I don't care for anything now but just
escape. If you can help me. . . ."
"I must take you away. There's nothing for us but to go away
together."
"But your work," she said; "your career! Margaret! Our promises!"
"We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of
us. I don't know which. Our flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's
too late to save those other things! They have to go. You can't
make terms with defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most.
But it's you. And I need you. I didn't think of that either. I
haven't a doubt left in the world now. We've got to leave
everything rather than leave each other. I'm sure of it. Now we
have gone so far. We've got to go right down to earth and begin
again. . . . Dear, I WANT disgrace with you. . . ."
So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded
cushions of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been
so valiant and careless a girl. "I don't care," I said. "I don't
care for anything, if I can save you out of the wreckage we have
made together."
4
The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get
as much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left
London with Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office.
Upstairs I found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles,
methodically reading the title of each and sometimes the first halfdozen
lines, and either dropping them in a growing heap on the floor
for a clerk to return, or putting them aside for consideration. I
interrupted him, squatted on the window-sill of the open window, and
sketched out my ideas for the session.
"You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of mine which reached
out ahead.
"I like to see things prepared," I answered.
"Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
I was silent while he read.
"You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said abruptly.
"Well!" I said, amazed.
"I know," he said, and lost his breath. "Not my business. Only--"
It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
"It's not playing the game," he said.
"What do you know?"
"Everything that matters."
"Some games," I said, "are too hard to play."
There came a pause between us.
"I didn't know you were watching all this," I said.
"Yes," he answered, after a pause, "I've watched."
"Sorry--sorry you don't approve."
"It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington."
I did not answer.
"You're going away then?"
"Yes."
"Soon?"
"Right away."
"There's vour wife."
"I know."
"Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked
him out and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of
course--it's nothing to you. Honour--"
"I know."
"Common decency."
I nodded.
"All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most. . . .
It's come to be a big thing, Remington."
"That will go on."
"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it. No one. . . .
I'm not sure it will go on."
"Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?"
He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America. You were
alight with it." Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment.
"But I thought you would stick to your bargain."
"It's not so much choice as you think," I said.
"There's always a choice."
"No," I said.
He scrutinised my face.
"I can't live without her--I can't work. She's all mixed up with
this--and everything. And besides, there's things you can't
understand. There's feelings you've never felt. . . . You don't
understand how much we've been to one another."
Britten frowned and thought.
"Some things one's GOT to do," he threw out.
"Some things one can't do."
"These infernal institutions--"
"Some one must begin," I said.
He shook his head. "Not YOU," he said. "No!"
He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night
too. It matters to me. It matters immensely to me. In a way--it's
a thing one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you. I'm the
sort of man who leads a narrow life. . . . But you've been
something fine and good for me, since that time, do you remember?
when we talked about Mecca together."
I nodded.
"Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow.
I know things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them. .
. . Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now
like a man who is hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling
wrong on wrong. It was wrong for you two people ever to be lovers."
He paused.
"It gripped us hard," I said.
"Yes!--but in your position! And hers! It was vile!"
"You've not been tempted."
"How do you know? Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood
the consequences and thought of other people. You could have ended
it at the first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered
again. You kept on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You
didn't keep it. You were careless. You made things worse. This
engagement and this publicity!--Damn it, Remington!"
"I know," I said, with smarting eyes. "Damn it ! with all my heart!
It came of trying to patch. . . . You CAN'T patch."
"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two
ought to stand these last consequences--and part. You ought to
part. Other people have to stand things! Other people have to
part. You ought to. You say--what do you say? It's loss of so
much life to lose each other. So is losing a hand or a leg. But
it's what you've incurred. Amputate. Take your punishment--After
all, you chose it."
"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.
"Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full of justifiable
damns. But you two did choose it. You ought to stick to your
undertaking."
I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. "My dear Britten!" I
cried. "Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose
I don't go! Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going
to be much to ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been
thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and over
again from the beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came
back from America--I grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a
step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as
wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend
this way or that and never change. You talk as though Isabel was a
cat one could give to any kind of owner. . . . We two are things
that change and grow and alter all the time. We're--so interwoven
that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples. . . .
