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 myenergies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does notsettle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, andI have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I haveabandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. Mymind has been full of confused protests and justifications. In any caseI should have found difficulties enough in expressing the complex thingI have to tell, but it has added greatly to my trouble that I have agreat analogue, that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall outof politics at very much the age I have reached, and wrote a book toengage the restlessness of his mind, very much as I have wanted to do. He wrote about the relation of the great constructive spirit in politicsto individual character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lieslike 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 drivesinto the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa across theblue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I began a labouredand futile imitation of "The Prince. " I sat up late last night with thejumbled accumulation; and at last made a little fire of olive twigs andburnt it all, sheet by sheet--to begin again clear this morning. 

But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting thosescandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that Ihave released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that hestill has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindredwith him and set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation ofthe matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reasonof the dream he pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by themixture of his nature. His vices come in, essential to my issue. He isdead and gone, all his immediate correlations to party and faction havefaded to insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his broad methodand conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary canever be exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of thesubtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desireagainst too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed tolie 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 thatI have to tell. 

The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world'shistory. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confuciusare but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindredaspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and peoplesmade rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in termsof harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle anddiseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste humanpossibilities; they thought of these things with passion and desire asother men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousandsof men there are to-day almost mastered by this white passion ofstatecraft, and in nearly every one who reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering response. But in every one it presentsitself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimatethings. 

It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he livedin retirement upon his property after the fall of the Republic, perhapswith a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurkingin his limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was "ThePrince" was written. All day he went about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everydaypassions. He would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossipingcuriously among vicious company, or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returnedhome and went to his study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off hispeasant clothes covered with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put on his "noble court dress, " closed the door onthe world of toiling and getting, private loving, private hating andpersonal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment to those widerdreams. 

I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the lightof candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter of "ThePrince, " with a grey quill in his clean fine hand. 

So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of hisanimal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapsesinto utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of thebegging-letter writer even in his "Dedication, " reminding HisMagnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of thecontinued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him. They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whoseindelicate side we know nothing, and whose correspondence with Dionysiusof Syracuse has perished; or to Confucius who travelled China in searchof a Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indignities now lostin the mists of ages. They have achieved the apotheosis of individualforgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled withhis tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and everyhumbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recentand less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--andat the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at thedesk. 

That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist inmy story. But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the manner ofmy now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl ofhuman thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, hasaltered absolutely the approach to such a question. Machiavelli, likePlato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, mightdo the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imaginationof a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towardsrealisation, their attitudes became--what shall I call it?--secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particularPrince 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 ourown time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. Atvarious times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince ofWales, to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaperproprietor who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances andpossibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accordtowards 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 oldsort 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'saffair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and wasthe source and centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition ofaffairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman issomething of a servant and every intelligent human being something ofa Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this worldfor secretarial hopes. 

In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderfulhow it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a smallwriting-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and nohuman being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation ofmurdering 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 thatis not because power has diminished, but because it has increased andbecome multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised. It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannotprevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond all previous ages, is fullof powerful men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achievestupendous things. 

The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are beingdone! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. WhenI think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicineand sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase ingeneral education and average efficiency, the power now availablefor human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it withanything that has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I thinkof what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinatedminority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisershas achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it inspite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and thepassionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddywith dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organisedstate may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heightsthat may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible. 

But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches atthousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is theold appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending ofconfusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flatteredlord, 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 nosingle man, but to the socially constructive passion--in any man.... 

There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my worldand Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if they had comeacross a vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of thestatesman. 

2

In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region oflife almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the vehicleof children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-day haveever had an inkling of the significance that might give them in thestate. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed earth bears itscrops. Apart from their function of fertility they gave a humorous twistto life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought of women outside with his other dusty things whenhe went into his study to write, dismissed them from his mind. Butour modern world is burthened with its sense of the immense, now halfarticulate, significance of women. They stand now, as it were, closebeside the silver candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until hestays his pen and turns to discuss his writing with them. 

It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentousthat I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is to be truewhich has turned me at length from a treatise to the telling of my ownstory. In my life I have paralleled very closely the slow realisationsthat are going on in the world about me. I began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and dishonouring; only very slowlyand very late in my life and after misadventure, did I gauge the powerand beauty of the love of man and woman and learnt how it must needsframe a justifiable vision of the ordered world. Love has brought meto disaster, because my career had been planned regardless of itspossibility and value. But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when hewent into his study, left not only the earth of life outside but itsunsuspected soul. 

3

Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one stepfurther, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to me. Thepolitical career that promised so much for me is shattered and ended forever. 

I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a stonepine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides are terracedand set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleamingsapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains hanging in the sky, andI think of lank and coaly steamships heaving on the grey rollers of theEnglish Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if Iwere back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and themoney-changers' offices, the splendid grime of giant London and thecrowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgencyand 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 forever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the clink andclatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vividrecent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit again at eventfuldinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars below the House--dinnersthat ended with shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarmingand excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that was for methe opening opportunity. I see the stencilled names and numbers go up onthe green baize, constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loudshouting.... 

It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate version ofour story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partialjudgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out oflife already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlightand hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such wisdomas I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things Ihave 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 myparty. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this redblaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career forever. 

CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER

1

I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was alittle boy in knickerbockers. 

When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to methe memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heavenand its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective oilclothand a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they call it, of dark stainedwood. Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. There arecupboards on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves withbooks above them, and on the wall and rather tattered is a largeyellow-varnished geological map of the South of England. Over the mantelis a huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones, andabove that hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half anddisplaying an interior of intricate detail and much vigour of coloring. It is the floor I think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumedto be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; thereare steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OFTHE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brownsurround were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine. 

I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom Iowe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have notforgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous westof England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and foreach of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-workcarpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and shapedand smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a half by one, andhalf-bricks and quarter-bricks to correspond. There were hundreds ofthem, many hundreds. I could build six towers as high as myself withthem, and there seemed quite enough for every engineering project Icould undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses andchurches and citadels; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and makecauseways over crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and ona keel of whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to pushover the high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplinedpopulation, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays andall convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors andsoldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world. 

Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who writeabout toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme foressayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out ofthe caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of theperformance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre once, butI never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers weremy perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. Therewas the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows through which one peeped intotheir intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slantingways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence outinto the hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gunemplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And therewas commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtiumseed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden;such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacksof old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons alongthe great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indianfrontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there werebattles on the way. 

That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget bywhat benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--I havenever seen such soldiers since--and for these my father helped me tomake tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolatecountry under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. ThenI conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubtthrough contact with civilisation--one my mother trod on--and theirland became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a clockworkcrocodile of vast proportions. ) And out towards the coal-scuttle was aregion near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where livedcertain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country ofrudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves andseveral mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number ofsurvivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequentlyinvalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivatedwildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the gardenhedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories wentmy Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in theoilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills--one tunnel was threevolumes long--defended as occasion required by camps of paper tentsor brick blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineeredascent to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation. 

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years anddeveloped from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion andnow that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. Iplayed them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far moresignificantly than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, andthen forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I wasmostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And inthe retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, butfore-shortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem toremember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing shipsthat, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on thefloor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect froman aunt, that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my publicbuildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, andtherewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brasscannon in the garden. 

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in mymemory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots thatwent gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stoopedto scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth ofwhole days of civilised development. I still remember the hatred anddisgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did Idisregard them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisonsfrom fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrongboxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweepingthe splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, castingthe jungle growth of Zululand into the fire. 

"Well, Master Dick, " the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, "youought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until you'vesailed 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 andswiping 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-sidedboots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dullbodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were verydestructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. Shewas always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a washand brush up, and she never seemed to understand anything whatever ofthe political Systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade alltoys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building and the soldiersfor church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Arkmixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not knowwhether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled withcannon, and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fearof God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort ofark rather elaborately done. 

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of thepig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You madeyour beasts--which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceivedas pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from whichthey went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped mostsatisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep stepsto where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round theirlegs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughtermanwith a chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside ofan old alarum clock. 

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He worebright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my motherdisliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my little chairand survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding andsympathy. 

It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, mostof my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron, " he would say, "suitable forroofs and fencing, " and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper thatis used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you see the tigerloose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your cattle ranch. " And Iwould find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large inthe world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effortto get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the captureddragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and springgone out of him. 

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimableblessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood except those ofJules Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me fromthe Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustratedhistories; one of the Russo-Turkish war and one of Napier's expeditionto Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, livesof Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, fromwhich I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it hastaken years of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently wehad Wood's NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OFTHE ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great numberof unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD Ithink it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's NEWTESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other informingbooks bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousandsof carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two otherimportant works in the sitting-room. I was allowed to turn these overand even lie on the floor with them on Sundays and other occasions ofexceptional cleanliness. 

And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after thefashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that fascinatedme 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 withhis hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, takinga number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the oldScience and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools; and ourresources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a hundredpounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three palatial butstructurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead Station. 

They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style, interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairscoal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictivelydevoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so, he hadoverreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant would stayin them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance ofinefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every storey in thehouse was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which would have been cooland pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs went steeply up, to endat last in attics too inaccessible for occupation. The ceilings had vastplaster cornices of classical design, fragments of which would sometimesfall unexpectedly, and the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in patternand much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents. 

As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at atime, 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 therent he received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessantnecessary repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairinghimself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother wouldnot 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 wascovered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapesfor pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourableautumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an importantpart 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 alwaysgood ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one ofthe founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assistedhim in his school until increasing competition and diminishingattendance had made it evident that the days of small private schoolskept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon my father hadroused himself and had qualified as a science teacher under the Scienceand Art Department, which in these days had charge of the scientific andartistic education of the mass of the English population, and had thrownhimself into science teaching and the earning of government grantstherefor with great if transitory zeal and success. 

I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetictime. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married when myfather was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw only the lastdecadent phase of his educational career. 

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from theworld, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness andgenerosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more orless completely digested into the Board of Education. 

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how manyof the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and early manhoodhave given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. WhenI was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strangebody called a Local Board--it was the Age of Boards--and I stillremember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table overthe liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of aMetropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; Iwas already practically in politics before the London School Board wasabsorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council. 

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State toremember that the very beginnings of public education lie within myfather's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic peoplewere shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could neither read abook nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be foundeverywhere in England; and great masses of the population were gettingno instruction at all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronageof exceptional parents; all over the country the old endowed grammarschools were to be found sinking and dwindling; many of them hadclosed altogether. In the new great centres of population multitudes ofchildren were sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretchedand the under-equipped and under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary contributions and sectarian rivalries, made anineffectual fight against this festering darkness. It was a conditionof affairs clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amountof indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies werepossible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historianwill disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, thecommercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarianenthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose. I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new socialinstitutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they shouldpresent chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust of governmentin the Victorian days was far too great, and the general intelligencefar too low, to permit the State to go about the new business it wastaking up in a businesslike way, to train teachers, build and equipschools, endow pedagogic research, and provide properly writtenschool-books. These things it was felt MUST be provided by individualand local effort, and since it was manifest that it was individualand local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly agreed tostimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery ofexamination both in Science and Art and for the elementary schools; andpayments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with theexamination results attained, to such schools as Providence might seefit to send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand wouldbe established that would, according to the beliefs of that time, inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" wascreated, and this would give education as a necessary by-product. 

In the end this belief was found to need qualification, butGrant-earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So faras the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the taskof examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the mostpart quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also were teachingsimilar classes to those they examined, it was feared that injusticemight be done. Year after year these eminent persons set questionsand employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands ofanswers that ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairnesswell developed in their minds, they were careful each year to re-readthe preceding papers before composing the current one, in order to seewhat it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of afew years the recurrence and permutation of questions became almostcalculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teachpeople not science, but how to write answers to these questions, theindustry of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished from anykind of genuine education whatever. 

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of theage. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science prevalent atthis time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making graduates inarts 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 inthe district. Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of thebooks. A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existencespecialising in Science and Art Department work; they set themselves toproduce text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and qualityof knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twentysubjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and modelsand instructions that should give precisely the method and gesturesesteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book was writtenin the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and testquestions extracted from papers set in former years were appended toevery chapter. By means of these last the teacher was able to train hisclass to the very highest level of grant-earning efficiency, and verynaturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. First he posedhis pupils with questions and then dictated model replies. 

That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as anelementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, and it isso I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawnoccasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriouslyscribbling class sitting in rows of desks before him. Occasionally hewould slide to his feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw onthat very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for theclass to copy in coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display aspecimen or arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in theInstitute in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount ofapparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that bythe Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement withmaps and diagrams and drawings of his own. 

But he never really did experiments, except that in the class insystematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in thefirst place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and goodmaterial in a ruinous fashion, and in the second they were, in hisrather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus ofthe Institute and even the lives of his students. Then thirdly, realexperiments involved washing up. And moreover they always turned outwrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriouslyand opened demoralising controversies. Quite early in life I acquired analmost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of Nature andthe impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusivefact. I knew, for example, that in science, whether it be subject XII. , Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII. , Animal Physiology, when you blowinto a glass of lime-water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if youcontinue to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into thestuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face andpainful 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 andheat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and may be collectedover water, whereas in real life if you do anything of the sort thevessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium chlorate descendssizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says "Oh! Damn!" withastonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in the backseats gets up and leaves the room. 

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite understandthat ancient libertine refusing to co-operate in her own undoing. And Ican quite understand, too, my father's preference for what he calledan illustrative experiment, which was simply an arrangement of theapparatus in front of the class with nothing whatever by way ofmaterial, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminousdescription of just what you did put in it when you were so ill-advisedas to carry the affair beyond illustration, and just exactly what oughtanyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable powers of vividexpression, so that in this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw thisstill life without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboardto be copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard anyexceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as "empyreumatic"or "botryoidal. "

Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once stickingup 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 hishand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air. "Likethat, " he said. 

I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment aftergiving it. "As in a flock bed, you know, " he added and resumed hisdiscourse. 

3

My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practicalaffairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practicalincompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguinetemperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any humanbeing. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneousimagination, and as he had never been trained to do anything whateverin his life properly, his futilities were extensive and thorough. At onetime he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamouredwas he of its possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactorymemories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in mymemory; it came near the end of his career and when I was between elevenand twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light thatwrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up bothlawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternatingwith periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks hetalked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal. 

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is athing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it doesnot 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 andover-irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our twopatches at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainlyintensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the nightbefore they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to developa PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames weredamaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with itsoccasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because myfather always stopped work and went indoors if any one watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry inhardy natures. 

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guidingstring and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequentobliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, andparticularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished bywhich everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutterfrom the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularlyobstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he hadfailed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to givethe gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderlyappearance. He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain underthe influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stoppedin time. He hardly completed any of the operations he began; somethingelse became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of theNumber 2 territory was never even dug up. 

In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a manless horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he hadlaunched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out hispatience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after aday or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or socialorganisation, or summarising some book he had read. He talked to meof anything that interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then hewould begin to note the growth of the weeds. "This won't do, " he wouldsay and pull up a handful. 

More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. Hishands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off inhis careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken. He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. "CURSE theseweeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was at an end. 

I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into thetranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff all over me andthe Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! AAAAAAH!"

My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearingon such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in thescullery 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 wouldcry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the towel! I'lllet the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll giveup everything, I tell you--everything!"... 

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I wasin 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, andslashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We hadtied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half wererotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe inboth 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 afantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After hehad assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kickedholes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a rowof artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumberframe. Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write ofit. 

"Well, my boy, " he said, approaching with an expression of beneficenthappiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk likereasonable beings. I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed foran instant with bitter resentment--"Pandering to cabbages. "

4

That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One isthat we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston andnearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and theother is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not somuch to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done withit. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weirdworld-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time notunderstanding many things that afterwards became plain to me. It is onlyin recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; howfriendless my father was and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for the sympathy of the undevelopedyoungster who trotted by his side. 

"I'm no gardener, " he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I startgardening?

"I suppose man was created to mind a garden... But the Fall let us outof that! What was I created for? God! what was I created for?... 

"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, youknow. 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 foran 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 dowhatever you ought to do. I admit it's a puzzle.... 

"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco whiteelephants! 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 themand minding them. They'll eat your life up. Eat up your hours and yourblood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to havesold them--or fled the country. I ought to have cleared out. Sarcophagi--eaters of men! Oh! the hours and days of work, the nightsof anxiety those vile houses have cost me! The painting! It worked upmy arms; it got all over me. I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn'tliving--it's minding.... 

"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country allcut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas wepassed just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and thehedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart'stail. Patching it and bothering about it. Bothering! Yapping at everypasser-by. Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beastwants to keep us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch, --God knowswhy! Look at the weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!... There's noproperty worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blitheringrubbish.... 

"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. Iought 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 tofind 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, ifI 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 acascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU bewarned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one toshow you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Geteducation, get a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's youronly chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and propertyminding. There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin youat suchlike games. You and I are the brainy unstable kind, topside ornothing. 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 ofthem for you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say. "... 

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yetexactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, withresentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging outclumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passedalong them. That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiringpebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I havethe clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with adeer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimesbetween his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he becamediverted by his talk from his original exasperation.... 

This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory withmany other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did atdifferent times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at thetime with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has becomethe symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't understandthe things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broadideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave themto me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one asense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of thehuman life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal oforder and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, Isuppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism, --as theFabians expound it. 

He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, buthe seemed always to be waving his hand towards it, --just as hiscontemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his ageand 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 wascoming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaningand travailing in muddle for the want of it.... 

5

When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound upwith the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings andpaintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that. 

Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and somethingof its history. It is the quality and history of a thousand placesround and about London, and round and about the other great centres ofpopulation in the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality ofthe whole of this modern world from which we who have the statesman'spassion 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 onthe London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social orderthat had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At thattime its population numbered a little under two thousand people, mostlyengaged in agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There wasa 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 pleasantgentlemen's seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in theircoaches along the very tolerable high-road. The church was big enoughto hold the whole population, were people minded to go to church, andindeed a large proportion did go, and all who married were married init, and everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buriedat last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in theplace. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community inthose days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle of thetown with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much cheerfulmerry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a pack ofhounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and the localgentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant cricket matchesfor a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement of the entirepopulation. It was very much the same sort of place that it had been forthree or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van Winkle from 1550 returningin 1750 would have found most of the old houses still as he had knownthem, the same trades a little improved and differentiated one from theother, the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns not verymuch altered, the ancient familiar market-house. The occasional wheeledtraffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference, nextperhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brassesand the protestant severity of the communion-table in the parishchurch, --both from the material point of view very little things. ARip van Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greaterchanges; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people ofthe middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, thestylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed him, andsuchlike details. The place would have had the same boundaries, the samebroad essential features, would have been still itself in the way thata man is still himself after he has "filled out" a little and grown alonger beard and changed his clothes. 

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that wasdestined to alter the scale of every human affair. 

That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition toimprove material things. In another part of England ingenious peoplewere beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metalin abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto beenunattainable. Without warning or preparation, increment involvingcountless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strengthof horses and men. "Power, " all unsuspected, was flowing like a druginto the veins of the social body. 

Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody hadcalculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have amazed theirancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much more easily andcheaply than they had ever done before, to make up roads and move thingsabout that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for locomotion, to joinwoodwork with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all sortsof mechanical possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on alarger scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities from overseas, not simply spices and finecommodities, 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 andtile appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromsteadthatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, only passableby adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, and waspresently the route first of one and then of several daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be too tortuous for these awakeningenergies, and a new road cut off its worst contortions. Residentialvillas appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who esteemedthe place healthy, and by others of a strange new unoccupied class ofpeople who had money invested in joint-stock enterprises. First oneand then several boys' boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils fromLondon, --my grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to thenorth-west, was making itself felt more and more. 

But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first trickleof the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north they werecasting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to theproduction 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 werehouses with handsome brass-knockered front doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square glass panes, and the place waslighted publicly now by oil lamps--previously only one flickering lampoutside each of the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk, it long remained talk, --of gas. The gasworks came in1834, and about that date my father's three houses must have been builtconvenient for the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of thereal suburban quality; they were let at first to City people stillengaged in business. 

And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; therewas a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the east, andthe Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural placidities thathad formerly come to the very borders of the High Street were broken upnorth, west and south, by new roads. This enterprising person and thenthat began to "run up" houses, irrespective of every other enterprisingperson who was doing the same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and with much hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainageworks. Rates became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new churchin commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in theresidential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington. 

The population doubled again and doubled again, and became particularlyteeming 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 smallhouses built by small property owners and let by the week, sprang upalso in the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the LondonRoad. A single national school in an inconvenient situation set itselfinadequately to collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages ofBeckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely fourmiles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensionsand proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of locality orcommunity had gone from these places long before I was born; hardly anyone knew any one; there was no general meeting place any more, the oldfairs were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies, van showmen, CheapJacks and London roughs, the churches were incapable of a quarter of thepopulation. One or two local papers of shameless veniality reported theproceedings of the local Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmenwho were interested in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet"Bromstedian" as one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained inthe general mind a weak tradition of some local quality that embracedus all. Then the parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, andan ambitious area with an air of appetite was walled in by a BromsteadCemetery Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowfulvarieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas witha front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supplyof urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, marble, andgranite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in elaborate detail theentire 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 inthe full tide of building and growth from the first; the second railwaywith its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I wasten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed open and littered with ironpipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toilingaway deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced byplanks, of wheelbarrows and builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken andswallowed up by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, clearedof undergrowth and left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiartattered dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who haveseen happier days. 

The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It cameinto my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashingbrightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above theweir 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 ofthis initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside afootpath, --there were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and herewere ducks, and there were willows on the right, --and so came to wheregreat trees grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and atlast met overhead. This part was difficult to reach because of an oldfence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery bywading. Either I have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father hasdescribed them so accurately to me that he inserted them into mymemory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I neverpenetrated at all, but followed the field path with my mother and metthe stream again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows. The Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now betweensteep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the cattlewaded and drank. Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary rushes grewin clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasionsof rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers at the water'sedge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, and in them fisheslurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen and water-beetlestraversed the calm surface of these still deeps; in one pool were yellowlilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly places hovering fleets ofsmall 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 froma dreamless brooding into foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Welldo I remember that half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascadeshave their reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before weleft Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed. 

The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new drainageworks that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first acquaintedwith the geological quality of the London clay, had to do withthat--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at firstdid not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy might walkdryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came thepegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being nolonger in fear of floods, were now to be slashed out into parallelogramsof untidy road, and built upon with rows of working-class cottages. Theroads came, --horribly; the houses followed. They seemed to rise inthe night. People moved into them as soon as the roofs were on, mostlyworkmen and their young wives, and already in a year some of these rawhouses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows brokenand wood-work warping and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump forold iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a riveronly when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood ofsurface water.... 

That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead. The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative life; that wayhad always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother, and itsrapid swamping by the new urban growth made it indicative of all theother things that had happened just before my time, or were still, at aless dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy. I began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walkedpast scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken brick andcinder mingled in every path, and the significance of the universalnotice-boards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing andintimidating passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights ofway. 

It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time andwhat I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that evenin those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and growingdisorder. The serene rhythms of the old established agriculture, I seenow, were everywhere being replaced by cultivation under notice andsnatch crops; hedges ceased to be repaired, and were replaced by cheapiron railings or chunks of corrugated iron; more and more hoardingssprang up, and contributed more and more to the nomad tribes of filthypaper scraps that flew before the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts of Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads thatled nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don'tremember barbed wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did notproduce that until later), and in trespass boards that used vehementlanguage. Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheapglass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushedupon a world quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when thefulness of enjoyment was past. 

I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but thereplacement 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 incoordinatedfresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and noneof them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion. Each left a legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in itswake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out ofhand, 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 andwasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things arenecessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learnand plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the follyand muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods. The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some of them veryimpressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come to mankind, butof permanent achievement, what will our descendants cherish? It is hardto estimate what grains of precious metal may not be found in a mudtorrent of human production on so large a scale, but will any one, ahundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the Victoriansbuilt, travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings theymade to live among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature thatsatisfied their souls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted andundisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and greatnew freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by onepossession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was myfather's exploitation of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. Thewhole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is a yearago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immenseclustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders'roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; thevarious enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, ifanything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and public-houseand tin tabernacle glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot thatintervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors andsculleries gape towards the railway, their yards are hung with tatteredwashing unashamed; and there seem to be more boards by the railway everytime I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, andsuchlike solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetiteleft in them.... 

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted ifit sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan. 

6

Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these givethe quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of them allrises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine ofthat Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressivecleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church tofind my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He hadnever had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floorwindows--at house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumberwho mixed his paint--and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contriveda combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen tablethat served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed upthis arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had atthe critical moment--rolled. He was lying close by the garden door withhis head queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rodwith a tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We hadbeen 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 gardenand so discovered him. 

"Arthur!" I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in hervoice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And--SUNDAY!"

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voiceroused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had alwayspuzzled 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 adozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and clasped herineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished forfeeling, at the carelessly flung limbs. 

