The New Machiavelli

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Title: The New Machiavelli
Author: Herbert George Wells
Posting Date: August 2, 2008 [EBook #1047]
Release Date: September, 1997
Last Updated: March 2, 2018
Language: English
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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 to-day 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 pill-boxes, 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 privet-twigs 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 spring-sided
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 pitter-litter 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 who 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
Grant-earning 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 Grant-earning 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 he
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 co-operate 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 be 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
understanding 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 notice-board! 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
north-west, 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 drain-pipes. 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 thatched 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 exploitation 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 be 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 independent-spirited
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 love-making 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 science-teaching, 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
self-subsisting 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 mutton-chop
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 carefully
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, walking-sticks, 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 bare-shouldered, 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 well-proportioned
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 he 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, but 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 liberal-minded. 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 check 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.
Those 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 medical-student 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 style,
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 classical tradition.
And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Of
course--we've got to departmentalise. 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 half-back.' Things
like that.”
“I could do that all right,” said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestly
becoming 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,
ever-deepening, 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 county-town 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 be 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 entertained 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 Existence 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 question-begging 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 self-deception
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 case 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, black-haired 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 administrative 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 could no' 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
alternative 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 self-conscious 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 snow-fields 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 self-forgetfulness, 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 country-side, 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
reorganisation, 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 largeness 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 heavy-faced 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.
Willersley 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 to-morrow
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 aunt talked to me in a casual feeble way, chiefly
about my mother's last illness. The two had 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 country-side
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 train 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 maintained 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 motor-car.
“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 half-starved 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 tweed-clad 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 summer-house 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 proposition 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 school-girls. 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 step-father, 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 pure-minded 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, high-coloured,
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 bawling 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
twenty-seven 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, world-making, 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 passage-hall, 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, clean-shaven 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 captured
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 calligraphy 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 co-operation.
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
public-spirited 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 word “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 step-father
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,
well-exercised 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, fair-haired, 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 complicated 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, over-mastering 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, swan-necked boats with their
minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and low
before us rises the little tower of our destination. Our men swing
together and their oars swirl leisurely through the water, hump back in
the rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies
back on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit
up beside her.
“You see,” I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect
acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism,
“it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to be
something priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is
so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be distracted from one's
purpose. The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive
needs, to work out and carry out plans. For a man who has to make a
living the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like ourselves
it's--it's the constant small opportunity of agreeable things.”
“Frittering away,” she says, “time and strength.”
“That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest,
it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too seriously. We've GOT
to take ourselves seriously.”
She endorses my words with her eyes.
“I feel I can do great things with life.”
“I KNOW you can.”
“But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main
end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our scheme.”
“I feel,” she answers softly, “we ought to give--every hour.”
Her face becomes dreamy. “I WANT to give every hour,” she adds.
2
That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial lake
in uneven confused country, as something very bright and skylike, and
discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of the very sunshine
of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge,
time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the whispering, nearly
noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steam
launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of the
depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made me feel altogether in
recess from the teeming uproars of reality. There was not a dozen people
all told, no Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big
cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas of separate tables, its
distempered walls and its swathed chandeliers. We went about seeing
beautiful things, accepting beauty on every hand, and taking it for
granted that all was well with ourselves and the world. It was ten days
or a fortnight before I became fretful and anxious for action; a long
tranquillity for such a temperament as mine.
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 sweet-dishes,
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 temperamental 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 bill-sticking 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 rabbit-witted 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
shoulder-knot--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 armchair.
“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 seventy-six
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 liberal-minded 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 honourable 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 “sub-careerist” element
noted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of the
rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-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 COUP-DE-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 rest-and-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 the 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 husband 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 make-believe, 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, make-believe,
Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the 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 temple-studded 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 over-ate 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 hand-bills 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 remember, 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 self-forgetfully, 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 deep-side
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 well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a
public-spirited 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 co-operate 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 responsibility. 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, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and
bustled self-consciously 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 self-sufficient 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 self-conscious, 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 horny-handed
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, self-indulgent 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 well-behaved, 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 be 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 be 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 bad-tempered,
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, fine-thinking. 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 chauffeurs, and of the quality
of English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and
university by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come
their way, witty, light-hearted, 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 half-cunning,
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
public-house. 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 well-managed 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
rich-looking 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 contemporary 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 wrong-doing, 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 writing-desk.”
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 co-operations. 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; battered-looking, 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 experience--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 muddle-headedness, 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 had 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 love-making. 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 unvizored 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 clear-headed 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 perspiration-beaded 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 reception-room; 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 self-conscious 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, love-making 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 be 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 black-splashed 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 he 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 half-dozen 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 your 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 are 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 be 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 hand-baggage 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.
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