You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of
things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us.
You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you
don't know anything."
Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered
to a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put
back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
There was a long pause.
"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for
balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate
them. I saw her yesterday. . . . She's--ill. . . . I'd take her
now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."
"Torture?"
I thought. "Yes."
"For her?"
"There isn't," I said.
"If there was?"
I made no answer.
"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to
stand against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your
lives?"
"No end of things."
"Nothing."
"I don't believe you are right," I said. "I believe we can save
something--"
Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,"
he said.
His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man
has a right to take his hand from the plough!"
He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You
know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended
off for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of
the way somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down
for a year, say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy,
as friends. Saved! You KNOW it."
I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And
does it matter if we could?"
I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had
not been able to find for myself alone.
"I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up
this scandal."
He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in
me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of
every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison
whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the
uttermost now--I mean it--until every corner of our world knows this
story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton
Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all
the other stories that have picked man after man out of English
public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong
initiative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should
dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to be
penitent--"
Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. " I lay in bed last night
and went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of
us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last
night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all
I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and
debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I
came to the most beautiful things in life--like peeping Tom of
Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural
manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English
world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it! The
very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the
English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they
call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as
the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable
prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of
pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we were mumbled
at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean,
was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and
grime!"
"Yes," said Britten. "That's all very well--"
I interrupted him. "I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think
it a valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely
pride in self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those
who see and think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other
thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of
a monkey kept in a cage by itself!" I put my foot in a chair, and
urged my case upon him. "This is a dirty world, Britten, simply
because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is
dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why don't the
moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and
wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and
this,' to all the world. All the world! . . . I will!"
Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk.
"That's all very well, Remington," he said. "You mean to go."
He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the
wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong.
It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work,
you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your
jolly mistress. . . . You won't see you're a statesman that
matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as
you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away and
accusing your country of rejecting you."
He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have
you forgotten the immense things our movement means?"
I thought. "Perhaps I am rhetorical," I said.
"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now!
Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able
to go on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd
get. You know, Remington--you KNOW."
I thought and went back to his earlier point. "If I am rhetorical,
at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all
the implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just
now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit
Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you
talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents
everything. I'm not going out of this--for delights. That's the
sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine--that excites
them! When I think of the things these creatures think! Ugh! But
YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a
fire--ends clean. I'm going for love, Britten--if I sinned for
passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day
she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten. . . . I've been a cold
man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that word!--I put
things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last
is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick thing--
a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god. . . . I'm
not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a
man that's been flayed. I have been flayed. . . . You don't begin
to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude. . . . She's not going
to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails. . . . It's hard
to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--
there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or
achievements in the world. . . . I made her what she is--as I never
made Margaret. I've made her--I've broken her. . . . I'm going
with my own woman. The rest of my life and England, and so forth,
must square itself to that. . . ."
For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless.
We'd said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the
desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays.
"This man goes on doing first-rate stuff," I said. "I hope you will
keep him going."
He did not answer for a moment or so. "I'll keep him going," he
said at last with a sigh.
5
I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I
cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things
as no word of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive
thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its
very inconsecutiveness is essential. Many words are underlined. It
was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly
from my mind. . . .
"Certainly," she says, "I want to hear from you, but I do not want
to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on
with. Something I've made out of you. . . . I want to know things
about you--but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some
day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may
be different. Then perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even
more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling
than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of
the things we were DOING for the world--had given myself so
unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly at
loose ends. . . .
"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life
of my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even
for you and your schemes. . . .
"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I
ask again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things
up?' . . .
"It is just as though you were wilfully dead. . . .
"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I
might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this
catastrophe impossible. . . .
"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning,
and tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a
chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you
and I stood away from. You let my first repugnances repel you. . . .
"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be
asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think
I HATE you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake
for a time, thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful,
for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life,
when clearly I have understood so little of yours. But I am savage--
savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.