The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried, pale tothe depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"

I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie thatglorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into thetree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immensefact 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 motherwas 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 setoff by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of batteredfossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunateyoungsters who take readily to school work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, andwhen I was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City MerchantsSchool and was entrusted with a scholar's railway season ticket toVictoria. After my father's death a large and very animated and solidlybuilt uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother'ssister's husband, with a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night butwho was otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off thethree gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and myfather's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Pengewithin sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the CrystalPalace. Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his nativehabitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death. 

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time andinterest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge ofPenge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town andoutskirts of Bromstead. 

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was morecompletely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there werethe same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges andtrees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut offa large part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fencesand forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinaryspectacle of meteorology a great variety of gratuitous fireworks whichbanged and flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to seethem better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickhamand Greenwich, impressed upon me the interminable extent of London'sresidential suburbs; mile after mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over railwaybridges. I have forgotten the detailed local characteristics--if therewere any--of much of that region altogether. I was only there two years, and half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But withPenge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty oftwilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, andthe mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shopsby night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains andrailway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the eveningoccurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-spiritedboy--and I began my experience of smoking during these twilight prowlswith the threepenny packets of American cigarettes then just appearingin the world. 

My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught theeight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four nights aweek I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again untilwithin an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at schoolin order to play cricket and football. This, and a pretty voraciousappetite for miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the PengeMiddleton Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. Martin's Church, and mymother did not like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, sheherself slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home. I must confess I wasat home as little as I could contrive. 

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventfulplace indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative temperament or hermind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and Iremember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topicsI was anxious to evade. I had developed my own view about low-Churchtheology long before my father's death, and my meditation upon thatevent had finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. Myreason would not permit even a remote chance of his being in hell, hewas so manifestly not evil, and this religion would not permit him aremote chance of being out yet. When I was a little boy my mother hadtaught 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 Irebelled against these things as indignities. But our minds parted verysoon. She never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never interested herself in my school life and work, she could notunderstand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly toregard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had felttowards my father. 

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not thinkhe deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness intheir union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the halfingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, andpresented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder whynearly all love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must havedisappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of hiscareless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixedand definite, she embodied all that confidence in church and decorum andthe assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic of the large massof the English people--for after all, the rather low-Church section WASthe largest single mass--in early Victorian times. She had dreams, Isuspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a littlepoke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta andstarched under a little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hatand peg-top trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather likethe Prince Consort, --white angels almost visibly raining benedictions ontheir amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babiesand an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) littlegirl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she must haveseen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste, " with a vivarium in theconservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, makingpreserves in the kitchen. My father's science-teaching, his diagramsof disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts thatcontradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loosetweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic readingfits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her ratherunintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when hewould swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passedlike summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. Shewas constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt tounderstand 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 attitudeto nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a scepticaldisapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and notto her. "YOUR father, " she used to call him, as though I had got him forher. 

She had married late and she had, I think, become mentallyself-subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill daysI used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that oldspeculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a considerableinterest in the housework that our generally servantless condition putupon her--she used to have a charwoman in two or three times a week--butshe did not do it with any great skill. She covered most of ourfurniture with flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly andwithout very much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearlyall our Bromstead things, was crowded with furniture, and is chieflyassociated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a condiment she usedvery freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equaldread of "blacks" by day and the "night air, " so that our brightly cleanwindows were rarely open. 

She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at theheadlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, Ithink, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and inrailway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of theRoyal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do notthink she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that dated fromher own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in them; there wasMiss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I remember with particularanimosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE WORLD. She made these books ofhers into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of calico andfigured muslin. To me in these habiliments they seemed not so much booksas confederated old ladies. 

My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoicedto watch me in the choir. 

On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of thetable at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darningstockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffycomfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think shefound these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to puther work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musingthat would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like mostyoung 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 withbirths, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) andthe distresses of bankruptcy. 

And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own thatI suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes credibleto me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary offragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books. Sheput down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer stiff littlecomments on casual visitors, --"Miss G. And much noisy shrieking talkabout games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A. Delighted and VERYATTENTIVE. " Such little human entries abound. She had an odd way ofnever writing a name, only an initial; my father is always "A. , " and Iam always "D. " It is manifest she followed the domestic events in thelife of the Princess of Wales, who is now Queen Mother, with peculiarinterest and sympathy. "Pray G. All may be well, " she writes in one suchcrisis. 

But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to telleasily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in verygreat detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later Ifind such things as this: "Heard D. S----. " The "s" is evidently "swear"--"G. Bless and keep my boy from evil. " And again, with the thinhandwriting shaken by distress: "D. Would not go to church, and hardenedhis heart and said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser thantheir maker!!!" Then trebly underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING. "Dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! Morecomforting for me to read, "D. Very kind and good. He grows morethoughtful every day. " I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies. 

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think thedeath of my father must have stirred her for the first time for manyyears to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peaceat all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Ofthis gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her diaryalso she could find no phrases. But on a loose half-sheet of notepaperbetween its pages I find this passage that follows, written verycarefully. I do not know whose lines they are nor how she came uponthem. 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 mymother really grasped the import of what she had copied out. It affectedme as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and joined in awhispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its generaleffect quite hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went throughall her diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional termof tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow theregrew upon me the realisation that there had been love.... Her love forme, on the other hand, was abundantly expressed. 

I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; suchexpression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not knowwhen I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. ChieflyI was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny withirrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believingquite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose ithad 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 thatdissolve my estrangement from her, I can pierce these barriers, Ican see her and feel her as a loving and feeling and desiring andmuddle-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 hersome return for the narrow intense affection, the tender desires, sheevidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then again I ask how Icould make that return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Herdemand 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 Isaw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely remote.... 

My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret Ifeel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and turnedhis weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could lookback without that little twinge to two people who were both in theirdifferent quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrianand ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one ofthe essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one ofthose things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that Icannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeedthe most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trainedin a hard and narrow system that made evil out of many things not inthe least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All theirestrangement followed from that. 

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human loveand happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must needsconsider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose Iam a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate moreand more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast by religiousorganisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanismwith its fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the blackest record ofuncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, taintedto a degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with this same hatefulquality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vainambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and bethe one and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside thehousehold of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical goodnessand lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference isexaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind againstbroad or amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by darkallusions, by sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, fromworldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments that mingle humansympathy. For only by isolating its flock can the organisation survive. 

Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if Iremember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority ofprint and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that evercame into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet withone woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now theuninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine andattitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries ofGod's mysterious preferences, now a new church in the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was! A score of vices that shun the policeman havenothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the naturalkindliness of men. The contents were all admirably adjusted to keep aspirit in prison. Their force of sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful intimations of the swift retribution that fellupon individuals for Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakeningtowards Ritualism, or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable humanbeings; there would be great rejoicings over the conversion of allegedJews, and terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidelswith boldly invented last words, --the most unscrupulous lying; therewould be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety" lusciouslydescribed, or stories of condemned criminals who traced their final ruinunerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads people to give upsubscribing 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 myspiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering.... 

2

A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It wasat one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, theBlackfriars. 

I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed theman with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor ofdiscords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influenceso terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated someway down a table at right angles to the one at which I sat, a man ofmean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between thewings of his collar. He ate with considerable appetite and unconcealedrelish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the moustachewave like reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientiouslook. 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 tobe shaping for great successes, and he was glad to be in conversationwith me and anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I triedto make him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications heran, 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 putconstructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you know, verynarrow. 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 therewas a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and clothed andeducated.... 

I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and itseemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in myboyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-chopwhiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were stillhard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday opening ofmuseums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive asever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnablenessof the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, onewasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthedattack on poor little Wilkins the novelist--who was being baited by themoralists at that time for making one of his big women characters, notbeing in holy wedlock, desire a baby and say so.... 

The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do goon, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dyingnow, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguelyfearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses ofthese narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of Heaven, one wants agreat wind from the sea!

3

While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial inthemselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They hadthis in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietlytaking for granted and let me see through it into realities--realitiesI had indeed known about before but never realised. Each of theseexperiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the values inmy life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment. One of thesedisturbing and illuminating events was that I was robbed of a newpocket-knife and the other that I fell in love. It was altogethersurprising to me to be robbed. You see, as an only child I had alwaysbeen fairly well looked after and protected, and the result was anamazing confidence in the practical goodness of the people one met inthe world. I knew there were robbers in the world, just as I knew therewere tigers; that I was ever likely to meet robber or tiger face to faceseemed equally impossible. 

The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all sortsof instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone outof the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a carefullyaccumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new experience inknives. I had had it for two or three days, and then one afternoon Idropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath crossing a fieldbetween Penge and Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does withoutat the time appreciating what had happened, then, later, before I gothome, when my hand wandered into my pocket to embrace the still dearnew possession I found it gone, and instantly that memory of somethinghitting the ground sprang up into consciousness. I went back andcommenced a search. Almost immediately I was accosted by the leader of alittle gang of four or five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assortedsizes 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 thesearch. 

"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced sniffingboy in a big bowler hat. 

I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the groundabout 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 tome, 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 wasyour knife?"

Remarkable doubts assailed me. "Of course it's my knife, " I said. Theother 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 histrouser pocket. 

I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I doubtif it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and clenched myfists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose, the advantage oftwo years of age and three inches of height. "Hand over that knife, " Isaid. 

Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinaryvigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a knee inmy back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so got medown. "I got 'im, Bill, " squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nosewas flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out and hit somethinglike sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to be atme at the same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to discover them allmaking off, a ragged flight, footballing my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation and pursuedthem. 

But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition, and Idoubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour requiredme to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just been downin the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little antagonist ofdisagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course to beeven with him, but also I doubted if catching him would necessarilyinvolve 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 torecover my dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the dust out of that andout of my jacket, and brushed my knees and readjusted my very crumpledcollar, I tried to focus this startling occurrence in my mind. 

I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a policestation, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented that. Nodoubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals. And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thingindeed rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all theflavour of my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simplebrute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certainkindly complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes wasqualified for ever. 

4

But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clearintimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise andincrease and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and atlast dominate all my life. 

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparablyconnected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I nevermet the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It wassome insignificant name. 

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly likesome deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories. It came assomething new and strange, something that did not join on to anythingelse 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 discoveryabout the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose thatisolation and spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at lastpossess the whole broad vision of life. 

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of thecheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chanceon a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shopstowards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarettebetween my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight paradesof young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are oneof the odd social developments of the great suburban growths--unkindlycritics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boyclerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend theirfirst-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lacecollars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantlyinto the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walkup and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It isa queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes inwhich so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance ifyou will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that hithertohas lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade. 

Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in theevening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I made myway through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a publicschoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes for me!--andvery careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girlspassed me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tintedfaces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools reflectingstars. 

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over hershoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck andshoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl asI have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. Iturned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette ostentatiouslyand lifted my school cap and spoke to them. 

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I saidand what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it wassomething absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was wehad met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when suddenlyits urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous amazement upon itsmate. 

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisationkeeping us apart. We walked side by side. 

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five timesaltogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on the otherside of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtivelycaressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shopsinto the quiet roads of villadom, and there we whispered instead oftalking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face. "Dear, " I whispered very daringly, and she answered, "Dear!" We had avague sense that we wanted more of that quality of intimacy and more. Wewanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe againthe scent of flowers. 

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thingthat matters is the way in which this experience stabbed through thecommon stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge newinterest 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 shadowedthroat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity.... 

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach theirhouse. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of small housesnear Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, theyvanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as amoth goes out of a window into the night, and left me possessed of anintolerable want.... 

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my workand I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded up and downthat Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a thwartedsense of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I wentbackwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and at lastexplored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never sawher again, except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, indreams. How my blood was stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering inthe darkness for her. I prayed for her. 

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when herfirst real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to myimagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man. 

I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was abouther and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed nonsenseabout love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could notpossibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put the bookaside.... 

I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thingbecause it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and secretiveabout such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darklyand shamefully like a thief in the night. 

One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first yearbefore I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the Strandan engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its duskyencounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered, bare-breastedOriental 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 thingis that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not have itframed and hung in my room open to the criticism of my friends, but Ikept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer lockedfor a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the darkgirl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often when Ihad sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with itbefore me. 

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a timenobody 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 andbelow 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 MerchantsSchool. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the mooningexplorations of the south-eastern postal district which occupied therestless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant spaces between thewoven threads of a school-boy's career. School life began for me everymorning at Herne Hill, for there I was joined by three or four otherboys and the rest of the way we went together. Most of the streets androads we traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood'sLondon have passed and left them, and I have revived the impression ofthem again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in ahansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gatestill looks out with the same expression of ancient well-proportionedkindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new sciencelaboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields areunaltered except for the big electric trams that go droning and spittingblue 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 haschanged 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 ofvigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate anddeveloped a more and more comprehensive view of our national processand our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of theeducational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from theconstructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view thepublic school as anything more than an institution that has just chancedto happen, we must treat it as having a definite function towards thegeneral scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take thecrude young male of the more or less responsible class, to correcthis harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of thecontemporary developments he will presently be called upon to influenceand control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading andruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and set upfor an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible notto feel how infinitely more effectually--given certain impossibilitiesperhaps--the job might be done. 

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality ofelucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about mewas London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, thatfilled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imaginationto a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school not only offered no keyto it, but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We werewithin three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the governmentoffices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, greateconomic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamedwith election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployedcame trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now thenewspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor andpoverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawlingcostermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was thebackground of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and throughthe school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greekepigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped downinto something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and forall its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like ourblackened and decayed portals by Inigo Jones. 

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin andGreek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us did nothabitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any morenow except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At theutmost our men read them. We were taught these languages because longago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escapefrom 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 andamazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means ofinitiation to the detached criticism and partial comprehension of theworld. I can imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener andRoper, teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressiveChinaman 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 irresistiblestimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago. A new greatworld, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, had assimilatedall these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on to new and yet moreamazing developments of its own. But the City Merchants School stillmade the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek, still, with nothought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream amidst the harvesting. 

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went upto Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of ourcurriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it wasimpossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge ofthe classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button upa sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objectiona reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. Headmitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past ata common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remainedin which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancientachievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, apeculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects ofinstruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening andorderly discipline for the mind. 

He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a SeniorClassic!

Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case. In schoolsas we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort ofassistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he couldsee no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment. Andthat 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 schoolare the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Ourfounder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogicvalues and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools and university colleges sprang into existencecorrelated, the scholars went on to the universities and came back toteach the schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, beforethey had ever made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boysherded together, a crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed institutions. Ina century, by its very success, this revolutionary innovation ofRenascence public schools had become an immense tradition woven closelyinto the fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful peopleceased to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, butthat only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Sincemost men of any importance or influence in the country had been throughthe mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade them thatit was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man coulddevise. And, moreover, they did not want their children made strange tothem. There was all the machinery and all the men needed to teach theold subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father gave seemed indeed the uninvitingalternative to the classical grind. It was certainly an altogetherinferior instrument at that time. 

So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languagesfor seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would situnder the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had falleninto an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work usup to enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he wouldlash himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthinggreat lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed face andshining eyes if it was not "GLORIOUS. " The very sight of Greek lettersbrings back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of ourclass-room, the banging of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen ofhis alpaca gown, his deep unmusical intonations and the wide stridingof his creaking boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we wouldconsent that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answeringreverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. Weall accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these strangesounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothicintricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbinglights, the heights and broad distances of our English tongue. Thatindeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek andLatin, but that he was fiercely against every beauty that was neitherclassic 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 outprotagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling ofincomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods fadedbeyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for amoment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thoughtof the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our schoolperformance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these thingsto 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 asone looked at it. 

Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with theleathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall.... 

And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the eveninglight and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, London inblack and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loomof Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the powerand 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 Greeknor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses wentlumbering past, bearing countless people we knew not whence, we knewnot whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers jostled one, a thousandappeals of shop and boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lightsof window and street mingled with the warm glow of the declining dayunder the softly flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about theglobe. One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voiceof Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remotegesticulations.... 

That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to livinginterests where it might have done so. We were left absolutely to thehints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoonsof the comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet forany general ideas whatever about the huge swirling world processin which we found ourselves. I always look back with particularexasperation to the cessation of our modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up abruptly, as though it had come upon somethingindelicate.... 

But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the hugeadjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief cricketer onthe staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the placeof this or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matterof supreme importance to boys. He obliged us to affect a passionateinterest in the progress of county matches, to work up unnaturalenthusiasms. What a fuss there would be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared with an evening paper! "I say, youchaps, Middlesex all out for a hundred and five!"

Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of thefirst class. I applied myself industriously year by year to masteringscores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the placesnearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either. ) Through a slightmistake 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 inKent. It did quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight andfast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to bowl Flack out. Hewas a bat in the Corinthian style, rich and voluminous, and succumbedvery easily to a low shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he wascaught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl him before he gotcaught. He loved to lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled himat the practice nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just tomake him feel nice again. 

Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has beenobserved, going across the Park on his way to his highly respectableclub in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange briefdance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The hit accomplished, Flackresumed his way. 

Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, needlesslyalert. 

6

These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distantand more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and gowns, a uniform whichgreatly increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when Ireached the Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simpleand very eager to be liberal-minded. He was bald, with an almost conicalbaldness, with a grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under thestresses of a Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression ofpuzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He madea tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to meonly three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrongsurname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not one ofthe old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, theTophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after generation. I recall him most vividly against the background of faded brownbook-backs in the old library in which we less destructive seniors weretrusted to work, with the light from the stained-glass window fallingin coloured patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of having nocolour of his own. He had a habit of scratching the beard on his cheekas he talked, and he used to come and consult us about things andinvariably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining thetraditions of the school. "

He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of aman captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans hadbegotten 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 Zeitgeistthat made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towardsdevelopments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spiritswere carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissionsfrom our curriculum, and particularly at our want of German. Moreover, four classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in theold 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 getin some German, you know, --for those who like it. The army men will bewanting it some of these days. "

He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for thelower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change, " but he achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, atwhich the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safetyinkpots 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 inthe 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 theeffect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But thatis like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn tocomplete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, histhoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous waythrough sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundantprepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, thatwhat we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best avoidedaltogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with shortarresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to stir and exhort ustowards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodnessin general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed toindicate in those transitional years. 

7

The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was becauseI was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because ofa temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have myprivate dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the familytraditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at firstthat I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered verylittle bullying, and I never had a fight--in all my time there were onlythree fights--but I followed my own curiosities. I was already avery keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen. I was alsointensely interested in modern warfare. I read the morning papers inthe Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the illustratedweeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTEon my way home. 

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligentboys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interestedin men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnifiedpuerility among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voraciousreader of everything but boys' books--which I detested--and fiction. Iread histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particularzest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quitesubordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable figureat games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the finequality of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, itsGothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgianextensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presencepervaded it everywhere, with the rushing and impending London allabout it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things werecertainly not the living and central interests of my life. 

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the masterseven more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go freely withone boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General forEast Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of amap in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malaysin Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indiesbefore steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected thatthere was any one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about theIndian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. But Britten had comeup through the Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship onthe way. It gave him a startling quality of living knowledge. From thesepilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessionsconcerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly. Webecame congenial intimates from that hour. 

The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the LowerFifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment between thebooks I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and humanintercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher education, andaired and examined and developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my mind. As we were bothday-boys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walksand expeditions together, and my habit of solitary and rather vagueprowling gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. I wentseveral times to his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, oneof whom was a medical student and let us assist at the dissection of acat, and once or twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we wentwith parcels of provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds andgalleries of the Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at closequarters. We went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired bythat made an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docksand Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-wayplaces together. 

We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantomwarfare. " When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had bothdeveloped the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about usas we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushedalong on either side, crouching and gathering behind hedges, crestingridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house tohouse. The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed in my imagination withthe pits and trenches I had created to check a victorious invader comingout of Surrey. For him West Kensington was chiefly important as thescene of a desperate and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops(who had seized the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against aroyalist army--reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best knownto themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitarygame, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a successof that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed defences andassailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset. Afterwardswe recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large scale map of theThames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper. 

A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten'sluck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us bothto the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in CaxtonHall. We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly acouple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shothard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaboratedset of rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion ofour leisure. Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game aprofound 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 Lamband the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAYGAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertainthings we wanted to drag out into the light of expression. Britten hadgot hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN andRABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmicsolicitudes talking. I was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment confessingshamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius. We thoughtevery 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-mortemexamination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those daysbeen recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change inmy circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshireuncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needysolicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W. , about a mile and a halffrom the school. So it was I came right into London; I had almost twoyears 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 uscontinuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY. 

As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursuedthe same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and the nicknameof the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set withdark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean andfair-haired and some inches taller than he. Our talk ranged widely andyet had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free withpolitics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of WilliamMorris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialismpretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the helpof Britten's medical-student brother and the galleries of the NaturalHistory Museum in Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the groundfloor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in ourtimes, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over ourDarwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did exhaustively. But onthe other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex orsexual relationships. There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, ourlips were sealed by a peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever hadoccasion either of us to use the word "love. " It was not only that wewere instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamedof the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. Weevaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge. 

We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipationof our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed ourboyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secretliterature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theologicalcaricature. Britten's father had delighted his family by reading aloudfrom Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyedthe precious volume to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspirationof some of our earliest lucubrations. 

For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger'sfirst taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly tothe revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for someyears. 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 acareer that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, nowLord Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, rathergood-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an outsider even aswe were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached toobserve him, with private imaginings very much of the same qualityand spirit as our own. He was, we were inclined to think, rather asentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style, played chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and earnedBritten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the invariableneatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with avigour that we found extremely surprising and unwelcome. 

Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our projectmodestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and brilliantliterature by which in some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult ofideas 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'sstudy--we had had great trouble in getting it together--and howeffectually Cossington bolted with the proposal. 

"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine, " said Cossington. "Theschool used to have one. A school like this ought to have a magazine. "

"The last one died in '84, " said Shoesmith from the hearthrug. "Calledthe OBSERVER. Rot rather. "

"Bad title, " said Cossington. 

"There was a TATLER before that, " said Britten, sitting on the writingtable at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of the LowerSchool 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 itseems almost a duty--"

"They call them all -usians or -onians, " said Britten. 

"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE, " I said. "We could probably find a quotationto suggest--oh! mixed good things. "

Cossington regarded me abstractedly. 

"Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith, whohad a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a murmurof approval. 

"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN, " decided Cossington, "and we mightvery well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the OBSERVER. 'That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old boys and allthat, and it gives us something to print under the title. "

I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy. "Someof the chaps' people won't like it, " said Naylor, "certain not to. Andit sounds Rum. "

"Sounds Weird, " said a boy who had not hitherto spoken. 

"We aren't going to do anything Queer, " said Shoesmith, pointedly notlooking at Britten. 

The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. "Oh! HAVE itARVONIAN, " I said. 

"And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossington. 

"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is betterbecause it has a whole page, not columns. It makes no end of differenceto one's effects. "

"What effects?" asked Shoesmith abruptly. 

"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write closer fora double column. It's nuggetty. You can't get a swing on your prose. " Ihad 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 votewe don't have any. "

"We sha'n't get any, " said Cossington, and then as an olive branch tome, "unless Remington does a bit. Or Britten. But it's no good makingtoo much space for it. "

"We ought to be very careful about the writing, " said Shoesmith. "Wedon'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 thefellows' names, " he said. "Small beer in ancient bottles. Let's get astuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine. "

"We might do worse than a Greek epigram, " said Cossington. "One in eachnumber. It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classical tradition. And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Ofcourse--we've got to departmentalise. Writing is only one section of thething. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school. There's questionsof space and questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk ofprinted 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 totheir play:--'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place forextreme individualism. ' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back. ' Thingslike that. "

"I could do that all right, " said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestlybecoming pregnant with judgments. 

"One great thing about a magazine of this sort, " said Cossington, "isto mention just as many names as you can in each number. It keeps theinterest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their own littlebit. Then it all lights up for them. "

"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from hismeditation. 

"Rather. With comments. "

"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home, " saidShoesmith. 

"Shut it, " said Naylor modestly. 

"Exactly, " said Cossington. "That gives us three features, " touchingthem off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section, Sports. Then wewant a section to shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anythingthat's going on. So on. Our Note Book. "

"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silentdisapproval 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 frontpage. It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something manly andstraightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or ESPRITDE CORPS, or After-Life. "

I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington matteredvery much in the world. 

He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort ofenergy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realisedthat anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly ata disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and detailedvision of a magazine made up of everything that was most acceptablein the magazines that flourished in the adult world about us, and haddetermined to make it a success. He had by a kind of instinct, as itwere, synthetically plagiarised every successful magazine and breathedinto this dusty mixture the breath of life. He was elected at his ownsuggestion managing director, with the earnest support of Shoesmith andNaylor, and conducted the magazine so successfully and brilliantly thathe even got a whole back page of advertisements from the big sports shopin Holborn, and made the printers pay at the same rate for a noticeof certain books of their own which they said they had inserted byinadvertency to fill up space. The only literary contribution in thefirst number was a column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English indepreciation of some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and endingwith 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 allover the editorial under the heading of "The School Chapel; and How itSeems to an Old Boy. "

Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any graceor precision what we felt about that magazine. 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE

1

I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to formand interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world intowhich I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, itssubtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day theliving interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning nowfor three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on aTuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors andearly influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestrywas shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the sonperplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploringinterminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexualmystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centresof the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it downthat one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analyticaland synthetic those ears must be. One begins with the little childto whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque anddisconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and "being good" justsimple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last tothe vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaringsearchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, hererefracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showingbroad 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 ofnothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It ishard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannottrace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growingrealisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imaginationwith infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moraldistress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thoughtof reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon nowirreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadeningyears did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded meaway from it. 

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in thatpassage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for somepermanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to beurgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to thisday, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever thatIncomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of allthings, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid ofit. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment longbefore my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life istransitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; thatGod is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts sothat one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequencebut failure, no promise but pain.... 

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparativelylate before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I wasafraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a largeand difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all inthe direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as somethingdisconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostileand disgraceful in its quality. The world was never so emasculated inthought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time.... 

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always foundinseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knewthe thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep awayfrom. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagantdecency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing.... 

The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle andhuge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations ofthe beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it Ifeel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used tolook at them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least inmy later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for thesake of them.... 

The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to menow that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strangecombination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about withprohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmaticalwarnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinatedcuriosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so littleand I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthfulPantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I havetold how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lampsand the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shiningout of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphererather than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought apicture. 

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoidedchamber.... 

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down thebarriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings tothe light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into whatwe called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even thephysical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostlyas occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner bythe Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man'sin King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphereof Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a backgroundbrown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchisticleanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a hugeFrench May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and blackon a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations. Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, eventhe floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and facedownward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown andour caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like anelephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine;the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from hischequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs, except thefour or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beerand were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smokedreckless-looking pipes, --there was a transient fashion among us for corncobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesseswith liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicatedchiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected werekeeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was agood Englishman of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, adeep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said oneevening--Heaven knows how we got to it--"Look here, you know, it's allRot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What arewe going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all festering insideabout it. Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether aboutthis Infernal University!"

We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talkwas clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I rememberHatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty andDecency, " said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought themto Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and theseclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And allthat sort of thing. "

Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usuallywildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic ofthose alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegantwar customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, andquoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and CunninghameGraham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster inhis regard for respectability. But his case was too preposterous, andEsmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing withall four long fingers flat together, carried the point against him. Hequoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet. 

"Well, anyway, " said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like anintellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency. "

We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced andtolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity, " headmitted generously. "What I object to is this spreading out of decencyuntil it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid tospeak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to looka frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to ourcoming 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 seemedto seek and catch his image in the air--"oh, a confounded buttered slideof sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it andtalk 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 outinto 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 takethe consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean toknow what I'm doing. "

He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But oneis apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one doesthe clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how farI contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, prettycertain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to callaristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set wasdeveloped. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained theproposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sortsof man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind toother 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 betweenfences, 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'ssaying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, thatis. "

A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected. 

"Well, " exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are weup here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to bethought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years forgetting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. GoodGod! what do you think a university's for?"... 

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several ofus. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were goingto throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see whatcame of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, andone of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our greatelucidation. 

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussionof sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place inour intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Ourimaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and wentround it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolongeddiscussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps toMadingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serioustreatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, forthe institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the GreatCourt are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hot-earedwrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hillhave their particular associations for me with that spate of confessionand free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent andcrappled and sometimes crippled ideas. 

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulboroughin Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under abridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathedand talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at momentsit seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by thesimple abolition of tailors and outfitters. 

Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, howsplendidly 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 singingand shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, andgrieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fitto be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had onceknown a girl whose hair was gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleighto 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 marriedto him--we thought that splendid beyond measure, --I cannot now imaginewhy. She was "like a tender goddess, " Benton said. A sort of shamecame upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Bentoncommitted himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon greatpauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in agoverness cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, webecame alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For mightshe not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sicklypointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which welived?

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially thissame emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam. We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that weflourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, "starkfact. " We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had beenflags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred mylong-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it acompleter and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared forin the slightest degree.... 

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, ourmore formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three ofus got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had aResearch Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myselfwho both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental andMoral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got alectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in thecloak of Political Economy. 

2

It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream ofundergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of ourbeer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to bedifferentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite forideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other handwe intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men whomade up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we werealtogether too hard on our contemporaries. We battered our caps andtore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these othersextremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselvesand 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 alittle doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--forwhich Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys, " intendingthereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The PinkyDinky 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 dreadedbecoming. 

But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant somuch to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party uponthe Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in therain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile pipes, andelaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We improvised asort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for theresponses. 

"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life, " said someone. 

"Damned prig!" said Hatherleigh. 

"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with alight gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot goon 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 allbeing 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 bea 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 ofthings. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs tocarry it off. "... 

We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured. 

Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keepoutfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shopswith whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, andnot be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had titles. "

"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than mostPinky 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 mancondescended. "

"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared oldHatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair. 

We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of thePinky Dinky. 

We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky Dinky goes to King'sChapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH! Hewouldn't tell you--"

"He COULDN'T tell you. "

"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads aboutit, never thinks about it. Just feels!"

"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has adoubt--"

Some one protested. 

"Not a vulgar doubt, " Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation whetherthe Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form.... There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODYput it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a manshould be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and allthat--"

"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 atcroquet?"

"It's their Damned Modesty, " said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's what'sthe matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as avirtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it'ssome confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour toHavana cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler ofthe people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on thejob! 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 onthe 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 athoughtful silence for a time. 

"I say, " began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, "whatis 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 thoughtthat had arrested our flow. 

3

I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and theorganisation of the University. I think we took them for granted. When Ilook back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of thingsthat we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in theorder of things, for all the world like having eyebrows or a vermiformappendix. Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertainvery fundamental doubts about these old universities. Indeed I had ascheme--

I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of thepolitical combinations I was trying to effect. 

My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the bigproject of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I wantedto build up a new educational machine altogether for the governing classout of a consolidated system of special public service schools. Imeant to get to work upon this whatever office I was given in the newgovernment. I could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or theWar Office quite as easily as from the Education Office. I am firmlyconvinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schoolsand universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send theirroots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any good that couldpossibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincibleobstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as theAmericans say, the whole system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and thenfor the public service generally, and as they grew, opening them tothe public without any absolute obligation to subsequent service. Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a newcollege system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modernhistory, European literature and criticism, physical and biologicalscience, education and sociology. 

We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut theumbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should have setthis going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools andthe Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind tobegin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed atmaking a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type ofman. Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I shouldhave kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow orother I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think Icould have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquetand tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the PeepingTom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life thatit isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had militarymanoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fedand 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 camedown, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those twoplaces.... 

Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense oflowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an undergroundroom where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicablecontagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, inthose roads and roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villashave destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of itsevil.... 

Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but theircollective effect is below the quality of any individual among them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, ofprim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fearof God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises andantiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught;one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in theworld--a covetous scandal--so that I am always reminded of Ibsen inCambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seemappropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writingdesk. "... 

We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thingto make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. Onemight as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line ofbattleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those oldbathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in its peculiarand distinctive way to damage by futile patching. 

My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear oldCodger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from the oldSchoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a goodNetsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he couldmake and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence ofCambridge in my thoughts. 

I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childishface, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat handcarrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet atrifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer trippingpace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or Isee him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If hecould not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice hadprecisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt itcould flow round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddieswere wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscularmovements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit--veryjudicial, very concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it wasthe last thing he would have told a lie about. 

When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on someoccasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocentthan his--"Born in the Menagerie. " Never once since Codger began todisplay 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 hereand lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quiteexceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerfulcombination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from thebeginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by yearhe has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item forthe intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out topeople as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish worldof 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 haveread every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the UnionLibrary. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainlyhe had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, MissBraddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would haveastonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothingso much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficultquestions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rivalin this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than gloriousfor Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertookto rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all thechanges how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain bythe nearest and cheapest routes.... 

Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. AramintaMergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character inthe Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausibleexpressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of theOxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscurewar.... 

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! theintimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff likenothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. Itwas a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brainthat had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionatelyloved, --a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theoriesabout Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him tothink about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of therealities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across theblack mouth of a gun.... 

4

All through those years of development I perceive now there must havebeen growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself allthe phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman'sidea, 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 thoseother factors in life I have set out to present. It was growing inme--as one's bones grow, no man intending it. 

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact ofdisorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinousconfusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies thesethings in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at largein any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the ideawhich sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in theworld, --the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords itmay present, is as a matter of fact "all right, " is being steered todefinite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought thatOrder prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomedrebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against andstruggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of myexperience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping fromcontrol. 

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind waspresently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of mymother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascibleProvidence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and thesurvival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest tosurvive. 

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist'sLAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my lifeuntil I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and lovedhim. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and Iscoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution, " having, so tospeak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked atthe Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-flukeand skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things onlythrough the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully forus. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life wasa various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man setsitself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion. 

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching theseconclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen ornineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just aschildren do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen monthsand some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very littleto do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people;some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests atfourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belongedto one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we shouldhave been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape thetheoretical boy. 

The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centresthere; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished fromthe wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars andfuture time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed theChannel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good workingidea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forestsand all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered overits surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how itwas changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mindbeyond measure. 

I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to theAncients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deceptionwrite down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. Sofar as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now atforty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries andraces, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension wasvery different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening mysocial knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by feltand realised distinctions. 

In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridgein September--my vision of the world had much the same relation to thevision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the directvision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world and saw--whatdid we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had no suspicion wereinterdependent. We had no conception of the roots of things nor of thereaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example, that businesshad anything to do with government, or that money and means affected theheroic issues of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and wherethere were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gatheredtogether. Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so muchconnect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as asort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-mindedmen. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how"interests" came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed bypurely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honestor dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. Weknew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a wholenation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capableof the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our owntimes, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civilwars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death andthe front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the courseof an accurately transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Actof Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferredits population EN MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the LocalGovernment Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisationsout of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freelydistributed bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of lawsabolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peacefuland orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul'sCathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill, --a close and notunnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I rememberquite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully fifteen and wewere perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was simply thatas yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers oflegislation and conscious collective intention.... 

I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have mydoubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one didnot understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's generaloutlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adultunderstanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. SometimesI myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the MansionHouse, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimesit was I who sat judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping inmy clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of theProvisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! theGeneral Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand!... 

I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believethe mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gavethat place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. Igot outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almostas universal as sea and sky. 

At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange forBritten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly andself-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. Igot 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'swits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge madepolitics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no senseof effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and acolonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real tous; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school wereallusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended tobe in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn theabolition of "water, " and find a shuddering personal interest in theancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that Itouched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down todebate 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 timein my life expected to read and think and discuss, my secret vice hadbecome a virtue. 

That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous andvarious than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors whohad been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in mymind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side ofPinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expressionof ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of eachgeneration stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistantmasters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the natureof things least oppressed by them, --except when it comes to a vote inConvocation. 

We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. Inever saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but hehad resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and theCombination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeliand the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentaryhistory, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceilingof our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of SirWilliam Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like asocialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not comeindeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, withinpersonal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings atcountry houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as toread political memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward. From gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt somethingof the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanentofficials worked and controlled their ministers, how measures werebrought forward and projects modified. 

And while I was getting the great leading figures on the politicalstage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as menas the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was gettingthem reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and theirmotives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring inmy Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception ofthe world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual and moralprocesses.... 

5

Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation itcame as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of andthe Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the ChicagoAnarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation (as it was then)presented socialism to our minds. Hatherleigh was the leading exponentof the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of ahuge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand acrossa revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had toexpound. 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 likethe mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, givingplace in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right andJustice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a Perfectly SplendidTime. 

I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance ofBritten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideasabout freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Oursimple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were "all wrong. "The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers andknew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on the part of the few toexpropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the currentforms of life, forms that esteemed themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was presently to be tornaside.... 

It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, Ithink, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhapsalso I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget thecircumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with itspractical corollary of an analytical treatment of the material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of humanaffairs. 

I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working manI knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change, and indeedcould not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into theformer. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creepsinto a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather gliblyassumed, an "ideal, " but a complete misrepresentation of the quality andpossibilities of things. 

I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridgethat I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast ofrich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinousmajority of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious aboutways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and illhoused, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallenupon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did not know the wantof necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to auniversity education intimated very plainly that there was not a thingbeyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demandthat it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressiveradicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almostnaturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself atall with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that hadbeen forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it linkme in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It wasa personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the backstreets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirtychildren, ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that madethe social background of London, the stories one heard of privation andsweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I wasmaking about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the socialrevolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, andit 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 anostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, werereally material to such questions. 

Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves inimmediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders orplumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciouslyand unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters orsportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expectedto behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round aboutCambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all weexplained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part ofthe country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, wasvery eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who wasa Hampshire man, assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of hisco-operative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks to-dayEngland thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancashire. 

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder veritiesof the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that Ihad to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future withmy uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much ofthe human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for thefirst time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of hisinnate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash thisscoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to aconception of millions of people not organised as they should be, noteducated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapableof nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostlyincompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearinga limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerablewrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that thepoor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--"muddlingalong"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, thatmean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that theytook the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoardingit, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any waywhatever. 

The complete development of that realisation was the work of manyyears. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did haveintimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed thevisit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroicanticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not anticipated. 

Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him atRedmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial. Itfailed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attemptto screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nailsinstead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next dayChris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, andleft 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'teven rouse men to opposition. 

And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of theposter, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-madeclothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent andinvincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout bootstucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer andlooked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables andchair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairsafter the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat wasoccupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and hispicturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and didn'tknow how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which wasdisconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the samedifficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped. 

"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps, " he repeated with anorth-country quality in his speech. 

We made reassuring noises. 

The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through anuncomfortable pause. 

"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, whatwith the new machines and all that, " he speculated at last with redreflections in his thoughtful eyes. 

We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of themeeting. 

But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refinedconversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became adifferent man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly whatsocialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of socialconditions. "You young men, " he said "come from homes of luxury; everyneed you feel is supplied--"

We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch ofRedmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listenedto him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made usindignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy andseemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beautyof his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. Welooked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who haddropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity. We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and ceaseforthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped andmurmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer. 

Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, thatindolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He laycontorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed andhis left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thinhand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his wateryeyes. "I don't want to carp, " he began. "The present system, I admit, stands condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in theminds of intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is justwhere everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy. "

"Socialism, " said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, andHatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely. 

"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer, " said Denson, gettinghis 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 thisfine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescentand inviting noises--"but the real question remains how exactly are yougoing to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions. If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complexand clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and thingsin general administered, but you don't get rid of the need ofadministration, 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 ofscrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now. 

"Nothing could be worse than things are now, " said Chris Robinson. "Ihave seen little children--"

"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily beworse--or life in a beleagured town. "

Murmurs. 

They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming outfrom the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight oflate afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; hewas an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points anddisplayed a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation. And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. "Suppose, " hesaid, "you found yourself prime minister--"

I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffledand his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the hugemachine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer andsmoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands thatprotruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoonof 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 againhe came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your learnedmen 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 hisgoing to work in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were allwith your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights until hewould fall asleep at his reading. 

"It's made many of us keen for all our lives, " he remarked, "all thatclemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read abit 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 roundeyes 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. Onegets 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 ofDenson, "while men decay and starve. "

"But suppose, " I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "thealternative is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patentlyfutile. "

"I don't follow that, " said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose anythingfutile, so far as I can see. "

6

The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialismbut Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialisticprofessions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctlyImperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man'sBurden. "

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of thatperiod; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently exalted andthen, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middlenineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavychin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shoutsof boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in thesounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderfuldiscovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and theengineer, and "shop" as a poetic dialect, became almost a nationalsymbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling andhaunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climaxwith his "Recessional, " while I was still an undergraduate. 

What did he give me exactly?

He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he providedphrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organisedeffort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the currentsocialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thingthat follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature andgave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much ofthe rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and theimpatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for thesake 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 hereap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know weserve 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 bornand brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africabeing yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the nowremarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that time keptanything but "awful. " He learnt better, and we all learnt with him inthe dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are justified in turningresentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption.... 

South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridgememories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disastersour facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying orprofitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspapersellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to therealisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers wehad imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling ofrifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had alwaysbeen, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing togrip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets andcountry-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war buglesfor them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they, --just ill-trainedand fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. Andhow it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson'sNek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise thebloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso--Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, inLadysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfoldingcatalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lestworse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lackof cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirtyretrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion. 

All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the riflescrackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale ofaccidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and moneypoured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. Isee it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead ofthrough the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had beenthere the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacksof helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, thewrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, andat last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling andspreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemyuntil at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him inthe toils. If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered tothose battle-fields. 

And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yellingnewsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papershastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful receptionof doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemedto some of us more shameful than defeats.... 

7

A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated meimmensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit ofpropaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OFOUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I gota supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached andadverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must havebeen published already nine or ten years when I read it. The countryhad paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the Warbecause 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 everyword for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangersthat gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discoveredEurope to me, as watching and critical. 

But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country'sintellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and disciplineand moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent therewere other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring ourImperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful tome. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social andpolitical reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made themno longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the loveof making one might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had alittle forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere enviousecho to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbingsense as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon.... 

One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was anattempt 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. Itprofessed 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 bythe story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the womanhe had loved and never married. Now in the retrospect and with a mindfull of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit theconflict was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that theterrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terribleclaim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the "infernal punctilio, " and DudleySowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inalertnessthe book set itself to assail. So many things have been brought togetherin my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will notvaliantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understandnothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to mewas altogether outside my range of comprehension.... 

8

As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension ofthe world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments thatfound me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as ifit stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happenuntil I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace ofVereeniging 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 CivilService, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London SchoolBoard, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the "advanced"people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent incomethat relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had akindred craving for social theorising and some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begottenby the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It hadmarched 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 modestclimbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we werebenighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa MariaMaggiore 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 Maggiaand over to Airolo and home. 

As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness andenlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement ofthe boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage andladen porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcelyperceptible swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, veryobvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homelandand seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about theboat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently amovement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on acliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scanthe little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in apale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children uponit, and the clustering town of Boulogne. 

One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearlythree and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasinglittle stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, thestrangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French ofCity Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one wasstanding in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street toBoulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters inblouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peakedcaps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all ontwo wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements instead ofsash windows, and great numbers of neatly dressed women in economicalmourning. 

"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artlesscries. 

It was a real other world, with different government and differentmethods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers andsat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one'soreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the Germanofficial, so different in manner from the British; and when one wokeagain after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffeein Switzerland.... 

I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revivesa certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release inme. 

I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran onto Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply slopingfields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms andfrom 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 dirtinessof London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me thatperhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quitestupendous possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might bedeveloping here--and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a newunderstanding. 

Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenishgrey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him withthe drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockingsand vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was aborrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave inthe train, but I made him at one of the Swiss stations--I dislikethese Oxford slovenlinesses--and then confound him! he cut himself andbled.... 

Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed tohave washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, andeating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks, snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrousrock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and there werewinding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then darkclustering fir trees far below. 

I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of beingoutside. 

"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never havingperceived it before; "this is the round world!"

9

That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view ofthe Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, which wesaw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the earlysummer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouchingand munched bread and chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among thetumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake Cingolo, and surveyedthe winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano. 

And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley'smind abounded in historical matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habitof topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again theRoman Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the firstgreat Peace among the warring tribes of men.... 

In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about ouroutlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the samequestion, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question:"What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as importantly asI, but from a different angle, because his choice was largely made andmine still hung in the balance. 

"I feel we might do so many things, " I said, "and everything that callsone, 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 areup to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one of those questionsit is inadvisable to reopen subsequently. "

He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long wordswas 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, itseems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and thatis the number of people who can think a little--and have"--he beamedagain--"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 isall 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 outof 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 deepeningbenevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very fairly kept hisword. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses ofuseful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days ofarid administrative plodding and of contention still more arid andunrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gestureand manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have become a thinghe puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled witha considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered bysubordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he hasmade mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man whohas foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier pathsto distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve thecommunity. He does it without any fee or reward except his personalself-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any hopeof future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. Nodoubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of recognition. Nodoubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spendingand husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitableproprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools hehas done so much to develop. "But for me, " he can say, "there would havebeen a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would havebeen less ably taught. "... 

The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not tocontent at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets thenotice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of hismistress. 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 whilethere was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I haveno doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimsongown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidentalvanity 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 eventhen as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Longmay his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! Helectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listensless, toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving youin detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that comefrom a man's work. 

Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas anddeterminations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smokeand pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields andthe 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 disputesabout the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in anothersection. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, andwith at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine andnoble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broadenand exalt life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to presentin a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month'sconversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, thatranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantlyresuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jestand go and come back, and all the while build. 

We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneathall its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. "Muddle, "said I, "is the enemy. " That remains my belief to this day. Clearnessand order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It wasmuddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters andhumiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawlingdisorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives usthe waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of thepoor. 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 arefor--servants of the new reorganisation!"

We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of SocialService. 

We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of suchunpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spokeof the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, thehostilities to such a development as we conceived our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in the invincibility of thecauses 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 knownto us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informedthan I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive movement coming fromthe heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink togossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towardsilluminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from myprivate reading. We were particularly wise, I remember, upon themanagement of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever. We perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. Wetalked of swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action. 

Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects werethickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write, and allthat we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in ourminds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speakingthat moving word. We had already produced manuscript and passed theinitiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in theUnion, and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feetwere already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six andtwenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in termsof bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardingsclamorous with "Vote for Remington, " and Willersley no doubt saw himselfchairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironicalwords after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendlybeside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible insuch dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference atthat time wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideasabout town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organisedinternal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards thelatter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later. 

The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How manyof them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation beforethey failed?

There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes aboutour prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world ofmen as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrastI remember once lying in bed--it must have been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix where--and speculating whetherperhaps 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 fora world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about thisprospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could thinkof so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could neverbe anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished youngman I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five andthirty. 

Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and whythey had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much aboutfailures. 

10

Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knewmy Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialismthat would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life couldhave shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done withfor ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinatelyand 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 acart's tail. "

"Essentially, " said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription, inpeace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official andhas 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 bettersort of official. A man's none the less an official because he'sirresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just thesame. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw.... "

Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and asplendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an idealstate, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, theorganised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our idealsand gave form to all our ambitions. 

Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominantduty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how toserve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealthto it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuingsubstance of our intercourse. 

11

Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and theflush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight alongsome narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for nationalreorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though theworld was wax in our hands. "Great England, " we said in effect, overand over again, "and we will be among the makers! England renewed! Thecountry has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters andanxieties 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 awinding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clusteredamidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silentlyon the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses whereSwitzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenlyto gather to a head. 

I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had beenaccumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, thephrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substanceremains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperorsand kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classedamong the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us fornothing, we had abilities, --it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behaveas if we hadn't--and Fortune watched us to see what we might do withopportunity and the world. 

"There are so many things to do, you see, " began Willersley, in hisjudicial lecturer's voice. 

"So many things we may do, " I interrupted, "with all these years beforeus.... 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'vegot no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I runabout like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothingbut mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit formodesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I knowif 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 gunthat is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where toaim itself.... "

The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distantrailway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakesof foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, thevast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind thisnearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast townsshining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed theworld, --and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nurseryfloor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings shouldfeel. 

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, Iremember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind thetown and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width andabundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming pastthe brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour andclamorous 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 hundredtimes when I have thought of England as our country might be, with nowretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained andpurposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective endsand 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 andhad still to make.... 

12

And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there wasanother series of a different quality and a different colour, like theantagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one toanother, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. Iwas asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to dofor the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with anincreasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my avertedattention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you goingto do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and womenand your desire for them?

I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of myupbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not beenfor my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known anygirls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a littlelater. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world besideme and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon meand grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied byother things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, andthere the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to myaverted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venuswho stoops and allures. 

This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in mymind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue ofthe glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregardeddreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in thecheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encounteredin the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greaterEngland 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 swingingand shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as sheapproached. 

"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 therebright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years.... 

I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and wasa little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I tookin them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore toCannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me andbroke down my pretences. 

The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valleyto valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities fivemiles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of themresting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one likeCeres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approachingand 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 immensesense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down thatwinding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliamentand all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind onfor ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way ofdeath. Reality was behind us. 

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not sosure, " he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, thatagricultural work isn't good for women. "

"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursingof all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I wonder why Istand it!"

"Stand what?"

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world andyou and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we pooremasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!... "

"I'm not quite sure, Remington, " said Willersley, looking at me witha deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesquescenery 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 andCannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly becauseof that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave usthe refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower airinto which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn inthe Empress Hotel. 

We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to anEnglishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in thehotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fairgolden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhapsfifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee andpresently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like that, " she confidedstartlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man tosleep. "

Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was. 