"Oh, why--why did you give things up?
"No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not
only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
purposes. They ARE great purposes. . . .
"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the
strength you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and
your young mistress. . . . All that matters so little to me. . . .
"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At
times I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit
to give you. . . . I've always hidden my tears from you--and what
was in my heart. It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things
brought to you to see. You are so curious as to be almost cruel.
You don't understand reserves. You have no mercy with restraints
and reservations. You arc not really a CIVILISED man at all. You
hate pretences--and not only pretences but decent coverings. . . .
"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that
slow people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't
I bold and reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that,
I suppose, as to ask why my hair is fair. . . .
"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
myself alone. . . .
"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I
shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to
have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?)
in which you were to forge so much of the new order. . . .
"But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of
you, I mean. . . . It tears me when I think of you poor and
discredited. You will let me help you if I can--it will be the last
wrong not to let me do that. . . .
"You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall
come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a
failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success
as a district visitor. . . ."
There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly
penetrating analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want
to. There's this difference that has always been between us, that
you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It
goes through everything. You are always TALKING of order and
system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the
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.
That was over. I should never have a voice in public affairs again.
The inexorable unwritten law which forbids overt scandal sentenced
me. We were going out to a new life, a life that appeared in that
moment to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere residuum of
sheltering and feeding and seeing amidst alien scenery and the sound
of unfamiliar tongues. We were going to live cheaply in a foreign
place, so cut off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the
commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture of shyness and hunger. . . .
And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and
adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great
was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking
of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly
I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal
abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and
favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all,
stood for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that
dear great city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing,
a key, a link, a reconciling clue in her political development, that
now she might seek vaguely for in vain? What is one life against
the State? Ought I not to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion
and sorrow for Isabel, and held to my thing--stuck to my thing?
I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WAS
a good game. No end of a game. And for the first time I imagined
the faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt
of this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite
unwarned. And Shoesmith might he there in the house,--Shoesmith who
was to have been married in four days--the thing might hit him full
in front of any kind of people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why
the devil hadn't I written letters to warn them all? I could have
posted them five minutes before the train started. I had never
thought to that moment of the immense mess they would be in; how the
whole edifice would clatter about their ears. I had a sudden desire
to stop the train and go back for a day, for two days, to set that
negligence right. My brain for a moment brightened, became animated
and prolific of ideas. I thought of a brilliant line we might have
taken on that confounded Reformatory Bill. . . .
That sort of thing was over. . . .
What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous
perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora
began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I
thought of people I had been merry with, people I had worked with
and played with, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of
houses that had once glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived
we must lose them all. I saw life like a tree in late autumn that
had once been rich and splendid with friends--and now the last brave
dears would be hanging on doubtfully against the frosty chill of
facts, twisting and tortured in the universal gale of indignation,
trying to evade the cold blast of the truth. I had betrayed my
party, my intimate friend, my wife, the wife whose devotion had made
me what I was. For awhile the figure of Margaret, remote, wounded,
shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of my immense
ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I had a
feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the
throat, some one talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for not
keeping me, for letting things go so far. . . . I wanted the whole
world to know how fine she was. I saw in imagination the busy,
excited dinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly
excited, brightly indignant, merciless.
Well, it's the stuff we are! . . .
Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's
tears and the sound of her voice saying, "Husband mine! Oh! husband
mine! To see you cry!" . . .
I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow
compartment, with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and handbaggage
swaying on the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me,
gripping my wilting red roses tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I
perceived she was sitting bent together with her head averted from
the light to hide the tears that were streaming down her face. She
had not got her handkerchief out for fear that I should see this,
but I saw her tears, dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve. . . .
I suppose she had been watching my expression, divining my thoughts.
For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still
and weary amazement. Why had we done this injury to one another?
WHY? Then something stirred within me.
"ISABEL!" I whispered.
She made no sign.
"Isabel!" I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely
to her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.