We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usualtopographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "Myhusband doesn't walk, " she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot managethe hills. "

There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyedshe liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to writeletters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I feltenterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one hasnever seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautifulscenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice madeher laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember Isaid 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 wasthe 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, smilinggood-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersleywent out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found itnecessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Whothe deuce are these people?" I said, "and how do they get a living? Theyseem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, whatis a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter. "

Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocativequality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I metlike old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the intervalhad been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time ofinsignificant things. 

"What do you do, " she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take asiesta?"

"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 steamerpropeller 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. Myfriend'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 wascalled, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness thepurplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me andhesitated. 

Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake thatafternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejectedabruptly. "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 helooked at me curiously. "Very well, " he said; "then I'll make some notesand think about that order of ours out under the magnolias. "

I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishlyrestless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went upto my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came alittle tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a tautbowstring, 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 thesafe-door nearly opened. "Come in, " I said almost impatiently, foranyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew hertowards me. 

"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, andawkward and yielding. 

I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turnedupon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew her to meand kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a littlenoise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one andher face, close to mine, became solemn and tender. 

She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who hadtapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured.... 

That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! Iwas a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented ofadventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world beforehad done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things offadmirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dogin the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisivepokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited andhilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe underthe arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagantnonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about thehappenings 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-morrowafternoon 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 startabout five. "

We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a placewhere girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancingon a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous displayof pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in theworld. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it theright way. 

Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kepthim back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decidedto start early the following morning. I remember, though a littleindistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Herchristian name was Milly. ) She was tired and rather low-spirited, anddisposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse Ifound myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There wassomething kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive anduncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality ofmotherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answeredand approved. She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded tomy initiative. "I've done you no harm, " she said a little doubtfully, anodd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You have likedme, haven't you?"

She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless andhad no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a richmeat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it, " she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he playedvery badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchangepunting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrivedher marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I everencountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners whichencumbers modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much ofthat aspect of them.... 

I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because Ihave no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather thanwonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in thosefurtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have beenmore irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I hadbeen suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--findingmyself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloomof my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And hereis the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I wasover-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I feltI had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultationfrom Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungraciousself-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine bythe rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell betweenus. 

"You know?" I said abruptly, --"about that woman?"

Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the cornerof his spectacles. 

"Things went pretty far?" he asked. 

"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in myunpremeditated achievement. 

"She came to your room?"

I nodded. 

"I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling andso 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 knowabout her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When wefound that League of Social Service we were talking about, " he saidwith a determined eye upon me, "chastity will be first among the virtuesprescribed. "

"I shall form a rival league, " I said a little damped. "I'm hanged if Igive 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 dogreat public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing therights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditionswe work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experimentin that way, if you want even to discuss it, --out you go from politicallife. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, witha kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to doimmense 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 experiencefor humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing. "

Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt ifsexual proclivities, " he said drily, "come within the scope of theparable. "

I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I, "isa fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'mgoing to look at it, experience it, think about it--and get it squarewith the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances ofthat. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't lookthis in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sexmeans breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst theirsuccesses. Eugenics--"

"THAT wasn't Eugenics, " said Willersley. 

"It was a woman, " I said after a little interval, feeling oddly thatI had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb caseagainst 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 Ihave described the kind of education that happens to a man of my classnowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experiencethat I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this secondhook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give something of theatmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of theforces that went to her making. I met her in Staffordshire while I wasstaying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the uncle whosold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret wastwenty then and I was twenty-two. 

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened upso much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, andcircumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vividmemory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrialworld 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 aperplexing interrogation and a symbol.... 

But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world thatserved as a foil for her. 

2

I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth ofsixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talkthings over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go intobusiness instead of going up to Cambridge. 

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, butchiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anythingthat deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my lifeI had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was madeup of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptionalextravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, forinstance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-class in thelocal trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with anentire unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of sucha proceeding. 

The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns beforeit and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a coach houseand stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the gardener and thecoachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brassbedstead, and had a little bathroom attached equipped with the porcelainbaths and fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary andstamped with his name, and the house was furnished throughout withchairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and prevalentlyred Turkish carpets, cosy corners, curtained archways, gold-framedlandscapes, overmantels, a dining-room sideboard like a palace witha large Tantalus, and electric light fittings of a gay and expensivequality. There was a fine billiard-room on the ground floor with threecomfortable sofas and a rotating bookcase containing an excellentcollection of the English and American humorists from THREE MEN INA BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatoryopening out of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought pottedflowers in their season.... 

My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that wouldget over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years herjunior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything nice, andunmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father andfollowed the imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldestand tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouterbuild, and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treatedme on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for aboy a little younger and infinitely less expert in the business of lifethan herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certainmysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much tomy own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of unfathomableallusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk over and through anuninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense of superiority. 

I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six o'clockhigh tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I heard themrattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with greatdecision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis foursomeswhere it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my presence wasunnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some veterinary works, anumber of comic books, old bound volumes of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWSand a large, popular illustrated History of England, there was verylittle to be found. My aunt talked to me in a casual feeble way, chieflyabout my mother's last illness. The two had seen very little of eachother for many years; she made no secret of it that the ineligiblequalities of my father were the cause of the estrangement. The onlyother society in the house during the day was an old and rather decayedSkye terrier in constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginaryfleas. I took myself off for a series of walks, and acquired aconsiderable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries. 

It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-sideand often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copsesand flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valleyindustrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turnedby nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar of men'sactivities. And in such a country as that valley social and economicrelations were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless confusionof London's population, in which no man can trace any but the mostslender correlation between rich and poor, in which everyone seemsdisconnected and adrift from everyone, you can see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close at hand thecongested, meanly-housed workers, and at a little distance a smallmiddle-class quarter, and again remoter, the big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram--after the untraceable confusionof London. 

I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets ofmean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriouslyheated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened wallsor a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the womenpouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilersto work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the southcountry, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, andsurveyed across dark intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, thegnome-like activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes andrumours of strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure labourpaper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was inthose 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 thatperiod, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more orless furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and theexpropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled andfar more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building anddevelopment that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, butit had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great virtue in theword "exploitation. "

There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing thetwisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I can'tdescribe how, except that one eye was just expressionless white--andhe ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterlysatirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot water fromthe tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had beenscalded and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And LordPandram was worth half a million. 

That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of myimagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crudemelodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believethe card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and thata case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the muddygutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed andscalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a wearyarm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by for help, for help and somesort of righting--one could not imagine quite what. There he was as afact, as a by-product of the system that heaped my cousins with trinketsand provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars and spaciousbilliard-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 thatexisted between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt andanimosity he felt from them. 

3

Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed thatevery 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 businessat fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone'seducation should terminate. He was very anxious to dissuade me fromgoing up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all myvisit. 

I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructivelyabout the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence byslaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggssubtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for someyears until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantlyaggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changedperspectives, I fancy, as to the facts that he was suffering forcontinuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescentdaughters who had just returned from school. 

During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word isrows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, hehad maintained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned physicalchastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon themthat power had mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stoppingtheir pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable;besides which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he shouldgive them money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting adifficulty in making it. So that after he had stopped their allowancesfor the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggarywithout a qualm. It had been his pride to give them the largestallowance of any girls at the school, not even excepting thegranddaughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul recoiled from thisdiscipline as it had never recoiled from the ruder method of theearlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutualrecriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogetherdeadlier thing than the power of the raised voice that had alwayscowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as ifinvoluntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you reallymust not say--" and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a greatadvantage, they resumed the discussion.... 

My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear anddefinite. 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 gaveinstances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him "false ideas. "Some men said that at college a man formed useful friendships. What usewere friendships to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, asmy uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience werelittle greater than a common man's. If college introduced him to hotelproprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man intoParliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive cornerin the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from theonslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddleand tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant tobe a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, andwas full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitorsamong my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by themselves, " saidmy uncle. "It isn't so. Not unless they take their coats off. I tookmine off before I was your age by nigh a year. "

We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think menlived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was throwing outat the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but justfailing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or hadnot done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates had certainly barred mymistaking the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins andbathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection thatit dawned upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow with myuncle, "me, having no son of my own, " was anything but an illustrationfor 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 complexionthat told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures--he keptemphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger--the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, andsoft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in thegarden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by takingme to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dustygrinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through thehighly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls lookedashamed of themselves, --"They'll risk death, the fools, to show theirfaces to a man, " said my uncle, quite audibly--to the firing kilns andthe glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway sidingand the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders. 

Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, andhe showed off before me for a while, with one or two subordinates andthe telephone. 

"None of your Gas, " he said, "all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hardcash 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 inyour glazes?"

Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle'slife. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, exceptthe benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use. "Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns, " he said. "Let me tell you, myboy--"

He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed toanger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the matterat all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning. Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it wouldbe quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as they hadit--and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects oflead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in aparticularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to getlead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused abortion. I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, thework-people simply would not learn the gravity of the danger, and wouldeat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of risks, so that as myuncle put it: "the fools deserve what they get. " Sixthly, he and severalassociated firms had organised a simple and generous insurance schemeagainst lead-poisoning risks. Seventhly, he never wearied in rational(as distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) precautionsagainst the disease. Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minorcompetitors lead poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and peoplehad generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, hehazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distantchimneys, might be advantageously closed.... 

"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the tableon which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a time when amaster will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girlsnoses for them. That's about what it'll come to. "

He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, andurged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interestedenemies of our national industries. 

"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'llsee a bit, " he said. "They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'llwhistle to get it back again. "... 

He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell meof his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a ferociousgreeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factorygates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly harddiapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with themean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and showed grimyinteriors, and dirty ill-clad children played in the kennel. 

We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged herlimbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, aspartly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there wasplenty 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'youthink? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked piece ofbiscuit 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, andeating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!

"Eating her dinner out of it, " he repeated in loud and bitter tones, andpunched me hard in the ribs. 

"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles. And the fools up inWestminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longtonfools have.... And then eating their dinners out of it all the time!"... 

At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against eveningdinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a concerted demandfor a motor-car. 

"You've got your mother's brougham, " he said, "that's good enough foryou. " But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival waslaunching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls, " heremarked. "He's a fool, " and became thoughtful. 

Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room witha 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 toTrinity. 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. Youcould have come here--That don't matter, though, now... You'll have yourtime and spend your money, and be a poor half-starved clergyman, muckingabout with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your ownever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of yourlife. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'mhalf 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, "andlikely 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 ina different universe from the dreams of scientific construction thatfilled my mind. He could as easily have understood Chinese poetry. Hismotives were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his classand kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and fanciedslights, a habit of acquisition that had become a second nature, a keenlove both of efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed tome to have no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love ofbeauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He hadstrong 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 theseoccasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he wasurgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and aharsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley. And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights of hisjolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the unprintablefeminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly contempt andconsiderable financial generosity, but his daughters tore his heart; hewas so proud of them, so glad to find them money to spend, so resolvedto 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 anilluminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them throughhim, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms Ishould have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I hadnot first seen them in him in their feral state. 

With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rathermottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls throughall my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwingout a shrewd aphorism, the intractable unavoidable ore of the newcivilisation. 

Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised inequal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was notthe most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education afterfifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated allpeople who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave uphigh tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played andcould judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because heknew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because hewas English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Alsohe hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire, " andhe hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet. " He wantedto have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call uponevery other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars andthe best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, andevery one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extralarge size, specially made and very inconvenient. ) And he hated TradeUnions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of hisworks, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiringmechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigoroushuman being. He was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to theideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a Central Africannegro. 

There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrialworld. You will find the same type with the slightest modifications inthe Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. Nodoubt you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselvesup from the general mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in ahard industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had firstto drive themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure tothink of the state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams orbeauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore suchcravings. All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of asdictated by his conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagancesthat expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury thatsprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broadviews, his contempt for everything that he could not understand. 

His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls theywere! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. Myuncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, wasalso in his odd way proud of me. I was his nephew and poor relation, andyet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerativethings in the grandest manner, "Latin and mook, " while the sons of hisneighhours, not nephews merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in theirnative town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes andaltered relations, and before I had settled down to them off I wentagain. I don't think I was one person to them; I was a series ofvisitors. There is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteenin unbecoming mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteenand nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first andgood tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary fortwo girls of twenty-three and twenty-four. 

A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-greenaffair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was controlledmysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The hightea had been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my unclewould not dress nor consent to have wine; and after one painfulexperiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibitedany 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 tosay--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to stareat!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't, he hadexplained, want strangers poking about in his house when he came hometired. So such calling as occurred went on during his absence in theafternoon. 

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families ofthe industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendousinsulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. Allthe isolated prosperities of the district sprang from economising, harddriven 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 theEstablishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to thewider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed atschool, and through two much less prosperous families of relations wholived at Longton and Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships with oldschool mates were "kept up, " and my cousins would "spend the afternoon"or even spend the day with these; such occasions led to other encountersand interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetingsthat formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard tablehad been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends foran occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for glory and thegirls. Both of them played very well. They never, so far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic conflicts they beganto 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 atennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recallthat in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the districtfound much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts andsuchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in tangledtandems at the apparition of motor-car's. 

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters atall. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they hadsprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them thatthe concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut theirchildren off from the general social sea in which their own awkwardmeeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world inexchange. My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his businessaffairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wantedthem just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sortof animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He wasirritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritatedthat they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in youngmen. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evadethe bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideaswhatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeedno 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 theirdevelopment. They supplemented the silences of home by the conversationof schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had tomake what they could out of life with such hints as these. The churchwas far too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon mymind upon my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondencesand having little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with themysterious owners of certain initials, S. And L. K. , and, if I rememberrightly, "the R. N. " brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my nextvisit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when Icame again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligiblequantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted quiteso openly in my face. 

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe thatthe end of life is to have a "good time. " They used the phrase. Thatand the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points ofresemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. Whensome years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed torecover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston. There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decoratedcases of sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisilyarch and eager about the "steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool;they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of agood time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of richyoung women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feelthat you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one ofits leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself andpresents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying aboutin that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency. Mycousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them withparcels and cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as astroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the new language of the Academyof Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it, fornature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents andembarrassed in giving them. But then, like my father, I hate anddistrust possessions. 

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; Isuppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romanticand sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed atonce very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equalmeasure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what theythought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. Itwas very secret if they did. 

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were alwaysready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware of anyeconomic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambientpoverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable externalthings that upset my uncle's temper. They knew of nothing wrong insocial life at all except that there were "Agitators. " It surprised thema little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down. But they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion as ofsomething that might breach the happiness of their ignorance.... 

5

My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook astage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in everythingelse was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise. 

It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. HithertoI seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she became almostcompletely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyesof hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast--it was the firstmorning of my visit--before I asked for them. 

When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intenselyaware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had always admiredSybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was something in hertemperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted it on myprevious visits. 

We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked aboutCambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and myambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever. 

The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for thehouse. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various starts andwe 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 theherbaceous border. 

We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she becameanxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily disarranged, andasked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in mylife been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelidand 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 thelittle electric stress between us in a rather meandering analysis of herprincipal girl friends. 

But afterwards she resumed her purpose. 

I went to bed that night with one proposition overshadowing everythingelse in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult, but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a doubtwhether on the whole it was worth doing. The thing had come into myexistence, 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 upstairssitting-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 theoutrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain, whenshe 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 whatour conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I mightkiss 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 agrowing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, combinedwith an intense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered andthirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy persuasion that I wasmadly 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 thatI realised that I was being used for the commonest form of excitementpossible to a commonplace girl; that dozens perhaps of young men hadplayed the part of Tantalus at cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about myroom at nights, damning her and calling her by terms which on the wholeshe 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, forI fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a rationalman to seek it.... 

"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling backwith down-bent head to release herself from what should have been acompelling embrace. 

"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision. "You STARTED thisgame. "

"Oh!"

She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and excitedand interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I should renewmy attack. 

"Beastly hot for scuffling, " I said, white with anger. "I don't knowwhether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just thought youwanted 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 Gertrudeawoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. Shedeveloped a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let herfingers rest in contact with it for a moment, --she had pleasant softhands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her armrest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge. Theywere much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I controlledmyself and maintained a profile of intelligent and entirely civilindifference to her blandishments. 

What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forgetabout what--with Sybil. 

"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi. "

And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theoryof my innate and virginal piety. 

6

It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background thatI think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I thinkbecause it is quite possible that we had passed each other in thestreets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregardwhich was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. Butif that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness thatshone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings. 

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughterof Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not inmy cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a smallhardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as ishumanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls'Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She reallylearnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far inmathematics as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no greatnatural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after theusual conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos. 

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill throughoverwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and goabroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls doin those university colleges, through the badness of her home and schooltraining. 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 exercisein order to increase her hours of toil, and worked into the night. Shecarried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys andinessentials of her subject. It didn't need the badness of the food forwhich Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnalcocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplementedit, to ensure her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting anddistressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took herand her half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died threeyears later, for a journey to Italy. 

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of themhad a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-father, playedthe part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that arosefrom nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, equipped with variousintroductions 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 nowMargaret was back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a verycivilised person. 

New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundantflowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddoncelebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the garden if theweather held. 

The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comforton the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had been ratherpleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich blossoming cherryand apple trees. Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpetshad been left amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was asit were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or glade. AndMargaret, hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pinkface very simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressedparty, --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 aslenderer, unbountiful Primavera. 

It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, andI remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures andgroups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and alarge lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah andopen French windows, through which the tea drinking had come out uponthe moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. Seddon had planned. 

The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate witha large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was obviouslyattracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands stillsufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One of themI recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond curly hair onwhich was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a refined black band. Hewore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a longfrock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and presently he removed hishat and carried it in one hand. There were two tennis-playing youthsbesides myself. There was also one father with three daughters inanxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half brokenin, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and conscientiously "reetStaffordshire. " The daughters were all alert to suppress the possibleplungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very gestures in the bud. The rest of the people weremainly mothers with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scatteringof aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept togetherand 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 theclumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquetwere intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork richwith the spikes and cups and bells of high spring. 

Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted andpartly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a disusedand faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentlerevival--while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seatnear Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup oftea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every observationhe made by a vigorous resumption of stirring. 

We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was aSelwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret hadcome to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness of an exileto hear the old familiar names of places and personalities. We cappedfamiliar anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and theBacks, and the curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story illustrative of his disposition to recklessdevilry (of a pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quiteneedlessly on the way to Grantchester. 

I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fairface, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow alwaysslightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy butdetermined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an evenmusical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. "I wentto Grantchester, " she said, "last year, and had tea under theapple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down. " (It wasthat started the curate upon his anecdote. )

"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the Pittiand the Brera, --the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places, --but it isn'tlike real study, " she was saying presently.... "We bought bales ofphotographs, " she said. 

I thought the bales a little out of keeping. 

But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifullydressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, andwith so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed adifferent kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed translucent besideGertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her slender body was agrace to me. 

I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest andplease 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 Hallalso--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 ofsocial progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The little curatedesisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and general debris of hisstory, 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 gladImperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether. "

Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from theshrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a state ofrefreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pinkand more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our littlegroup. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not disposed to playa passive part in the talk. 

"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word. "It's well Pa isn't here. Hehas 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 atMargaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance. Butshe was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself(and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of expression. Hesaid the state of the poor was appalling, simply appalling; that therewere 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 saidexplosively, 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, thatshe had no doubt she was a socialist. 

"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out ofeggshell! I like that!"

I came to Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow that because one's asocialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes. "

The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by proddingme slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his teacup, cleared histhroat and suggested that "one ought to be consistent. "

I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We beganan interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions of generalideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret supported oneanother as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and the initial maintainedan anti-socialist position, the curate attempted a cross-bench positionwith an air of intending to come down upon us presently with a castingvote. He reminded us of a number of useful principles too oftenoverlooked in argument, that in a big question like this there was muchto be said on both sides, that if every one did his or her duty to everyone about them there would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and above all enactments we needed moral changes in peoplethemselves. My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist tomanage, being unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutelyimpervious to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic;she didn't see why she shouldn't have a good time because other peopledidn't; they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. Shesaid that if we did give up everything we had to other people, theywouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were sofond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and expressedthe inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism, everything wouldbe just the same again in ten years' time. She also threw upon us theimputation of ingratitude for a beautiful world by saying that so far asshe was concerned she didn't want to upset everything. She was contentedwith things as they were, thank you. 

The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, andpossibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which Margaretinvolved the curate without involving herself, and then stood beside meon the edge of the lawn while the others played. We watched silently fora moment. 

"I HATE that sort of view, " she said suddenly in a confidentialundertone, 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 ondressing and playing and having meals and spending money!" She seemedto be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole world ofindustry and property about us. "But what is one to do?" she asked. "Ido wish I had not had to come down. It's all so pointless here. Thereseems to be nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No one hereseems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of need there is for MEANINGin 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--ifone 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. "Isuppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much tobe done for the world, so much one ought to be doing.... I want to dosomething for the world. "

I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, herblue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. "One feels thatthere 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 ofdelicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of weakness inher was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her background. Shewas, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a cinder heap. It iscurious, too, how she connects and mingles with the furious quarrelI had with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. IndirectlyMargaret was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revivedand questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in myattempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundestfeelings.... 

7

What a preposterous shindy that was!

I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered tobe the most indisputable and non-contentious propositionsconceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called mea "damned young puppy. "

It was seismic. 

"Tremendously interesting time, " I said, "just in the beginning ofmaking a civilisation. "

"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward overhis cigar. 

I had not the remotest thought of annoying him. 

"Monstrous muddle of things we have got, " I said, "jumbled streets, uglypopulation, 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 meantto be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all swimming in aflood of ill-calculated chances--"

"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--bychance--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 grewwhile those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He showeda disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd'sovershadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three timesover. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind. 

"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business, someof course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces quiteoutside the individual case that make the big part of any successunder modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process inpottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't YOUR foresight thatjoined all England up with railways and made it possible to organiseproduction on an altogether different scale. You really at the utmostcan't take credit for much more than being the sort of man who happenedto fit what happened to be the requirements of the time, and whohappened to be in a position to take advantage of them--"

It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, andbecame involved in some unexpected trouble of his own. 

I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover himbent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in hislast attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared as soon as hehad cleared for action to give me just all that he considered to be thecontents of his mind upon the condition of mine. 

Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outsideview of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to him. We wentat it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be aSocialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all ownership--and also aneducated man of the vilest, most pretentiously superior description. His principal grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to that herecurred again and again.... 

We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my resolveto go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had accumulatedbetween us. There had been stupendous accumulations.... 

The particular things we said and did in that bawling encounter matternothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near we cameto fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder ofbenefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay anotherhour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of puerile fury, topack 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 realityof our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to me, in allhuman affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. The world I hateis the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and my kind of people existfor primarily is to battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We question everything, disturb anything that cannotgive a clear justification to our questioning, because we believeinherently that our sense of disorder implies the possibility of abetter order. Of course we are detestable. My uncle was of that othervaster mass who accept everything for the thing it seems to be, hateenquiry and analysis as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; andall history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with thisconflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will destroyit. 

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 interveningfive years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of veryremarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself a grownman. 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, andmy ideas, if they had not changed very greatly, had become much moredefinite and my ambitions clearer and bolder. 

I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I hadpublished two books that had been talked about, written severalarticles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY REVIEWand the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club and learningto adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger uses. The Londonworld had opened out to me very readily. I had developed a pleasantvariety of social connections. I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER, and who talked aboutit and me, and so did a very great deal to make a way for me into thecompany of prominent and amusing people. I dined out quite frequently. The glitter and interest of good London dinner parties became a commonexperience. 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 talkwith some pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide rangeof houses; Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets ofartistic and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and openedto me the big vague world of "society. " I wasn't aggressive norparticularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and if Ihad nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible, and I hada youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses. And the otherside of my nature that first flared through the cover of restraints atLocarno, that too had had opportunity to develop along the line Londonrenders practicable. I had had my experiences and secrets and adventuresamong that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or discredited women theLondon world possesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a matter ofmagic 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 Ifind it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any realsense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seemsto 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 dateof my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things overand over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete factforms I had at first apprehended sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world aboutme. It was evident that many men no better than myself and with nogreater advantages than mine had raised themselves to influential andeven decisive positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I wasgathering the confidence and knowledge necessary to attack the world inthe large manner; I found I could write, and that people would letme write if I chose, as one having authority and not as the scribes. Socially and politically and intellectually I knew myself for an honestman, and that quite without any deliberation on my part this showedand made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith from thebeginning--for all that I came from nowhere and had no better positionthan any adventurer. 

But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger attwenty-seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, andany one looking closely into my mind during that period might well haveimagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to menow that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during thattime. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed. It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--took me at astride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigueand a perfectly definite and limited sensuality. It ended my youth, andfor a time it prevented my manhood. I had never yet even peeped at thesweetest, profoundest thing in the world, the heart and meaning of agirl, or dreamt with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thingas a friend among womanhood. My vague anticipation of such things inlife had vanished altogether. I turned away from their possibility. Itseemed to me I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted towork hard, to get on to a position in which I could develop and forwardmy constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was attractive tocertain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me an agreeableconfidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a convenientmistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my purpose andsay in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, "I've done youno harm, " and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of disposingof urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career I wasintent upon. 

I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it wasI appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a thousandambitious men see it to-day.... 

For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My politicalconceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desireruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire betterordered than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up aconstructive and controlling State out of my world's confusions. Wehad, I saw, to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a newbetter-living generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to linknow chaotic activities in every human affair, and particularly to catchthat escaped, world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrialand financial enterprise, and bring it back to the service of thegeneral good. I had then the precise image that still serves me as asymbol for all I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer buildinga lock in a swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source ofpower. My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise;it gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that mostengaged my mind during those years was the practical and personalproblem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innatepurpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward throughthe confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between politics andliterature my grip must needs be found, but where? Always I seem tohave been looking for that in those opening years, and disregardingeverything else to discover it. 

2

The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in thesharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshireworld. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two activeself-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It wasnatural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed to stand for thematurer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was thenurgent to attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians orpublic officials, they described themselves as publicists--a vague yetsufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard littlehouse in Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite anastonishing amount of political and social activity. 

Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiouslymatter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-hall, papered withsome ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked withhats and cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather thanannounced by a tall Scotch servant woman, the only domestic I everremember seeing there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past theopen door of a small study packed with blue-books, to discover AltioraBailey receiving before the fireplace in her drawing-room. She was atall commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk andred beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voicethat had an almost visible prominence, aquiline features and straightblack hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray like thehead feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind herback, and talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill withBlupp, who was practically in those days the secretary of the localGovernment Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat whitehands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to us, eagerto bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender girl in paleblue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one foot on thefender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled propitiation. A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a man in a trancecompleted 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 floorsof London houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indifferentwater colours, there was scarcely any furniture but a sofa or so and achair, and the floor, severely carpeted with matting, was crowded witha curious medley of people, men predominating. Several were in eveningdress, but most had the morning garb of the politician; the women wereeither severely rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointedout to me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognisedthe Duchess of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. Ilooked round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trodon 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 apologywith that intentional charm that is one of his most delightful traits, and resumed his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I hadnot seen since my Cambridge days.... 

Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he hadaffinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon thecompany with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was nibbling, hesaid, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might bring himdown to London. He wanted to come to London. "We peep at things fromCambridge, " he said. 

"This sort of thing, " I said, "makes London necessary. It's the oddestgathering. "

"Every one comes here, " said Esmeer. "Mostly we hate them likepoison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror attimes--but we HAVE to come. "

"Things are being done?"

"Oh!--no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the Britishmachinery--that doesn't show.... But nobody else could do it. 

"Two people, " said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an originalway. And by Jove! they've done it!"

I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeershowed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with adistinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of thefine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a roundedprotruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-shaven facethat seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peeredup with reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that weredivided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and hetalking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lispand nervous movements of the hand. 

People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly thesame eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He had comeup to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes capturedin provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--and had made a name forhimself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoriciansof the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to aposition in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in theWar Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a politicaljournalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very fullof political and sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memoryfor facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time affordedscope for these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-socialdiscussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of theNINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a halfsympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of thatperiod. He won the immense respect of every one specially interested insocial and political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinctionthat is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would haveremained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora. 

But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, anextraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who couldmake something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of thevigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and anunscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women whoare waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage andinitiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she couldbe bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely unfitted for hersex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, andaltogether too stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours ofease. Her cookery would have been about as sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feelsure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegantor unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in high collars orany sort of masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at the baseof her was a vanity gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state ofpersonal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste of hoursexacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had agypsy splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen inthe early nineties she met and married Bailey. 

I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter ofSir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton Kingprevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerableindependence. She came into prominence as one of the more able of thelittle shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropicactivities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. HumphryWard--the Marcella crop. She went "slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those days--and returned from her experiencesas an amateur flower girl with clear and original views about theproblem--which is and always had been unusual. She had not married, Isuppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with aninstinctive appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her fatherby speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her motherhad left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties shecould, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and successfulmanner. After her father's smash and death she came out as a writerupon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity OrganisationSociety, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose ends whenshe met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. Thelurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precisionwith which the little man rolled over all sorts of important andauthoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort ofimaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhapscarried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugatehim, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abjecthumility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry him. 

This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The twosupplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their subsequentcareer was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, while he was almostdestitute of initiative, and could do nothing with ideas except rememberand discuss them. She was, if not exact, at least indolent, with astrong disposition to save energy by sketching--even her handwritingshowed that--while he was inexhaustibly industrious with a relentlessinvariable calligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years passedby. She had a considerable power of charming; she could be just as niceto people--and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be. He wasalways just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlesslyrude and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable socialexperience, good social connections, and considerable social ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunityto redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, ratherstartling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which shocked her friendsand relations beyond measure--for a time they would only speak of Baileyas "that gnome"--was a stroke of genius, and forthwith they proceededto make themselves the most formidable and distinguished coupleconceivable. P. B. P. , she boasted, was engraved inside their weddingrings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She haddiscovered very early that the last thing influential people will do isto work. Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent upon asupply of confidently administered detail. Their business is with thewindow and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent uponthe stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that thefact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an invinciblepower over detail. She saw that if two people took the necessary painsto know the facts of government and administration with precision, togather together knowledge that was dispersed and confused, to be able tosay precisely what had to be done and what avoided in this eventualityor that, they would necessarily become a centre of reference for allsorts of legislative proposals and political expedients, and she wentunhesitatingly upon that. 

Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in theCivil Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devotedthemselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of publicinformation she had conceived as their role. They set out to studythe methods and organisation and realities of government in the mostelaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamtof doing it. They planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost entirely for it. They took that housein Chambers Street and furnished it with severe economy, they discoveredthat Scotch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant oftheir declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "ThePermanent Official, " fills three plump volumes, and took them and theirtwo secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly goodbook, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history andthe administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for alltime.... 

They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunchedlightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise" or Baileyattended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, hesaid, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway directorfor the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at home to variouscallers, and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both. 

Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in theirscheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or aboutthe public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with theill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one roommore of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had evermet easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept theconversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiledfowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but whisky and soda, andhot and cold water, and milk and lemonade. Everybody was soon very gladindeed to come to that. She boasted how little her housekeeping costher, and sought constantly for fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an additional private secretary. Secretaries werethe Baileys' one extravagance, they loved to think of searches goingon in the British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis madeoverhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together, Baileywith a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes betweenintervals 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. Imaginewhat it means in washing! I dare most things.... But as it is, theystand a lot of hardship here. "

"There's something of the miser in both these people, " said Esmeer, andthe thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is nothing morethan a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestionmisapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither good nor evil, but a power thatcan be used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvestedusuriously not money, but knowledge of the utmost value in humanaffairs. They produced an effect of having found themselves--completely. One envied them at times extraordinarily. I was attracted, I wasdazzled--and at the same time there was something about Bailey's bigwrinkled forehead, his lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his handsand 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 tome about my published writings and particularly about my then justpublished book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much. Itfell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I doubt ifthey 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 atremendous sense of kindred and co-operation. 

Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of suchconstructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by oneanother. 

"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain, " said Oscar, "andpresently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end. "

"If you didn't know of them beforehand, " I said, "it might be a ratherbadly joined tunnel. "

"Exactly, " said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all want tofind out each other.... "

They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me tolunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A womanFactory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banksland and hiswife were also there, but I don't remember they made any contributionto the conversation. The Baileys saw to that. They kept on at me in anurgent litigious way. 

"We have read your book, " each began--as though it had been a jointfunction. "And we consider--"

"Yes, " I protested, "I think--"

 That was a secondary matter. 

"They did not consider, " said Altiora, raising her voice and going rightover me, "that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable developmentof 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 theirlives, what they were up to, what they stood for. "We want to suggest toyou, " they said--and I found this was a stock opening of theirs--"thatfrom the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies MUST availthemselves more and more of the services of expert officials. We havethat very much in mind. The more complicated and technical affairsbecome, the less confidence will the elected official have in himself. We want to suggest that these expert officials must necessarily developinto a new class and a very powerful class in the community. We want toorganise that. It may be THE power of the future. They will necessarilyhave to have very much of a common training. We consider ourselves asamateur unpaid precursors of such a class. "... 

The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim ofpublic-spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, morespecialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state thatWillersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things moreorganised, more correlated with government and a collective purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing collectiveunderstanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative change, andmethods of administration.... 

It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very anxiousto win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first to identifytheir distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so we camevery readily into an alliance that was to last some years, and break atlast very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked me, I was soon discussingwith her the perplexity I found in placing myself efficiently in theworld, the problem of how to take hold of things that occupied mythoughts, and she was sketching out careers for my consideration, verymuch as an architect on his first visit sketches houses, considersrequirements, and puts before you this example and that of the more orless similar thing already done.... 

4

It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys andme, and how natural it was that I should become a constant visitor attheir house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not nearlyso easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit that also heldbetween 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 thesubstance quite different. It was as if they had made in china or castiron what I had made in transparent living matter. (The comparison ismanifestly from my point of view. ) Certain things never seemed to showthrough 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 tobeauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, orderand goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight tobeautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got that or theydidn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things harsh and ugly. That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of many of theirproposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak, were at times asdreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture. A caricature byits exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to point a truth byantagonising falsity and falsity. I remember talking to a prominentmuseum official in need of more public funds for the work he had inhand. I mentioned the possibility of enlisting Bailey's influence. 

"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp runningus, " he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the endhe 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 merelysubordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do all we wantedno doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do it wrong and messthe place for ever. Hands all black, you know. He's just a means. Just avery 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 meat the time he was just blind prejudice speaking.... 

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise thatour philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curabledifference, --once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoidof FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirelyassimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadowmy outlines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modellingalways, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat andmetallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand Iknow they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin greenshades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelesslyirregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer astime went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken atCodger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies havealways been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school ofPragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upona denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of generallaws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholasticsense--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 nometaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. It leads them to aprogressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trickof Altiora's to speak of everybody as a "type"; she saw men as samplesmoving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gavea 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 interms of actuality and the people one knew.... 

At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the verystrings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affectthis "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame andinjustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you foundmen who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchangewith Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approachingresignations and possible appointments that might make or mar arevolution in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorousdirectness that manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you werein a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outsidethere, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, runningon its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true andsteady to trim termini. 

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientificadministrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into thelimitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenueslined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street houseand 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 vagueincessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawledat you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggeredtriumphant in dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourselfswaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spiritof the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on theBailey stage.... 

Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncleout for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, youpassed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the socialsuitability of the "types" they might blend or create, you saw menleaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you knew for the "type" thatwill charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you foundyourself unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness orthe careless defiance of annihilation. You realised that quite a lot oftypes were underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscureand altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogetherunassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations. 

5

Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing heras a "new type. "

I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, fora preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room fire. Onegot her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciationshe valued. She had every woman's need of followers and servants. 

"I'm going to send you down to-night, " she said, "with a veryinteresting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals. Middle-class origin--and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-fatherwas a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the end, Ifancy--in the Black Country. There was a little brother died, and she'slost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She'snever been out into society very much, and doesn't seem really veryanxious to go.... Not exactly an intellectual person, you know, butquiet, and great force of character. Came up to London on her own andcame to us--someone had told her we were the sort of people to adviseher--to ask what to do. I'm sure she'll interest you. "

"What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked. "Is she capable ofinvestigation?"

Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did shake herhead when you asked that of anyone. 

"Of course what she ought to do, " said Altiora, with her silk dresspulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her voicetowards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to marry amember of Parliament and see he does his work.... Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything by herself--quiteexceptional. The more serious they are--without being exceptional--themore 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, "HEREyou are!"

Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of fiveyears, 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 andmore abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of purple velvet-setdiamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden and brown lines. Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace of mourning for hermother, and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, and I was puzzled for a momentto think where I had met her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with theslight obliquity of the lip and the little kink in her brow wereextraordinarily familiar to me. But she had either been preparedby Altiora or she remembered my name. "We met, " she said, "while mystep-father was alive--at Misterton. You came to see us"; and instantlyI recalled the sunshine between the apple blossom and a slender paleblue girlish shape among the daffodils, like something that had sprungfrom a bulb itself. I recalled at once that I had found her veryinteresting, though I did not clearly remember how it was she hadinterested me. 

Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended mixtures ofpeople with ideas and people with influence or money who might perhapsbe expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air ofhurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said absolutely nothing toher--there being no information either to receive or impart and nothingto 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, exceptthat it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and interestedto meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each other. We madethat Misterton tea-party and the subsequent marriages of my cousinsand the world of Burslem generally, matter for quite an agreeableconversation until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom, called me by name imperatively out of our duologue. "Mr. Remington, " shesaid, "we want your opinion--" in her entirely characteristic effort toget all the threads of conversation into her own hands for the climaxthat always wound up her dinners. How the other women used to hate thoseconcluding raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at thatdinner, nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't inany way join on to my impression of Margaret. 

In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with Altiora'smanifest connivance, and in the interval I had been thinking of ourformer meeting. 

"Do you find London, " I asked, "give you more opportunity for doingthings and learning things than Burslem?"

She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her formerconfidences. "I was very discontented then, " she said and paused. "I'vereally only been in London for a few months. It's so different. InBurslem, life seems all business and getting--without any reason. Onewent on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At least anything thatmattered.... London seems to be so full of meanings--all mixed uptogether. "

She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the endas if for consideration for her inadequate expression, appealingly andalmost humorously. 

I looked understandingly at her. "We have all, " I agreed, "to come toLondon. "

"One sees so much distress, " she added, as if she felt she hadcompletely omitted something, and needed a codicil. 

"What are you doing in London?"

"I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps Imight go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps asa work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thoughtperhaps it wasn't quite my work. "

"Are you studying?"

"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up aregular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology. ButMrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either. "

Her faintly whimsical smile returned. "I seem rather indefinite, " sheapologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things one can'tdo. One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a trustand 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 ofenvious admiration across the room. 

"SHE has no doubts, anyhow, " I remarked. 

"She HAD, " said Margaret with the pride of one who has received greatconfidences. 

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 wassystematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come intopolitics--as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with the otherexcellent and advantageous things that should occupy her summer holiday. It was her pride and glory to put things down and plan them out indetail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she did not even markoff 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 thebroadest hints and the glaring obviousness of everything, that summer. 

Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hiredor borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they wenton working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in theopen air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for longwalks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally explainedthemselves to) any social "types" that lived in the neighbourhood. Oneinvaded type, resentful under research, described them with a dreadfulaptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho Panza--and himself as a harmlesswindmill, hurting no one and signifying nothing. She did rather tiltat things. This particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse inlevel country near Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altioratook them for a month for me in August--and board with them uponextremely reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaretsitting in a hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, werecoming and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on theriver, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but theseirruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between Margaret andmyself. 

Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She sentus off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good walker--sheexhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet, notunderstanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for loversin the world. And Margaret and I were always getting left about, andfinding ourselves for odd half-hours in the kitchen-garden with nothingto do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run awayand amuse each other. 

Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather thanimagination or experience the conclusive nature of such excursions. Butthere she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's brinkto share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so much zeal and so littleskill--his hat fell off and he became miraculously nothing butpaddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled brow--that at last he had tobe paddled ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase ofrigid discretion, as nearly as possible drowned herself--and me no doubtinto the bargain--with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasisethe high note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the CharityOrganisation Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in itfor the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the aitof our feasting, --he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, andafterwards, 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 harmfulpaddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters. Still itwas the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books andnot of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal. 

I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back fromproposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forwardat last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutionsthan to remember the moods and suggestions that produced them. 

Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair toAltiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and unmarriedwhen you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmthand leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of themore experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The youngpeople married, settled down, children ensued, and father and motherturned their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to otherthings. That to Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed itto be the quality of the great bulk of the life about her. 

One of the great barriers to human understanding is the widetemperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating tosex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in charity andimaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeedfor no single man nor woman does there seem to be any fixed standard, somuch do the accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affectone's interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexualfact that may not seem supremely beautiful or humanly jolly ormagnificently wicked or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye that sees or the mood that colours. Here issomething that may fill the skies and every waking hour or be almostcompletely banished from a life. It may be everything on Monday and lessthan nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though inthese 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, Ialways suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainlyher general effect now was of an entirely passionless worldliness inthese matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her, she regarded sexualpassion as being hardly more legitimate in a civilised person than--letus say--homicidal mania. She must have forgotten--and Bailey too. Isuspect she forgot before she married him. I don't suppose either ofthem had the slightest intimation of the dimensions sexual love can takein the thoughts of the great majority of people with whom they come incontact. They loved in their way--an intellectual way it was and a fondway--but it had no relation to beauty and physical sensation--exceptthat there seemed a decree of exile against these things. They got theirglow in high moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vividworldly success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with soand so "captured, " and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval. Theysaw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and just put itdown to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate Altiora manifestlyviewed my situation and Margaret's with an abnormal and entirelymisleading simplicity. There was the girl, rich, with an acceptableclaim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, quite capable of politicalinterests, and there was I, talented, ambitious and full ofpolitical and social passion, in need of just the money, devotion andregularisation Margaret could provide. We were both unmarried--whitesheets of uninscribed paper. Was there ever a simpler situation? Whatmore could we possibly want?

She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did notsettle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect uponher 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 Imight give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite inagreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the ultimatefooting of her emasculated world, was to me just the superficialcovering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and yet stupendouslysignificant 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 unanalysableinstincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite as important;dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none the less adominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly and uninvited itcame like a moth from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew in mewith my manhood, how it found its way to speech and grew daring, and ledme at last to experience. After that adventure at Locarno sex and theinterests and desires of sex never left me for long at peace. I went onwith my work and my career, and all the time it was like--like someonetalking 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 curiositieshamper 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 Iwas never clear what it was I was seeking. But never--even at mycoarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone. Was I seeking help andfellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with beauty? It was a thing tooformless to state, that I seemed always desiring to attain and neverattaining. Waves of gross sensuousness arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of gratification or disappointment that wasclearly not the needed thing; they passed and left my mind free againfor a time to get on with the permanent pursuits of my life. And thenpresently this solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as itseemed, and yet a constantly recurring demand. 

I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeablefor others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get theright 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 asI was and am and can beget. You cannot have a world of Baileys; it wouldend in one orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives byDesire. 

 "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 educatedclasses is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, whencivilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in theworld. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and obscure, butI doubt for my own part if more than one man out of five in our classsatisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as I was, and Hatherleighand Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no lessons and offer nopanacea; I have to tell the quality of life, and this is how it is. Thisis how it will remain until men and women have the courage to face thefacts of life. 

I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened tome and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarnoadventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thingpassed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicatingone. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of myyouth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two weresustained relationships. Besides these five "affairs, " on one or twooccasions I dipped so low as the inky dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of correlated figures, the woman in hersqualid finery sailing homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, thatevery night in the London year flit by the score of thousands across thesight 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 init--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. Andyet 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 itpossible. Let me try and give you its peculiar effect. Man or woman, youought to know of it. 

Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of streetsthat lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by a solitarycandle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with curtains of cretonneclosing the window, and a tawdry ornament of paper in the grate. I siton a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-haired, sturdy young woman, halfundressed, who is telling me in broken German something that myknowledge of German is at first inadequate to understand.... 

I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the meaningcame to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and she wastelling me--just as one tells something too strange for comment oremotion--how her father had been shot and her sister outraged andmurdered before her eyes. 

It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendousbeneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite brilliantlyabout politics and might presently get into Parliament, with my collarand tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful adventure fading outof my mind. 

"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for amoment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten andremembered, 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 detaininghand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of what I wasstriving to say. 

8

I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by whichI passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness andunconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlierencounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions becomecrowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the subsequentdevelopments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of interpretationand comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping into my memories islike dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this memory or that, with nointimation of how they came in time or what led to them and joined themtogether. And they are all mixed up with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits of intercourse, surprises anddisappointments and discovered misunderstandings. I know only thatalways my feelings for Margaret were complicated feelings, woven of manyand various strands. 

It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same timeand in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds streams ofthought at quite different levels. We can be at the same time idealisinga person and seeing and criticising that person quite coldly andclearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to level and produceall sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions aboutMargaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret was entirely poeticillusion. I don't think I was ever blind to certain defects of hers, andquite 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; shenever seemed to escape from her phrase; her way of thinking, her way ofdoing was indecisive; she remained in her attitude, it did not flow outto easy, confirmatory action. 

I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together Iseemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I wouldstate my ideas. "I know, " she would say, "I know. "

I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made noanswering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her blueeyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just. "

I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it bysaying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always delectablydone. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, and she wouldtie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue velvet that carriedpretty buckles of silver and paste. The light, the faint down on herbrow and cheek was delightful. And it was clear to me that I made herhappy. 

My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling atlast very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed to offerme something.... 

She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it seemedto me my hold was slipping. 

She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition inme between physical passions and the constructive career, the careerof wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked. All the timethat 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 andimpulse. I could understand clearly that she was incapable of the mostnecessary subtleties of political thought, and yet I could contemplatepraying to her and putting all the intricate troubles of my life at herfeet. 

Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonteddisgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen inmy mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl hauntedme persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting amidst thosesluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while her heavy Germanwords grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I wouldfeel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash ofadventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dipinto tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless crueltyof a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will. 

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work thoseCossacks 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 oughtto have thought!"... 

"How did I get to it?"... I would ransack the phases of my developmentfrom the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the last extremity asa man will go through muddled account books to find some disorganisingerror.... 

I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these thingsin the exact order of their dates because they were so disconnectedwith 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 gointo particulars of that episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed oneanother. She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whimsabout our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised ourrelationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowingmoments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentiallyvicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted ata vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was fullof the quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecureprecautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almostinherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of herrecurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had followedsomething fine and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtivescuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what wehad made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the realityof our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidstincessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory ofbodily love and wasted them.... 

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities gettingentangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I hadlost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt that thesegreat organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with myconstructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had notunderstood the forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learntI failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world thatwas muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames andtwisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures that were perhapsdestroying any chance of profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keenindustry alternated with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods ofdubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I wasgoing on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritatedme intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, betweentwenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcelyany one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability ofa collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley hadprophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in somethingthat might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among thoseincommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was losingmy hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in life wasspreading upward and getting the better of me, over-mastering me and allmy will to rule and make.... And the strength, the drugging urgency ofthe passion!

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in aworld of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull redlike scars inflamed.... 

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as herwhiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections toher, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poorfellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE angels andfreed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her sobadly, 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 becameinfinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. Theharsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw upher fineness into relief and made a grace of every weakness. 

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as onetalks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the feeblestresponse, when possible moulding and directing, are times when I didindeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground she trod on. I wasequally honest and unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But inneither phase could I find it easy to make love to Margaret. For in thefirst I did not want to, though I talked abundantly to her of marriageand so forth, and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on tosome personal application, and in the second she seemed inaccessible, Ifelt I must make confessions and put things before her that would be thegrossest 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 themood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and withthe resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimerechoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite passionately inlove with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished. It has always been afeature of our relationship that Margaret absent means more to me thanMargaret present; her memory distils from its dross and purifies inme. All my criticisms and qualifications of her vanished into some darkcorner of my mind. She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my wayto her or perish. 

I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionateself-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying with the Rockleysat Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and theyhad 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 littleroom upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of potsof large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in flower. And there was a biglacquer cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of black and gold againstthe red-toned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparablybound up with the sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals. 

She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. Isuddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading topositive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. Sheclosed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand andstood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked. 

The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the wayvanished 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. Ididn't because--because you had too much to give me. "

"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to myface 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 throughthe quiet of her face. "Go on, " she said, very softly. It was sopitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whateverI might say. I began walking up and down the room between thosecyclamens and the cabinet. There were little gold fishermen on thecabinet fishing from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or something, I couldn't determinewhat, and some obscure sub-office in my mind concerned itself with thatquite intently. Yet I seem to have been striving with all my beingto get words for the truth of things. "You see, " I emerged, "you makeeverything possible to me. You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding. You know my political ambitions. You know all that Imight 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 bitwhat 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 ofblissful 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 uglyfacts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation. "Whathas held me back, " I said, "is the thought that you could not possiblyunderstand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. Ihave had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs. Passion--desire. Yousee, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled--"

She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling you, " Isaid, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that thereis another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. Itdidn't seem so at first--"

I stopped blankly. "Dirty, " I thought, was the most idiotic choice ofwords 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 andstopped 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, " andnothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know. 

"All men--" she generalised. "A woman does not understand thesetemptations. "

I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. ... 

"Of course, " she said, hesitating a little over a transparentdifficulty, "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 inthe slightest degree. "

She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptablecommonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put outher arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl inthe background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerableworld--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not whatnor 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 inMisterton--six years and more ago. "

CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE

1

There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations withMargaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now forthe most part inextricably not only with one another, but with latertalks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensestanticipations of the years and opportunities that lay before us. I wasnow very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleanedup my life but that she had. We called each other "confederate" Iremember, and made during our brief engagement a series of visits to thevarious legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House ofCommons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, wherewe heard Shaw speaking. I was full of plans and so was she of the wayin which we were to live and work. We were to pay back in public servicewhatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economicadvantage had won for him from the toiling people in the potteries. Theend of the Boer War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency"echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in amemorable oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, butthe Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it goingin the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was takento him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that sort. Theycertainly did their share to keep "efficient" going. Altiora'shighest praise was "thoroughly efficient. " We were to be a "thoroughlyefficient" political couple of the "new type. " She explained us toherself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us tothe people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world washighly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that Ishould be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed themost natural development in the world. 

I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentlessactivity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where chieflywe spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed inevery aspect our conception of a life tremendously focussed upon theideal of social service. 

Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in agondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of Muranoforms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rowsof posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-necked boats with theirminutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and lowbefore us rises the little tower of our destination. Our men swingtogether and their oars swirl leisurely through the water, hump back inthe rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret liesback on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I situp beside her. 

"You see, " I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfectacquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to besomething priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it isso easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be distracted from one'spurpose. The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructiveneeds, to work out and carry out plans. For a man who has to make aliving the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like ourselvesit'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 GOTto 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 mainend. 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 lakein uneven confused country, as something very bright and skylike, anddiscontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of the very sunshineof that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the whispering, nearlynoiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steamlaunch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of thedepopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made me feel altogether inrecess from the teeming uproars of reality. There was not a dozen peopleall told, no Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the bigcavern of a dining-room, with its vistas of separate tables, itsdistempered walls and its swathed chandeliers. We went about seeingbeautiful things, accepting beauty on every hand, and taking it forgranted that all was well with ourselves and the world. It was ten daysor a fortnight before I became fretful and anxious for action; a longtranquillity for such a temperament as mine. 

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of sharedaesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was noexultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost shywith one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help usout. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be verywatchful 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 Italianjourney--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother across Italy to thewestward route--and now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titiansand Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless photographs, theCarpaccios, (the St. George series delighted her beyond measure, )the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskinpraised. 

But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effectsday after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousandmemories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a littleforward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpieceand shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can hear again the softcadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had nogift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these things gave her. 

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivatedperson with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was cultivatedand moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things. Shewas passive, and I am active. She did not simply and naturally lookfor beauty but she had been incited to look for it at school, and tookperhaps a keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisationof beautiful things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of herdelight in being guided to it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to mewhen 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 ofthe meal.... 

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed morebeautiful than any picture.... 

So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases andsuch-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such thingsas 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 anddestroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had goneon in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, and avery big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation behind a thousandquestions, like the sky or England. The judgments and understandingsthat had worked when she was, so to speak, miles away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling things began to matterenormously, 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 forutterance. 

We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon, unless wewere making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret would rest foran hour while I prowled about in search of English newspapers, and thenwe would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and watch the drift of peoplefeeding the pigeons and going into the little doors beneath the sunlitarches and domes of Saint Mark's. Then perhaps we would stroll on thePiazzetta, or go out into the sunset in a gondola. Margaret became veryinterested in the shops that abound under the colonnades and decided atlast to make an extensive purchase of table glass. "These things, " shesaid, "are quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the mostordinary looking English ware. " I was interested in her idea, and a gooddeal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender handleand twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply tumblersand wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like afternoon ofit. 

I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy wasaccumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the TIMES andthe DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get hold of, moreand more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former paper one day inanswer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil appreciations more andmore. I found my attitudes of restrained and delicate affection forMargaret increasingly difficult to sustain. I surprised myself and herby 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 lightovercoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time throughthe narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and went and sat onthe edge of her bed to talk to her. 

"Look here, Margaret, " I said; "this is all very well, but I'mrestless. "

"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 neverhad it before--as though I was getting fat. "

"My dear!" she cried. 

"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil outof 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 inthe 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, alongthe Lido. " And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach fatiguedMargaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got beyondMalamocco.... 

A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, beardedArmenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towardssundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO, " said Margaret to thegondolier, 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 mypoint, "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 haveremembered. "

She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done, " I said, almostapologetically. 

She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, likeone who has drunk deeply, and turned to me. 

"I suppose one ought not to be so happy, " she said. "Everything has beenso beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has been justWith You--the time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. Butthe world is calling you, dear.... I ought not to have forgotten it. Ithought you were resting--and thinking. But if you are rested. --Wouldyou like us to start to-morrow?"

She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of themoment 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 ourneeds as public-spirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly paintedand papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean openpurples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once uponthe interesting business of arranging and--with our Venetian glass as abeginning--furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our weddingpresents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just exactlywhat we would have and just precisely where we would put it. 

Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, andso quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stoodaside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultationonly to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settledI went every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at aseries of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLYREVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, "New Aspectsof Liberalism. "

I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of gettinginto 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about Margaretdisappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of whatshe wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It wasvery pleasant to find her taking things out of my hands with a certainmasterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make ahouse in which I should be able to work in that great project of "doingsomething for the world. "

"And I do want to make things pretty about us, " she said. "You don'tthink it wrong to have things pretty?"

"I want them so. "

"Altiora has things hard. "

"Altiora, " I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortablethings. 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 andvery good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was a littleSussex 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 suchexpression for myself. 

"We will buy a picture just now and then, " she said, "sometimes--when wesee one. "

I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square tothe door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish appreciationof the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brassfurnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discoverMargaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a partially openedpacking-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have tea with her outof the right tea things, "come at last, " or be told to notice what wasfresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never had a house before, butI had really never been, except in the most transitory way, in any housethat was nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. Everything wasfresh and bright, and softly and harmoniously toned. Downstairs we hada green dining-room with gleaming silver, dark oak, and Englishcolour-prints; above was a large drawing-room that could be made stilllarger by throwing open folding doors, and it was all carefully done ingreys and blues, for the most part with real Sheraton supplemented bySheraton so skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered asto be indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, abovethis and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with speciallythick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead anda big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and window, andanother desk specially made for me by that expert if I chose tostand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and every sort ofconvenient 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 atany hour of the day or night. I could do no work in this apartment fora long time, I was so interested in the perfection of its arrangements. And when I brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaretseized upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in afine official-looking leather. 

I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me andfeeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a placein the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the samelarge world with these fine and quietly expensive things. 

On the same floor Margaret had a "den, " a very neat and pretty den withgood colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was a thirdapartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files. And Margaretwould come flitting into the room to me, or appear noiselesslystanding, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. "Iseverything 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 asthe Baileys do, and BEGIN!"

Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of seriousyoung wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, anddiscussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all tremendouslykeen 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 ourreturn we found other people's houses open to us and eager for us. Wewent out of London for week-ends and dined out, and began discussingour projects for reciprocating these hospitalities. As a single manunattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but nowI found myself falling into place in a set. For a time I acquiescedin this. I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the NationalLiberal, and participated in no bachelor dinners at all. For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles Ihad frequented. I put up for the Reform, not so much for the use of theclub as a sign of serious and substantial political standing. I didn'tgo up to Cambridge, I remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was Iwith my new adjustments. 

The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to putit roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people alreadyactually placed in the political world. They ranged between veryconsiderable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersleyand the sister who kept house for him possessed. There were quitea number of young couples like ourselves, a little younger and moreartless, or a little older and more established. Among the younger menI had a sort of distinction because of my Cambridge reputation and mywriting, and because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won andmarried my way into their circles instead of being naturally there. Theycouldn't quite reckon upon what I should do; they felt I had reserves ofexperience and incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich andvery important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who hasspecialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men ofletters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and theHartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revoltagainst the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to thesuffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with anerratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin hehad married. I had known all these men, but now (with Altiora floatingangelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and tookme into their order. They were all like myself, prospective Liberalcandidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in thewilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They were alltremendously keen upon social and political service, and all greatlyunder the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life findingits satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The youngwives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most ofall, and I--whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes andhabits of this set were very much in the background during that time. 

We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at whicheverything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptibleausterity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps inthe way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry webanished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-madelemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids. Ourmeat was usually Welsh mutton--I don't know why, unless that mountainshave ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we talkedpolitics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department byhimself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promotedintellectual. 

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their lessfrequented receptions, but I have never been able to participatesubmissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generallymanaged to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to makethe 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 utmostearnestness I have always seemed to myself to be most remote fromreality. 

2

I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowdedyears, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those beginningsof my married life. I try to recall something near to their proper orderthe developing phases of relationship. I am struck most of all by theimmense unpremeditated, generous-spirited insincerities upon whichMargaret and I were building. 

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experienceof all among married educated people, the deliberate, shy, complexeffort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, thesustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evadeviolent pressures. I have come these latter years of my life to believethat it is possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with oneanother, to stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying love between them. It is possibleto love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air. Butit is a rare and intricate chance that brings two people within sight ofthat essential union, and for the majority marriage must adjust itselfon other terms. Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the firstdays of love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They buildnot solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars andqueer provisional supports that are needed to make a common foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric theysustain together begins for each of them a cavernous hidden life. Downthere things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousnessexcept in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flashout for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starvedvictims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us thereis no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on toits honourable end. 

I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her. Perhapsalready unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the injusticeour marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us and nounderstanding. We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of ourquality, by the things we misunderstood in each other. I know a score ofcouples who have married in that fashion. 

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser andsubtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon amarriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminatingtime. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simplyand uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domesticrelationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of lifealmost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamentalincompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes arelentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exactsunthought of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These arestupendous demands. People not only think more fully and elaboratelyabout life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to makethat ever more accidented progress a three-legged race of carelesslyassorted couples.... 

Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use thephrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; she wastender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal topledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideasand instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves in broadgestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance. Myquality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminatingand essentially inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to mentioneverything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. Sheabounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenlyappreciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintorettoin the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirabletest of temperamental quality. In spite of my early training I havecome to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret ithas always been "needlessly offensive. " In that you have our fundamentalbreach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did notlike or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my "trueself, " and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it anddo her best to ignore the rest. And also I had far more initiative thanhad she. This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superioritiesand inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two peoplelinked in a relationship that constantly becomes more intolerant ofdifferences. 

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to eitherof us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving myselffrom her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds andwhat seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding inher.... 

It did not hinder my being very fond of her.... 

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and mostastounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say thatin that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one anotherduring the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeperthan that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceasedeven to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my ownperceptions and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinnerand finer determinations. There are people who will say with a noteof approval that I was learning to conquer myself. I record that muchwithout 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 forcedupon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, butfrom the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my verymarriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moodsfrom her, pretended feelings.... 

3

The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking aboutit from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's owndinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people ofour world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitementof my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, thatshapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western andthe North Western railways. I was going to "take hold" at last, theKinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place inthe rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in theminds of all our circle. The precise place I had to fill and the precisefunctions 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 tothe excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr. Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Divisionwas concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went about theconstituency making three speeches that were soon threadbare, and anodd little collection of people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheapphotographer, a democratic parson, a number of dissenting ministers, theMayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, the widow of an old Chartist whohad grown rich through electric traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, thatsturdy old soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquartersin each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leasedtemporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and goingwere maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state ofsuspended judgment as we went about the business. The country wassupposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and deliberatedecision, in history it will no doubt figure as a momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-sticking or a bill in awindow or a placard-plastered motor-car or an argumentative groupof people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement towards theschoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a greatempire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser ona doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with anentirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. Attimes one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one'sair of saving the country. 

My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied uponhis advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we should avoid"personalities" and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly spirit. Hewas always writing me notes, apologising for excesses on the part of hissupporters, or pointing out the undesirability of some course taken bymine. 

My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch withthese as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real attemptto put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply witha political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and itsdestinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life and orderthat lay before the world, of all that a resolute and constructiveeffort 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 lastConservative administration and brought it into contrast with the wideoccasions of the age; discussed its failure to control the graspingfinanciers in South Africa, its failure to release public education fromsectarian squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of theworld's resources.... 

It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness ofmethod bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my phrasesthe thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating gatherings. Eventhe platform supporters grew restive unconsciously, and stirred andcoughed. They did not recognise themselves as mankind. Building anempire, preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had noappeal for them. They were mostly everyday, toiling people, full ofsmall personal solicitudes, and they came to my meetings, I think, verylargely as a relaxation. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not thinkpolitics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kindof dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent andhonourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. Thegreat constructive process in history gives so little scope for clappingand drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think ofhounding on the solar system. 

So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of theissues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my reviewof our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, anddeveloped a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I callthem?--"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated me onthe rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of thelate Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to fall inwith the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-witted personintent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the vigorous attemptsof Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom. I ceased to qualify mystatement that Protection would make food dearer for the agriculturallabourer. I began to speak of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence atonce insane and diabolical, as a man inspired by a passionate desireto substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for honest Britishlabourers throughout the world. And when it came to the mention of ourown kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any one else of any prominenceat all on our side I fell more and more into the intonation of one whomentions the high gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings andreadier 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 mustfollow the road that leads there, " but I found the road neverthelessrather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets there, " I said, "then itis one begins. "

But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache andfatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wonderinghow far it was possible to educate a whole people to great politicalideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities andpersonal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose, to begin with andend with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broaderinterests arise and to personalities they return. All our social andpolitical effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd of peoplefall into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rushand excitement and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order hasvanished and the marshals must begin the work over again!

My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was afrightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the KinghamsteadDivision is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalledcross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing tothe eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London tohave undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that madeBromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages havedeveloped strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, andthere is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no placeat which one could take hold of more than this or that element of thepopulation. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall orDrill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking in thedinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some special sortof people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive limitations ofeach gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness driftedabout us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we wouldlive in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here. " The enemy obtained a numberof these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; youcannot imagine how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vastdrifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done beforeI brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by theriddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold atall, 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 intoParliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against the lateGovernment and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first contest, isthe memory of her clear bright face, very resolute and grave, helping meconsciously, steadfastly, with all her strength. Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards the alienationof my sympathies. I felt she had no business to be so sure of me. I hadmoments of vivid resentment at being thus marched towards Parliament. 

I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character inher. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She soundedamazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs forthe campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she appeared. She also mademe a birthday present in November of a heavily fur-trimmed coat and thisshe would make me remove as I went on to the platform, and hold over herarm until I was ready to resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her andshe liked it to be heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essencea towering self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairmanfloundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye withwhich she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she wasconcerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye, provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a little atthe hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far and taken somuch trouble!

She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotelsshe was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she rejectedall their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishingdietary of her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by hertranquil insistence upon special comforts and sustenance. I can see herface now as it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetlyresolute and assured. 

Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and shehad been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don'tthink it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with thatof Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intentionof achieving parallel results by parallel methods. I was to beGladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to lubricate his speeches witha 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 celebratedbook. She wanted, I know, to hold the glass in her hand while I wasspeaking. 

But here I was firm. "No, " I said, very decisively, "simply I won'tstand 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'stable. "

"I DO wish you wouldn't, " she said, distressed. 

It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a littlechildish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see now howpathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to followmy own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of ahigh destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed endwhen as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet byno means fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance.... 

4

And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casualincident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions ofher were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interestingschoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, whosaid and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her shewas riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of theframe--it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came tounderstand the quality of her nerve better--and on the third occasionshe was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On theintervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustainedconversation about the political situation and the books and papers Ihad 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! Andsince she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now ofthose early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this sectionmy idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faceson the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage is oddly like littleBailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealthof memories. She sits below me on the low wall under the olive treeswith our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in mylife. It still seems a little incredible that that should be so. She hasdestroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning oflife. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like theArabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot fromwhich it had spread gigantic across the skies.... 

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past ourlabouring ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar andshoulder-knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. Shecried out something, I don't know what, some greeting. 

"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret. 

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whomby way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of theunderlings, "J. P. " was in the car with us and explained her to us. "Oneof the best workers you have, " he said.... 

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross fromthe strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' house. Itseemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white panelling andoval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between whitemarble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine--and howIsabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock thatmade her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of blackhair. Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house wasto descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowingresponsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. And there was avery pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms withevery one. It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with thegirl, but on this occasion she wasn't sparring and refused to be teasedinto a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father. Shewas, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunitytoo rare for them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in away that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye betweenappeal and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which Ithought at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was sodistinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue moon Isabel iswell-behaved.... !"

Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversationat table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort oftopographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such avisit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconsciousof his doubly-earned V. C. And the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat thatwon his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, andwe began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in thehunting-field three years later. He interested Margaret into a disregardof my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence ofMoselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, thistime brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walledgarden, graceful even in its winter desolation. And there theconversation suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to apause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a maskand wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably youLiberals will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily asyou 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 ofyour predecessors, " said the doctor. 

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broachedtoo big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue eyes regardedthe speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me inthe not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence withsome 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 fishat 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 toelect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm aRemington-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 theworst. "

"I'd like to hear, " I said. "Electioneering shatters convictions andenfeebles 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 thebeautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright cleanwindows. 

"Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of usalready. 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 tolibel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in time formeals, 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 somethingcalled liberty. "

"Liberty under the law, " I said, with an unexpected approving murmurfrom Margaret, and took up the defence. "The old Liberal definition ofliberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions arenot the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfedpropertyless 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 hopelesslyfor life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'llgive every other liberty for it--until he gets out. "

Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of thechanging qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk, extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondaryissues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or lessexcept Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasionalinterjections. "People won't SEE that, " for example, and "It all seemsso plain to me. " The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial andinconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep inthe chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and wentwith her vivid intellectual excitement; occasionally she would darta word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into thediscussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed thatshe had read Bishop Burnet.... 

After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift inour car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offerme quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of theLurky 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 privatesatisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, andI perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too muchimportance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it's oddto note now--it has never occurred to me before--that from that day tothis I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter. 

And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in theelection, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle, now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps inanimated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I couldto 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 Ihad 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 ofthe bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that comebetween. One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts andimpressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether. I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionatelove or the possibility of such love between us. I may have done soagain and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I everthought 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 ifshe had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into mylife as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previousexperiences 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 werenarrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class. Ithought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty ratherthan beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hidthem from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after ourmarriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stoodat last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit ofeither idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a new sphereof womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffectedinterest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, herenergy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitelyfiner form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measurefemininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had myworld been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been suchfriends. 

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me sincehow full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. Shespoke, 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 younganimal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might havedone with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as Isat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She saysnow she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was asuspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regardingme with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gazeof 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 excitementwas not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out. The waitingfor the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, andthen everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: "Nine hundred andseventy-six. "

My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, butwe all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result forhours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-sixwould have meant something entirely different. "Nine hundred andseventy-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 intothe room. 

Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprungfrom at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almostcaressingly, 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 exactlythe thing she was meaning to say. 

"They want you to speak, " said Margaret, with something unsaid in herface. 

"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 thebalcony. 

"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly

"Oh, RATHER!" said I. 

The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief inmy oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine. 

"It's all over, " he said, "and you've won. Say all the nice things youcan and say them plainly. "

I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood lookingover the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swayingpeople. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, temperedby a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was goingon for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a speech could notinstantly check. "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!" and then a brief"boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. Theconflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass inthe 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 Iremember hearing that memorable war-cry. 

"Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"

"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you, " I said, amidst further uproar andreiterated cries of "Speech!"

Then silence came with a startling swiftness. 

Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. "I shall go to Westminster, " Ibegan. I sought for some compelling phrase and could not find one. "To do my share, " I went on, "in building up a great and splendidcivilisation. "

I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal ofbooing. 

"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 wildfireof booting and bawling. 

It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. Iglanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind hishand 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, " promptedParvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled myselfhastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent'sgood 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 expressedhostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement nostudent of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine. Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed ahideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There was not even alegend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but thatit impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing. 

6

Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we cameback--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to ourhouse in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations thatthe victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one. 

Then came a period when one was going about receiving and givingcongratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy whohas returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. TheLondon world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded thenurseries. All the children of one's friends had got big maps of Englandcut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy stickinggummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hithertosubmerged the country. And there were also orange labels, if I rememberrightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. Iengaged myself to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunchedat the Reform, which was fairly tepid, and dined and spent one or twotumultuous evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was in activeeruption. The National Liberal became feverishly congested towardsmidnight as the results of the counting came dropping in. A biggreen-baize screen had been fixed up at one end of the largesmoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting thatday, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheersthat at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever therewas record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when therewas a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I wasthere. 

How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco andwhisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making waves ofharsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every now and thenhoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was muchin evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gavebrief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late hour, amidstmuch enthusiasm. 

"Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I didnot know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddledapproval as I came down past them into the crowd again. 

Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than twohundred seats. 

"I wonder just what we shall do with it all, " I heard one scepticspeculating.... 

After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find itdifficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it waswe WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendousaccession to power for one's party. Liberalism was swirling in like aflood.... 

I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don'tclearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the fuss andstrain of the General Election had built up a feeling that my returnwould in some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myselfa mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague majority. Therewere moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could betoo big a crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I hadachieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very crowded opportunityit was at that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament andappointments; one breathed distracting and irritating speculations asto what would be done and who would be asked to do it. I was chieflyimpressed by what was unlikely to be done and by the absence of anygeneral plan of legislation to hold us all together. I found the talkabout Parliamentary procedure and etiquette particularly trying. Wedined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old Sir Edward waslengthily sage about what the House liked, what it didn't like, whatmade a good impression and what a bad one. "A man shouldn't speak morethan twice in his first session, and not at first on too contentious atopic, " said Sir Edward. "No. "

"Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's a sortof airy earnestness--"

He waved his cigar to eke out his words. 

"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could nameone man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashers. Onthe other hand--a thing like that--if it catches the eye of the PUNCHman, for example, may be your making. "

He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to likean originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar.... 

The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feelmore 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 theinspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hatsand wearing magisterial coats. It is one of my vivid memories from thisperiod, the sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of theNational Liberal Club. At first I thought there must have been afuneral. Familiar faces that one had grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic tiesand tweed jackets, suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze ofself-consciousness, from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. Therewas a disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for agood Parliamentary style. 

There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous competitionto get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory hangs about meof the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation inhabitedalmost entirely by silk hats. The current use of cards to secure seatscame later. There were yards and yards of empty green benches with hatsand hats and hats distributed along them, resolute-looking top hats, laxtop hats with a kind of shadowy grin under them, sensible top bats brimupward, and one scandalous incontinent that had rolled from the frontOpposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A headless hat issurely the most soulless thing in the world, far worse even than askull.... 

At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; andI found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of theSpeaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderlessafter the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its easeamidst its empty benches. 

There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to seeover 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 Igathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it wasChris Robinson had walked between the honourable member in possessionof the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him blushinglywhispering about his misadventure to a colleague. He was just thatsame little figure I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, butgrey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same knitted mufflerhe had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he talked to us inHatherleigh's rooms. 

It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, andthat I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day from theTIMES. 

I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through theouter lobby. 

I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled itselflike a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, thesilk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I wassurveying this statesmanlike outline with a weak approval. "A MEMBER!"I felt the little cluster of people that were scattered about the lobbymust 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 yetare cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme vividness thatit wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as that somethinghad got hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound of my mind. Whateverhappened in this Parliament, I at least would attempt something. "ByGod!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed. I am here to do something, and dosomething 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 chillingnight, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over my shoulderat the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember, westward, andpresently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and followed it, watching theglittering black rush of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges roundwhich the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched sky-line ofDoulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams weregliding amidst a dotted line of lamps, and two little trains crawledinto Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and weresuddenly changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. Itwas 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 thehuge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal of coalbarges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, anda colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysteriousblacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges. Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidstthese monster shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but onlymoving about among them. These gas-works have a big chimney that belchesa lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, shot withstrange crimson streaks.... 

On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the lappingwater of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the lamps andone treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem to be purelyarchitectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absoluteindifference to mortal ends. 

Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that onesees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrialmonsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably with my memoriesof my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vansclatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two outcasts huddledtogether and slumbering. 

"These things come, these things go, " a whispering voice urged upon me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber museums cameand 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 thecolonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet close by alamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!

I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string ofbarges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water turnedto ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It wasthen I was moved to prayer. I prayed that night that life might notbe in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed forstrength and faith, that the monstrous blundering forces in life mightnot overwhelm me, might not beat me back to futility and a meaninglessacquiescence 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 couldout of these disorders, and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought ofit a sense of yielding feebleness. 

"Break me, O God, " I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, destroyme as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interestsand little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of adream. "

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 nextportion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it raw edgedand 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 andaims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle andinvolved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers toconvey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is likelooking through moving media of changing hue and variable refractionat something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations aremingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; andnot only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods ofdepression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyondtreatment multitudinous.... For a week or so I desisted altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the warm softmornings among the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house ofours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel and I think on the wholecomplicating them further in the effort to simplify them to manageableand stateable elements. 

Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of thisconfused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This mainstrand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have lookedto most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices tomake a career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about inmotor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliantcompanies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby. Margaret worehundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeedingmeritoriously during that time. 

We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thoughtabout it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousandthings for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were byinertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in methat rendered its completion impossible. Under certain very artlesspretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in theworld, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been inprogress for years in my mind and the realities of my life, beforeour general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, orsuspected the appearances of our life. Then suddenly our proceedingsbegan to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and marredby the insurgence of these so long-hidden developments. 

That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I writeof these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogetherbroader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynicalobserver scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair butlimited ambitions of my ostensible self. This "sub-careerist" elementnoted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of therivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-so, whom, as a matter offact, I didn't respect or feel in the least sympathetic towards; guardedwith that man, who for all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, anda little touchy at the appearance of neglect from that. No, I meansomething greater and not something smaller when I write of a hiddenlife. 

In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of AltioraBailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in theHouse and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a man asusually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am tremendouslyimpressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of how little thatfrontage represented me, and just how little such frontages do representthe complexities of the intelligent contemporary. Behind it, yetstruggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether, was a far moreessential reality, a self less personal, less individualised, andbroader in its references. Its aims were never simply to get on; ithad an altogether different system of demands and satisfactions. Itwas critical, curious, more than a little unfeeling--and relentlesslyilluminating. 

It is just the existence and development of this more generalisedself-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more subtleand intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relationsto the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and spiritualhinterland vary enormously in the people about me, from a type whichseems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the window, to otherswho, like myself, come to regard the ostensible existence more and moreas a mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater personalitybehind. And this back-self has its history of phases, its crises andhappy accidents and irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct fromthe adventures and achievements of the ostensible self. It meets personsand phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled intonew realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant tothe general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of theostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; itaccumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises andrepudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing mentorupon the small engagements of the pupil. 

In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth ofphilosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the developmentof mankind. 

2

It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarkedwith Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and ahabit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontageas no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self intorelation with it. 

I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with himwhich presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of hisinfluence. 

I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton atthe Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of themoment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, andoddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a littleinclined to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness. But thatdisposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh andprovocative. And something that had long been straining at its checks inmy 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 becomeconfusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and ineffectual struggleat the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpoweringtendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiableconclusion by a COUP-DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, thequieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and informationfor its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play ofthought.... Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder Iendured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in waitconversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallantexperiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. Theywould watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping throughbushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave onetwilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at astretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but withan air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociologicaltypes. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. Henever raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would askwhat we thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward wouldsay it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, wouldthink it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would sayrather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and Iwould deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statementof views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds forsome other topic of equal interest.... 

On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberalbleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mindand complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not hiswife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward waspresent, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There wasalso some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life ofme I cannot remember her name. 

Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton andEsmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland. Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Lifeof Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogetherfalse but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. Atany rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there wasa distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, itmay have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt LadyCarmixter had returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led toa rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us howhe had profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his powerof work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now withoutinconvenience. 

"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 consultnine 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 mostconducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonadeand claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to bedemanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were upto?

"I want, " said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "tohear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"

Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of theCommunity. "

"HOW?"

"Beneficient Legislation, " said Lewis. 

"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know whereyou 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 askMrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French. 

For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischiefin Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing hisdemand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. "What ARE we Liberalsdoing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries. 

To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour forfundamentals--and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that Isuppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together withtwo different sets of people with whom one has maintained two differentsets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an instinctivesuppression in our circle that we shouldn't be more than vague about ourpolitical ideals. It had almost become part of my morality to respectthis convention. It was understood we were all working hard, and keepingourselves fit, tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro BonoPublico. Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was onthe verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in thenature of confirmations.... It added to the discomfort of the situationthat these plunging enquiries were being made in the presence of ourwives. 

The rebel section of our party forced the talk. 

Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: "Thecountry is with us. "

My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases aboutthe Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my cloven hoofto my friends for the first time. 

"We don't respect the Country as we used to do, " I said. "We haven'tthe same belief we used to have in the will of the people. It's nogood, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter offact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that brought us intopower has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've got to give itone--if possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. Forthe present if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen tohave hold of its tether. "

Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his systemof pretences. 

Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was atus again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak ofinterrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about thewelfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion of theArts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of YoungLiberalism took to their thickets for good, while we talked all overthem of the prevalent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret wasperplexed by me. It is only now I perceive just how perplexing I musthave been. "Of course, she said with that faint stress of apprehensionin her eyes, one must have aims. " And, "it isn't always easy to puteverything into phrases. " "Don't be long, " said Mrs. Edward Cramptonto her husband as the wives trooped out. And afterwards when we wentupstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that the ladies had beencriticising Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourablespirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took himat once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn. Wedispersed early. 

I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards BatterseaBridge--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, buther instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she givesthem 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 otherguests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments--Remington, thosechaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It's part of a man's dutysometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he tounderstand government if he doesn't? It scares me to think of yourlot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A kind of neuralgiain 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 wantto cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else buta reaction to stimulation!"... 

He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through mostof it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fondof had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horriblemanner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn'tbroken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and uglydemigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I hadany right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkemptlook, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about himsomething, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things oflife, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My set of people hadirritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his touch how theyirritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of myeasy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside hisrather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalismand Progressivism. 

"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that thethings they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and beauty. There's a sort of filiation.... Your Altiora's just the politicalequivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she'sa dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thingaltogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed to where under a boarding in thelight of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--"was in Babylonand Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of thesort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notesfrom Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold ofthings, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything oflife at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean roomsand talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes byoutside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all this, "--hewaved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to bebanished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outsidepublic-houses. Do you think they really care, Remington? I don't. It'smake-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 graveand necessary and respected on the Government benches. They think ofputting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats withbecoming brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portraitto a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's their scope. Theydon'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 dishonestyunless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot ofyours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do youthink they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis?Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how theyshrank 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 thegreatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment fromthe dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculaebuilding upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damnedthings 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 fora moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: "Which is why I wasso surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!"

"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten, " I said. "You'regoing too far with all your might for the sake of the damns. Like adonkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths inLiberalism--"

"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 thestars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I know them? withall the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyesand the brain that loved and understood--and my poor mumble of a lifegoing on! I'm within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I'm a failureby most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of itany more. I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of themeaning. "

He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens, " hecried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis.... "

"Make-believe. Make-believe. " The phrase and Britten's squat gestureshaunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stoodbefore my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirableequipment of me. 

I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it wasMr. 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 willever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. 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 sortthemselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less andless by their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; thefuture more. It is not simply party but school and college and countyand country that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as muchas our forefathers did of the "old Harrovian, " "old Arvonian, " "oldEtonian" 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 followfreemasonry down--freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadaysin England by propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses.... 

There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately toparty ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginationsand no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, orDayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the fact thatthe party system has been essential in the history of England for twohundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read historiesand memoirs, they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so muchfor what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populouswith glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes andquotations. It seems almost scandalous that new things should continueto happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of these oldassociations. 

That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrusthimself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once heldCharles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation toDayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to havethe front benches left empty now for ever, or at most adorned withlaureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat, " and "On this Spot WilliamEwart 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. Heis always gloomily disposed to lapse into wonderings about whatthings are coming to, wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. Hisconception of perfect conduct is industrious persistence along theworn-down, well-marked grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitelymore important to him is the documented, respected thing than theelusive present. 

Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl isa sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, in theirclubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of amorning's work free from either zeal or shirking, they mingle withpermanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer typeof business men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the morningpaper, of the architecture of the West End, and of the latest publicappointments, of golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicialwitticisms and forensic "crushers. " The New Year and Birthday honourslists are always very sagely and exhaustively considered, and anecdotesare popular and keenly judged. They do not talk of the things that arereally active in their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner theysuppose to be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism, individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex andwomen only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to methe strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties andtraditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of passionateinterests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, or bathing in agown, or falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or writing under apseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg.... 

It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the greatpast that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we are not somuch wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of ourpresent opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible tous. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in theworld to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to useher as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think of Whitehall thatlittle affair on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivialand remote in comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves tomy imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at hand. 

It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I thinkof St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London night andthe great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabsof my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as thesecond Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of theAdmiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending outinvisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to greatfleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes floodingthrough my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part usfrom our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spaciousgrey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little filesof papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernessesgashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worldsand mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses andwatch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Oncemore I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of theEmpire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West Endwith their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads toBuckingham Palace, witness the coming and going of troops and officialsand guests along it from every land on earth.... Interwoven in thetexture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, isthe gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and yourkind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destinyof Man!"

4

My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent. Thelittle group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very ignorantof the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out oftouch with the mass of the party. For a time Parliament was enormouslytaken up with moribund issues and old quarrels. The early Educationallegislation was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing Billwent little further than the attempted rectification of a Conservativemistake. 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 theGovernment so early as the second reading of the first Education Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my intentionin the heat of speaking, --it is a way with inexperienced man. I calledthe Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies of sects andlittle-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods with the manifestneeds of the time. 

I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer Iworry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes. Ispoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were alreadya little curious about me because of my writings. Several of theConservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that engagingfriendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an approving "Hear, Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two futile attempts tocatch the Speaker's eye before I was able to begin, the nervous quiverof my rather too prepared opening, the effect of hearing my own voiceand my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly be talkingabout, the realisation that I was getting on fairly well, the immensesatisfaction afterwards of having on the whole brought it off, and theabsurd gratitude I felt for that encouraging cheer. 

Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in theworld. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being easy, butits shifting audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of membersbehind the chair--not mere audience units, but men who matter--thedesolating emptiness that spreads itself round the man who fails tointerest, the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers'gallery, the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind thegrill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and the maceand the chapel-like Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspiretogether, produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I waswalking upon a pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncoveredmorass. A misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to beextraordinarily disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have Ihad to speak with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement ofthe House imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading outinto the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind ofsome particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of anauditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such as onehas with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose one's senseof an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose one's sense of theimmediate, and to become prolix and vague with qualifications. 

5

My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration ofthe quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certainimpressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. TheNational Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--andDoultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steelengravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone;and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, crowded smoking-room withinnumerable little tables and groups of men in armchairs, itsmagazine room and library upstairs, have just that undistinguished andunconcentrated diversity which is for me the Liberal note. The pensivemember sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreignspeech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent whites hisroving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his mind afield toCalcutta 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 todoubt about Liberalism. 

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded withcountless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or incircles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the greatnarrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groupsare 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 firstone gets an impression of men going from group to group and as it werelinking them, but as one watches closely one finds that these men justvisit three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing of theothers. One begins to perceive more and more distinctly that one isdealing with a sort of human mosaic; that each patch in that great placeis of a different quality and colour from the next and never to be mixedwith it. Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator inthe Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal boresare specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a clumpof men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island ofSouth London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant fromWhitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group ofIrish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or so, herea clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminentRationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them area group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging with documents andintent upon extraordinary business transactions over long cigars.... 

I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract someconstructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of politics. It was clear they were against the Lords--against plutocrats--againstCossington's newspapers--against the brewers.... It was tremendouslyclear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earththey were for!... 

As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, thevarious views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. And Mrs. Gladstone, thepartitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, woulddissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample ofmiscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universallittleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but acommunity, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in little groupsand 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 itdenunciation. 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 beenaccustomed to respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy andbate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in everyhuman heart.... 

I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality veryvividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste placecovered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drownby the million in ditches.... 

Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shymovements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close athand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he wassaying something about the "Will of the People.... "

The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot thesmoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flungaloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high androcky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched theswarming infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, likepebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human lifemore than that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed somegiantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still to come--or present itmight be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withalthe last phase of mankind?... 

I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitlyaddressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reefbuilders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All thehistory of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will bethe story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives--aneffort of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal. Thatsomething greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seekexistence, palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous itis! It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderfulwords, spoken more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a mysteryof unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty beyond the commonimpulses of men. It is something that comes and goes, like a light thatshines and is withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if ithas ever been.... 

6

I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member ofthe club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy withspeculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, hishorizons, 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 hisStaffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or CouncillorThat down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. Within seven miles ofthe 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 meektowards our very democratic mannered but still livened waiters. Washe perhaps the backbone of England? He over-ate himself lest he shouldappear mean, went through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spiteof the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, hewould have old brandy, black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in thename of temperance omit the brandy and have rather more coffee, inthe smoking-room. I would sit and watch that stiff dignity ofself-indulgence, and wonder, wonder.... 

An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of himin relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimesbeing ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance furtively at hisdomestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip againstthe reluctant, protesting business employee. We imaginative peopleare base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitterpenetration 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 andothers. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise thathis presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if ithad any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing somethingwith the nation and the empire and mankind?... How on earth could anyone get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyondhis newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in hisheart. He never discussed. At the first hint of discussion his tempergave way. He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentmentsand quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist animpulse 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 andmankind? 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 couldbe located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties anddialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered asrepresenting anything in the House, I pretended to sit for the elementsof HIM.... 

7

For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air ofcoherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into politics againafter 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 shortcoats and square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a littlesurprisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a"seagreen incorruptible, " as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking onthe Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick andspeaking with a fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was PhilipSnowden, the member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly fortystrong altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in muchstronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a bignational movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were springing upall over the country, and every one was inquiring about Socialism anddiscussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities with particularforce, and any youngster with the slightest intellectual pretension waseither actively for or brilliantly against. For a time our Young Liberalgroup was ostentatiously sympathetic.... 

When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certainevening gatherings at our house.... 

These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome ofa discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic anduncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed thateven the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties. 

"They never meet each other, " said Altiora, "much less people on theother side. How can they begin to understand politics until they dothat?"

"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives, " said Altiora, "totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them. Or theywon't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their tablemanners. 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 crippledby the want of a common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacydidn't at first appear to be more than an accident, and our talk led toMargaret's attempt to get acquaintance and easy intercourse afoot amongthem and between them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave aseries of weekly dinners, planned, I think, a little too accurately uponAltiora's model, and after each we had as catholic a reception as wecould contrive. 

Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic asreceptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful ofinsoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got anightmare feeling as the evening wore on. 

It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one shouldbe a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the tie or theshoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent aggression shouldalternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A number of our guestshad an air of waiting for a clue that never came, and stood and satabout silently, mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did notdiscover their distinctive Open-Sesames. There was a sprinkling ofmanifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many, Ithought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at anymoment was liable to become oracular. One was in a state of tensionfrom first to last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of explodingresentment, and replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We YoungLiberals 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 orAfrica, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats indicative of theHouse, or in what is sometimes written of as "faultless evening dress, "stood about on those evenings, they and their very quietly and simplyand expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes andmountains. 

I didn't at first see the connection between systematic socialreorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just asI didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects shouldappear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities. On one of these evenings a little group of rather jolly-looking prettyyoung people seated themselves for no particular reason in a largecircle 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 theSlipper. It must have been that same evening I came upon an unbleachedyoung gentleman before the oval mirror on the landing engaged inremoving the remains of an anchovy sandwich from his protrudedtongue--visible ends of cress having misled him into the belief that hewas dealing with doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to begiven hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I hadthe advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, tooneatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available uponwhich he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver. Sothat his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact little womanin what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive black dresshas also printed herself on my memory; she had set her heart upon mycontributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest with whichshe was associated, and I spent much time and care in evading her. 

Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-PuritanSocialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking outagainst austere methods of living all over their faces. Their mannerwas packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches tothe little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage indiscussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be Determinism--whichbecame heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the smallhours. It seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism oftheirs--ever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularlyrecall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with aneyeglass 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 thattwinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, andhe seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are weall 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 triedto get something like a representative collection of the parliamentaryleaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and anumber of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and HoratioBulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for ten minutes and talked charminglyto Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist andToomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a newcomforter, 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 asthey possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushesalmost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to mingle ordispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure. Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists one had supposedfriendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so manypeople to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms asours. But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sectionsof the party next week. 

I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a stilllarger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fairhair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. Wediscussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at thattime, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal party. Iwas struck by a thing in him that I had already observed less vividly inmany others of these Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last a clueto the whole business. He behaved exactly like a man in possession ofvaluable patent rights, who wants to be dealt with. He had an air ofhaving a corner in ideas. Then it flashed into my head that the wholeSocialist movement was an attempted corner in ideas.... 

8

Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris ofthe gathering. 

I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white andweary, 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 wasaccustomed to wait for clues. 

"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of theSocialist ideas, and see the men who are running them, " I explained.... "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out of the obvious commonsense of our present conditions. It's as impersonal as science. Allthese men--They've given nothing to it. They're just people who havepegged out claims upon a big intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feelquite 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 ofthem! They'd feel it was burglary.... "

"Yes, " said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I feltabout them all the evening.... Particularly Dr. Tumpany. "

"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, " I said; "that'sthe moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a mistake indates or something, and went back and annihilated everybody from Owenonwards 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 growingrealisation of constructive needs in every man's mind, and a littlecorner in party politics. So, I suppose, it will always be.... But theyWERE a damned lot, Margaret!"

I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said, smilingindulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's. )

I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was anexcellent word in that connection.... 

But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men'sbrains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some greatbrain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinkingthem!... 

"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he istrustworthy, " 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, " saidMargaret, after a pause. 

She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexedby 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 rustlingsoftly to her room. 

I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallisingout.... 

It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how thatopposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and themental 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. Thereality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a powerin the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, instudies where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under theurgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honesttalk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but notin everyday affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everydayaffair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits, interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personalfeeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his immediate self andspecialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himselfinto something a little less than the common man. He may have an immensehinterland, but that does not absolve him from a frontage. That is theessential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They repudiate frontage; claim to be purehinterland. That is what bothered me about Codger, about those variousschoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and theirdream of an official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopherin the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in thefirst place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like giftsto the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-sideshallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To understandSocialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join aSocialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not eventolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which itstands.... 

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken mesome years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideasthat swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I hadbeen disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with socialconstruction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in theself-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But Isaw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarilyconstructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between thesplendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We may beshaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a mancounts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, butfor his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are heldtogether not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bondof an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, andnearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as grossincrements are change, in his particular method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages ofsome definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, andevery party has its scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in apublic-spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessingits meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolishitself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstructitself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimitedsocialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression uponother classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs. Theinstincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve themselves for all--inspite of every one.... 

The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of twogreat parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends in theevent of a small Government majority. These two main parties are more orless heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has certain necessarycharacteristics. The Conservative Party has always stood quitedefinitely for the established propertied interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly the huge privatemonopoly of the liquor trade which has been created by temperancelegislation, are the essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with thenative wealthy are the families of the great international usurers, anda vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range ofresistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has alwaysshown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any other party. The great landowners have been as well-disposed towards the endowmentof higher education, and as willing to co-operate with the Church inprotective and mildly educational legislation for children and theworking class, as any political section. The financiers, too, areadventurous-spirited and eager for mechanical progress and technicalefficiency. They are prepared to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and public communications, upon sanitation andhygienic organisation. A certain rude benevolence of public intention isequally characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leadsto no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to seethe common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar. Allsections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably inclinedto the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised populationin uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners and old-fashionedcountry clergy, full of localised self-importance, jealous even of thecottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the abilityto retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole. On the otherhand, when matters point to any definitely confiscatory proposal, to thepublic ownership and collective control of land, for example, orstate mining and manufactures, or the nationalisation of the so-calledpublic-house or extended municipal enterprise, or even to an increase ofthe taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearlyadamantine bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangementin these affairs. 

Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediateinterest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man tenant and working-manpurchaser. Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the massof the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher education, and--except for an obvious antagonismto employers and property owners--almost destitute of ideas. Whatelse can it be? It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose wholesituation and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiativeand organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and capitalwith no sense of the difficulties involved in the process; but, on theother hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of individuals whichis implied by military service is steadily and quite naturally and quiteillogically opposed by it. It is only in recent years that Labour hasemerged as a separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai ofLiberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency to step back againinto that multitudinous assemblage. 

For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic. Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversifiedcrowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by theseother parties. It is the party against the predominating interests. Itis at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the partyof decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and planlessassociation in comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructiveon the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitableconstructions of the civilised state. Essentially it is the partyof criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a system of hostilities andobjections that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It isa gathering together of all the smaller interests which find themselvesat a disadvantage against the big established classes, the leaseholdtenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as againstthe merchant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against theChurchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitablepublican, the man without introductions and broad connections againstthe man who has these things. It is the party of the many small menagainst the fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason forloving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealeris doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; butit resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle agescommon men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege" because itrepresents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is onthe whole most set against Collective control because it representsno established responsibility. It is constructive only so far as itsantagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of thestate. It organises only because organisation is forced upon it by theorganisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of alliance withLabour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to publicexpenditure.... 

Every modern European state will have in some form or other these threeparties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympatheticparty 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 partysometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting withit, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, forexample, and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown ora dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may breakup, complicate, and confuse the self-expression of these three necessarydivisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them outnone the less for that.... 

And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas goon--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles insome great brain beyond our understanding.... 

So it was I sat and thought my problem out.... I still remember mysatisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like cloudsdispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't holda party together alone, "interests and habits, not ideas, " I had thatnow, and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading andinspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collectionof odds and ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientificidea, the idea of veracity--of human confidence in humanity--of all thatmattered in human life outside the life of individuals.... The only realparty that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and thatin the entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructiveattack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth andclaws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wantedanything in the world. 

Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen itbefore?... 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 thefinal convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of my dreamof ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administeredterritories--the vision I had seen in the haze from that little churchabove Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate legislativeconstructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with theBaileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals. To get thatordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individualside I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and closeattention was indicated by my perception of these ends. I marriedMargaret and set to work. But something in my mind refused from theoutset to accept these determinations as final. There was always a doubtlurking below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, afeeling 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, andunreal, that the Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operationwere preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my politicallife didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that ratherperplexingly I was missing the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotesto Altiora's self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, herquarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks onCramptonism and the heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as theChildren's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal all along with human progress as somethingimmediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by politicalparties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began tosee that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rathervulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat andbustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater andindefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent realityis also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which drawscontinually upon human experience and influences human action more andmore, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage. It isthe unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it was just through thefact that our group about the Baileys didn't understand this, that witha sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that sham expertofficialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and direct the affairs ofhumanity, that the perplexing note of silliness and shallowness that Ihad always felt and felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, camein. They were neglecting human life altogether in social organisation. 

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth ofstatesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and allorganising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange andachieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders ofmen, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can thinkout the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--ofthe purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have setthemselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they havetaken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; andall the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of theirgood intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppressthought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimentaldesires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying withthe making, that any extension of social organisation is at presentachieved. 

Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy isgrasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, lesspersonal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective mindin the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman andhis attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and becomesaccessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer to "fixup, " as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to thedevelopment of that needed intellectual life without which all hisshallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to build on thesands, and sets himself to gather foundations. 

You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities andharbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring onlyto 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 ina light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of acontemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour ofthought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity that lurksmore or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt there must go anemotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last something of a refrainin my speech and writings, to convey the spirit that I felt was at thevery heart of real human progress--love and fine thinking. 

(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a weekwithout the repetition of that phrase. )

My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. Themore 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 asa politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an adequateexpression for all that was in me, for those forces that had rebelled atthe crude presentations of Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressionsof my youth, at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at theconventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, at the philosophicalrecluse of Trinity and the phrases and tradition-worship of my politicalassociates. None of these things were half alive, and I wanted life tobe intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an edge of steel anddesire like a flame. The real work before mankind now, I realised onceand for all, is the enlargement of human expression, the release andintensification of human thought, the vivider utilisation of experienceand the invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairshas or lacks value as it helps or hinders that. 

With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as Iwas concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life ofpolitics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still againstthe muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to theiressential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, thelitter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward appearances whoseultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimlesshabits of thought, and imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughtsand souls of men. How are we through politics to get at that confusion?

We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create asustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educationalorganisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion oflife. 

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 intotradition or imposture. 

Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution, disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the scarcelyfaced possibility of making life generally and continually beautiful, become--EASY.... 

It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I couldengage would be those which most directly affected the Church, publichabits of thought, education, organised research, literature, and thechannels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my positionas Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and conduced to thisessential work. 

CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKING ASSOCIATES

1

I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits ofparty Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regardingthe development of the social and individual mental hinterland as theessential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to thepractical assumption that we wanted what I may call "hinterlanders. " Ofcourse I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley ofrich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world ofto-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the willof the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad commonaim. We must have an aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understandingand purpose--or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and moreclearly when I look through my various writings of the years between1903 and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908. 

I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and theexpansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finerinitiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anythingthat is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solveproblems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the presenttime, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any moregeneral happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, thatit CAN develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secularconstructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crudedemocracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that higheducation and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more mustits better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who havepower and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the wholeof humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to whathas become my general conception in politics, the conception of theconstructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerfulpeople, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidstwhom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highlyselective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic culture, which seems to meto be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of rawminds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate resultof intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosityliberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modifiedand redirected by literature and art.... 

But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointedby the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned about therepresentative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned mymind more and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy andinfluential people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I wasasking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particularjob to work through them and not against them. Was I not altogether outof my element as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about thesepeople that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendiddreams? Were they really the obstacles, might they not be rather thevehicles of the possible new braveries of life?

2

The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. Theconception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costlyerrors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financialadventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against the consumer. The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedilyadopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of baseends. But a big child is permitted big mischief, and my mind wasnow continually returning to the persuasion that after all in somedevelopment of the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream capableof sustaining a great educational and philosophical movement such asno formula of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgarforms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with thenoisiness and humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard forsocial efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise. Theresuddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--anew sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khakihat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged inwholesome and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyondhis strength--the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find itdifficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias infavour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been ableto produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of thiskind. 

3

In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some lostallusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the PentagramCircle. 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 laterbecame Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and veryvarious experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of theEmpire in a disinterested spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid inWestminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendanceof ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultoryconversation, and it is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere ofthat little gathering became as time went on; then over the dessert, sosoon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, oneof us would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' expositionof some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliverourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every onepresent had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare weemerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my housewas conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me and go ontalking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three. We had FredNeal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and hisstupendous flow of words materially prolonged our closing discussionsand made our continuance impossible. 

I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but moreparticularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of suchmen as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialistswho belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, thoughmostly of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously andinexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principalinstead of at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. Theyseemed obsessed by the idea that streams of trade could be divertedviolently so as to link the parts of the Empire by common interests, andthey were persuaded, I still think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform wouldhave an immense popular appeal. They were also very keen on militaryorganisation, and with a curious little martinet twist in their mindsthat boded ill for that side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were disposed to spend money much more generously on educationand research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemedlikely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the YoungLiberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the universities andupper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line with these men in ourdiscussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's sentimentalisingevasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such things as the"Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of Progress. " It wasn'tthat I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I believeall definite party "sides" at any time are bound to be about equallyright and equally lop-sided; but that I thought I could get more outof them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if Ico-operated with them. By 1908 I had already arrived at a point where Icould be definitely considering a transfer of my political allegiance. 

These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of ashining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy bottles, andbottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy ofdessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and cigarette-ends andmenu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton sitting back and cockinghis eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into theancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and alittle like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in ahushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and round eyes from speaker to speaker andsounding the visible depths of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbaultand Gane were given to conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursuedmysterious purposes in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used tospeak at me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me veryregularly for an after-talk. 

He opened his heart to me. 

"Neither of us, " he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handedsons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, onemust go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist aswe 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. Youand I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we workingtogether?"

"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 todo. "... 

The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at onceattractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membershipnobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ampleconstructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised power. I have no doubt therumour of them greatly influenced my ideas.... 

In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years Iwas hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a matter. I wasnot dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive andfluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the natureof my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and overagain: how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How far--and thiswas more vital--are they rendering lip-service to social organisations?Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of theirclass? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct beforeit resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything morethan a mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hardsuspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?

That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like askingwhat is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer variedwith my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I waswatching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not incidentally, butall round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of theirfathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above theprotests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits andvanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?--was it ever, indeed, or willit ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable incertain directions worth the retrogression that may be its price?

4

It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new conceptionsthat were developing in my mind. I count the evening of my paper thebeginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY and our wing ofthe present New Tory party. I do that without any excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's production; it was my reactionto forces that had come to me very large through my fellow-members; itsquick reception by them showed that I was, so to speak, merely the firstof the chestnuts to pop. The atmospheric quality of the evening standsout very vividly in my memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggywhen after midnight we went to finish our talk at my house. 

We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, andso it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced ArnoldShoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now thewealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile at the sight ofme, and how little I dreamt of the tragic entanglement that was destinedto involve us both. Gane was present, and Esmeer, a newly-addedmember, but I think Bailey was absent. Either he was absent, or he saidsomething so entirely characteristic and undistinguished that it hasleft 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, "TheWorld Exists for Exceptional People. " It is not the title I shouldchoose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of "mentalhinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The World Existsfor Mental Hinterland. "

The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with athousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and broughtwith me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with thescrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it theother day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Reportof the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia. 

My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon linessuch as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding sections. I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and tushed and pishedat that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were treated to one of hisplatitudinous harangues, he sitting back in his chair with that smallobstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling, and a sort of cadaverous glowupon his face, repeating--quite regardless of all my reasoning and allthat had been said by others in the debate--the sacred empty phrasesthat were his soul's refuge from reality. "You may think it veryclever, " 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 orwork had ever shown that he did trust in the people, but that wasbeside the mark. He was the party Liberal, and these were the partyincantations. 

After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show thatall human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either recognisearistocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy inparticular, and so I came to my point that the reality of human progresslay necessarily through the establishment of freedoms for the human bestand a collective receptivity and understanding. There was a disgustedgrunt from Dayton, "Superman rubbish--Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed onover him to my next propositions. The prime essential in a progressivecivilisation was the establishment of a more effective selective processfor the privilege of higher education, and the very highest educationalopportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise scholarshipwinners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a reward forvirtue. 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, thanwe had to involve it in a search for the tallest man. We didn't want amere process for the selection of good as distinguished from gifted andable boys--"No, you DON'T, " from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliantstuff in the world concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as againstcharacter in educational, artistic, and legislative work. "Goodteaching, " I said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idioticabout character. "

Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye ofagonised aversion. 

I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that isreally serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the thought, allthe art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied sofar as the English-speaking community is concerned by--how many?--bythree or four thousand individuals. ('Less, ' said Thorns. ) To bemore precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousandindividuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as totheir innate rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, thefew who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, theleisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects oftheir qualities, become commonplace workmen and second-rate professionalmen, marry commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage ofsuperfluous pollen in a pine forest is waste. "

"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin inhis necktie. "WASTE!"

"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usuallyin extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life ofintellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material andopportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I mightcall the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help byunderstanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand isneedlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and undifferentiated apublic. Most of the good men we know are not really doing the verybest work of their gifts; nearly all are a little adapted, most areshockingly adapted to some second-best use. Now, I take it, this is thevery centre and origin of the muddle, futility, and unhappiness thatdistresses us; it's the cardinal problem of the state--to discover, develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that bestdone--I drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislativeand administrative activity--by a quite revolutionary development of theeducational machinery, but by a still more unprecedented attempt tokeep science going, to keep literature going, and to keep what isthe necessary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent andappreciative criticism going. You know none of these things have everbeen kept going hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably. "

"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expressionof mystical profundity. 

"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to darknessagain. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darknessagain--and so it's got to keep its light burning. " I went on to attackthe present organisation of our schools and universities, whichseemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, anduncreative men of each generation into the authoritative leaders of thenext, and I suggested remedies upon lines that I have already indicatedin the earlier chapters of this story.... 

So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened newground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party orcombination of groups these developments of science and literature andeducational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked upto 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 emergedfrom his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest wasall close, keen examination of my problem. 

I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way wehad, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster'santenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell intosmaller and smaller fragments. "Remington, " he said, "has given us thedata 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 educationand training, " said Gane. "Remington is right about our neglect of thehigher levels. "

Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called thespirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community needs itsserious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously, " Iremember his saying. "The day has gone by for either dull responsibilityor merely witty art. "

I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown outof using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate theseconceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture. 

"It would have to be done amazingly well, " said Britten, and my mindwent back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and howCossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadaysto 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, " headded, "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, " headded. 

"It's what I've told Remington again and again, " said Crupp, "we'vegot to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make itwork. But he's certainly suggested a method. "

"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up, " said Dayton, darkly to theceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget. "

"All the more reason for picking it up, " said Neal. "For we can't dowithout it. "

"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocratsindeed--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 ideasin our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions thatshowed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify themby minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than anyone. "You all seem to think you want to organise people, particulargroups and classes of individuals, " he insisted. "It isn't that. That'sthe standing error of politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter ofprevailing ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people willmost help this culture forward. "

"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You yourselfwere asking that a little while ago. "

"If they win or if they lose, " Gane maintained, "there will be amovement 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, " saidThorns. 

He became audible, sketching a possibility of action. 

"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of thoseindeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideasmight 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, " saidThorns, "from the Young England movement onward. "

"Not one but has produced its enduring effects, " I said. "It's thepeculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressiveand rejuvenescent. "

I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled ourpresence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection wasintended 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. "Whatyou call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much ofeverything, 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, andthese big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Haveyou thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comesin?"

"Nature abhors a Vacuum, " said Crupp, supporting me. 

"Bailey's trained officials, " suggested Gane. 

"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora, " said Thorns. "Iadmit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in threeyears. "

"One may go on trying possibilities for ever, " I said. "One thingemerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almostconsciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all thenecessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your shipof state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what isclearly the affair of my sort of man, --I want to ensure the quality ofthe quarter deck. "

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a longtime. "A first-rate figure, " said Shoesmith, gripping it. 

"Our danger is in missing that, " I went on. "Muddle isn't ended bytransferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headedmany, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests ofa bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberalimagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a risein the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress issecondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficientmachinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brainsbehind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness, --that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and fromirresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rathercontrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; butall the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may besaved. "

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing. 

It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith becamenoticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult thathe didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do immense thingswith a weekly, " he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he leftoff and became a mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when Iwas 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 thatsort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and itwas some months before I made my decision to follow up the indicationsof that opening talk. 

5

I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In mydevelopments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trainsof thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had alreadyhesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominentlyinvolved in current affairs endorsed views that otherwise would haveseemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians ofPlato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were neververy distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, wasthe true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method ofinternational hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issueI can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining thatdemocracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinancesof the expert official by means of the polling booth. "If they don'tlike things, " said he, "they can vote for the opposition candidateand see what happens then--and that, you see, is why we don't wantproportional representation to let in the wild men. " I opened myeyes--the lids had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smoothsounds--to see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of hispredominant nose. 

The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings werepervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day ofreckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping upthe suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, thatsooner or later something must happen there--something very serious toour Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full ofthat old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient ordisagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinkingabout 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 hishead back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after thisconclusive statement we could still go on talking of war. 

All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of internationalconflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses thathad been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journeywith Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors. " Thatquite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, mentaldishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalisedcommercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the betterorganised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoplesof Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series ofconsequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English mindsto education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on theother 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 additionalDreadnoughts--

 "We want eight And we won't wait, "

but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, ourmean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed tocarry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrongmen in our places of responsibility and the right men in no placeat all, almost universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, andresentful subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, sohabitually as to be now almost unconsciously, dishonest. Germany isbeating England in every matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended sedulously to her collective mind for sixtypregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects she is still farmore anxious for quality in achievement than we are. I remember sayingthat in my paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that hadflashed into my mind. "The British Empire, " I said, "is like some ofthose early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurusand such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone, that is to say, --especially in the visceral region--is bigger than itscranium. 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 thebetter. We're still but only half awake to our error. You can't changethat 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 hauntedhim of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to blow a brainas one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjuredup, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearerand nearer.... 

I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of thatapprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a veryhumiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but Ido not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing classas will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in Englishlife--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance--isone of underbred aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise inmoments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can and assimilate wherewe must. It is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth iseducated by teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset thehistorical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and thatSocialism is an outrage upon the teachings of Christ. A sort ofdignified dexterity of evasion is the national reward. Germany, with alarger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolderintellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive usat last to a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight atall. The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years mayend like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall proudlybut very firmly take the second place. For my own part, since I loveEngland as much as I detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray for achastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only her spiritwould come out of it. So I was able to shake off that earlier fear ofsome final and irrevocable destruction truncating all my schemes. At themost, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction Ihad in view. 

In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined tosee, disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the mostextraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are therelike 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 happenshe remains. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not ownthat country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the mostwe prevent things happening. We suppress our own literature there. MostEnglish people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authoritieswould prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tourof Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring theaverage English voter face to face with the reality of India, or letthe Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time Ihave talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what Indiasignifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we wereup to there. I am not writing without my book in these matters. Andbeyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and look at oursedition trials!--they told me nothing. Time after time I have heardof that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked whatwould happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would bein the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a virgin would be leftin Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of LowerBengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder thanparalysis, better fire and sword than futility. Our flag is spread overthe peninsula, without plans, without intentions--a vast preventive. The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferencesthat would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of thefuture for themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of menheld back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indiansitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gaggedand his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks outin spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for inaction developsstupendous absurdities. The other day the British Empire was taking offand examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems andinscriptions.... 

In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had ourchance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness ofour national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything withIndia. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about "character, " worshipof strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men andthings as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, thatempty domination. Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could weboast 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 mustcarry 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 beruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandonIndia with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. Wetrain our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesomerespect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite ofus, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing todeal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class willbe quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our SouthAfrican diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandonthe reality, such as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. Theconqueror DE FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton, " and the democracyat home will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I amno believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less andless inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of anabrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral constructionswhich are the essentials of statecraft. 

6

I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--thismorning 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 torrentthat crosses the salita is full and boastful, --and I try to recall theorder of my impressions during that watching, dubious time, before Iwent over to the Conservative Party. I was trying--chaotic task--togauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the Britisharistocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; ofgreat smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlitbuildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full ofhandsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture toset off against those other pictures of Liberals and of Socialists Ihave given, I recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynesinaugurated at Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastestprivate houses in London, a huge clustering mass of white and goldsaloons with polished floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases andgalleries on a Gargantuan scale. And there she sought to gather allthat was most representative of English activities, and did, in fact, inthose brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every sectionof our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon thepolitical and social side. 

I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big saloonwith Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful rich womenone meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to becapable of everything, and we watched the crowd--uniforms and splendourswere streaming in from a State ball--and exchanged information. I toldher about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about thearistocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentageof beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effectof tallness was or was not an illusion. 

They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average ofpeople in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtlyindividualised. "They look so well nurtured, " I said, "well cared for. I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant considerationfor each other. "

"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish, " she said, "likebig, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What else canyou expect from them?"

"They are good tempered, anyhow, " I witnessed, "and that's anachievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand theRoosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes acrossthese big people for the first time is their admirable easiness anda 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 thisaristocracy--given SOMETHING--"

"Which they haven't got. "

"Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in theworld. "

"That something?" she inquired. 

"I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done allsorts of things--"

"That's Lord Wrassleton, " she interrupted, "whose leg was broken--youremember?--at Spion Kop. "

"It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white gloveresting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was alittle boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's gotthe V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown pluck, youknow--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 anaristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm notconvinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want tobetter 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 toanswer that! It makes me quarrel with"--I held up my fingers and tickedthe items off--"the public schools, the private tutors, the army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the countrytowards science and literature--"

"We all do, " said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at thebeginning, " 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 agleam of curiosity.... "You want, " she said, "to say to the aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE. ' Do you remember what happened to themonarch 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 areoff 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 notstated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitableminded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there wassomething free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondsontalked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashesof intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few mendisplay. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies thatare the essence of the middle-class order.... 

After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a typeand culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?

It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, butmuch harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, atowering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk andblack lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chinsand chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon thegreat terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accentand intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rathercommonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I amafraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer frombelow investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as myinformant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory onthe governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um alla peerage when they get twenty thousand a year, " she maintained. "That'smy 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 aristocratictheory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulatedintentions. 

"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um, " said LadyForthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get alot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's whatwe'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 ineducation, Lady Forthundred scored. 

We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, myold schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair ofthe magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap ofenergetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group ofdaily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to thenew-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him. 

"We're a peerage, " she said, "but none of us have ever had any nonsenseabout nobility. "

She turned and smiled down on me. "We English, " she said, "are apractical 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. Sometimesbetter than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends very much on thesort of butler who pokes 'um about. "

I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand ayear 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 thebrains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifthcousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on everyspacious social scene? How did things look to them?

7

Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham withhis tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequalmild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. He ledall these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested aboutlife, wary beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented my brain to getto the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man inEngland under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a greatmajority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are theconcomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him aswaves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that itseemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art tothe last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typicalaristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that heremained a commoner to the end of his days. 

I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papersof mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for himthat strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me tostand alone without an equal, the greatest man in British politicallife. Some men one sees through and understands, some one cannot seeinto or round because they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had asense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was sobig and atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had thateffect upon me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses withhim--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 withextraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other menhave to be treated in a special manner; approached through their ownmental dialect, flattered by a minute regard for what they have said anddone. Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I haveever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffylittle 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 dinnerso tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced intoduologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics. 

"I feel so much, " he said, "that the best people in every partyconverge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the countrytowns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on underevery government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, andpeople know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion become mattersof 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 generaltheme that political conflict was the outcome of uncertainty. "Directlyyou get a thing established, so that people can say, 'Now this isRight, ' with the same conviction that people can say water is acombination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no more to be said. Thething 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 withthose insistent movements of his hand upon it, or swaying forward witha grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a diabolical skill to preservewhat are in effect religious tests, tests he must have known wouldoutrage and humiliate and injure the consciences of a quarter--and thatperhaps the best quarter--of the youngsters who come to the work ofelementary education?

In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayedat 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 hisurbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care? Did anything matterto him? And if it really mattered nothing, why did he trouble to servethe narrowness and passion of his side? Or did he see far beyond myscope, so that this petty iniquity was justified by greater, remoterends of which I had no intimation?

They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly wellcared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate intimacy; hepleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think at times there wasno more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding aninterest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircaseskylight. Oh, beyond question he was great! No other contemporarypolitician had his quality. In no man have I perceived sosympathetically the great contrast between warm, personal things and thewhite dream of statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled theconflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at timesit seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of hislife, like some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waitsbehind a lesser master's chair.... 

8

Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised statebecoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as tohave the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke quite aftermy heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise that, I couldhave done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodiedthat, and there lies the gist of my story. And when it came to a studyof others among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was possible to question whether they had anyimaginative conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether theydidn't opaquely accept the world for what it was, and set themselvessingle-mindedly to make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it. 

There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the greatpeers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easiertask of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finestqualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problemof the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. Theywanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediatenecessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and theirexperience of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need forobedience in a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these arethe things that matter in England.... There were also the great businessadventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst). My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale betweena belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crudevanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitualpersistence in the pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal ofCossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to markhow 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 vanityof sweeping actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led toviolent ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a hauntingpursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed himin the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in him--butI feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day after a lunchat the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound meditation over the endof a cigar, one of those sentences that seem to light the whole interiorbeing of a man. "Some day, " he said softly, rather to himself than tome, 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 littlesilver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette.... 

Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and againthere were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their biglawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement. And below the giantpersonalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous menof the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interestedin aviation, active in army organisation. Good, brown-faced stuff theywere, but impervious to ideas outside the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their chauffeurs, and of the qualityof English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school anduniversity by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had cometheir way, witty, light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, witha certain aptitude for bullying. They varied in insensible gradationsbetween the noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and theTories of our Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a manmight exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an average of publicserviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed upsometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predominantidea was that the village schools should confine themselves to teachingthe catechism, hat-touching and courtesying, and be given a holidaywhenever beaters were in request.... 

I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figureof old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the libraryof Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things--Ithink they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all themorning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table andtalked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important menwhose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted the ideathat women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisancein politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anythingwhatever except excesses in population, regretted he could notcensor picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared thatdissenters were people who pretended to take theology seriously with theexpress purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of theEstablished Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue about religion, " he said. "They mean mischief. " Having deliveredhis soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to theleft of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciativeencounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to somerespectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classicalanecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalousmiscarriages of justice that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now hereposed. He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and hishead on one side. One whisker was turned back against the comfortablepadding. His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and hisfrown was a little assuaged. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence, respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard ithad made his unguarded expression!

I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake himup and ask him what HE was up to with mankind. 

9

One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days wasMargaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowlyand with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioningmy 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 beforeI came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I thinkduring the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon ourfellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene andquality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without anyvery definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause betweentea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, thebeginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an oddexceptional little wrangle. 

At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of thearistocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine forme to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, thatChampneys 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 leastaffected 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 anyother woman's in the house. 

"It's not only their dresses, " Margaret parried. "It's the scale andspirit of things. "

I questioned that. "They're cynical, " said Margaret, staring before herout of the window. 

I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there hadbeen an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was alsoAltiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us. "You know his reputation, " said Margaret. "That Normandy girl. Everyone knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! likesomething not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things tome. "

"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--allthat happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But noneof 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 condonationdisplayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's theirwhole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracyagainst the mass of people, " said Margaret. "When I sit at dinnerin that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections andcandlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and itscandelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and theover-crowded cottages stuffed away under the table. "

I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearnedincrement. 

"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 theTories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as wehave it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on theLiberal side against darkness on the Tory?"

"They MUST know, " said Margaret. 

I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must haveseemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the timeI was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my own; Iwanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that werepossible. It was perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolicalelement in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all theclearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talkingluminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and myreplete citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton discussing the care and management of the stomach overa specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressivefrock-coat pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centreand wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put thetruth to her?

"I don't see things at all as you do, " I said. "I don't see things inthe same way. "

"Think of the poor, " said Margaret, going off at a tangent. 

"Think of every one, " I said. "We Liberals have done more mischiefthrough well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in theworld 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 preventpeople drinking what they liked, because it interfered with industrialregularity--"

"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talkingmere 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. Ifneglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then dealwith it as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sellsomething 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 forselling honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk atall. Don't intensify the viciousness of the public-house by assuming theplace 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 realpublic-house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presentlywant to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt mento forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because ofbetting 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 yellowflowers.... 

"But prevention, " I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of ourwork. "

I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no antisepticsin life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individuallythan the average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? Thereal villain in the piece--in the whole human drama--is themuddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded orwicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I couldlet all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do whatit jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightlyneglected 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. "Ican'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 anddifficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permitthe statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, adefinite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency with that. Thosesubtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague usall so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts hischin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Thosewho have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immensemental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts andutterances on the one hand and the "thinking-out" process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, ascheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibilitywhile at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observationyou tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presentedmarch of affairs.... 

The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectualautobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elementsof the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtledetails; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Proteanvalues, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities ofsleepless nights.... 

And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, tobegin 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 therealities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if yourthinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despiteof all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. Itis no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leaphaphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the wholeworld of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to afailing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get something done, " butthe only sane thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker andtake thought and get a better implement.... 

One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was acurious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this shouldhappen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrasethings 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 uncertainto go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustainedconfidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me;her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate mychanging attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was alwaysthinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I wasstruggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, halftrue, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasingignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditationfitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they hadnothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these bigpeople, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, weretemperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than ourdeliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded ofthat, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements intheir composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It wasour incurable differences in habits and gestures of thought comingbetween us again. 

The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myselfand my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixedevil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series oftalks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more importantin my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, Inever 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 distilledquite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the rightthing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over tothe Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of suchforces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientificresearch, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That wasin 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict withthe country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. Iunder-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, Icalculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policyalike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immenseopportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened byconflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justificationby reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought andhigh professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the nowinevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there wouldbe great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that wereckoned.... 

At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp andShoesmith, 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 theHartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, veryrich-looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope ofgold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned thesegolden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapesme, --some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I rememberI didn't speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulledthe blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly inthe 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 herselfin the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stopperedbottles 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'thave 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, liftedan ivory hand-glass, and put it down again. 

"I wish, " she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it werepossible that you shouldn't do this. " She stopped abruptly, and I didnot look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making tocontrol 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 Kinghampsteadelection, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing anddisappointing 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--Istill 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--" Shecould 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 canfind work to do--better work on that side. "

"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if itdidn'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 saidnothing. 

There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiffdissertation from the hearthrug. "I am going over, because I think Imay join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. Ithink that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogetherconfused and demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir theclasses which now dominate the Conservative party into an energeticrevival. They will set out to win back, and win back. Even if myestimate of contemporary forces is wrong and they win, they will stillbe forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad will supply thechastening if home politics fail. The effort at renascence is bound tocome by either alternative. I believe I can do more in relation tothat effort than in any other connexion in the world of politics at thepresent time. That's my case, Margaret. "

She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw asideall the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her sentenceremained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone over, theywill 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 seethings as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range.... "I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up mydisquisition. 

"After all, " I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in mywritings. "

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. Theneither I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to aGeneral Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke aquarrel. "

"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 quitetell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign myseat--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--likeundoing 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--ithas been more than a religion. "

I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against theimplications of that. 

"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking ofgoing over, almost lightly--to those others. "... 

She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she hadcaptured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protestingineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's because I think myduty 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 shouldhave come to this!"

She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She washurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, Ithought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could notmake her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me tothis divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperamentswas like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flashof intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionatedisappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everythingelse 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 withan 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 biglanding, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heardthe soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroomdoor. 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 THINKin the same manner?"

2

And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolongedestrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations that wenever reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for sometime; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us wasconfessed. My own feelings were curiously divided. It is remarkable thatmy very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with thisquarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quiteunaware how or when my early romantic love for her purity and beautyand high-principled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know thatquite early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessedresentment at the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to herstandards of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, andnone 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 Icould think of Margaret with a returning kindliness. 

But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent uponher for house room and food and social support, as it were under falsepretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairsaltogether. But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed alast brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to keep my personalexpenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her motor brougham, dined and madeappearances, met politely at breakfast--parted at night with a kiss uponher cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quiteunderstood, which I understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never crossedthe landing to her room again. 

In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, Iperceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder is thatI, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many wayswiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After ourmarriage I treated her always as an equal, and let her go her way; heldher responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate thingsshe said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. Itwasn'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 tocrossing the difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier andmore tenderly, if there had not been the consciousness of my financialdependence on her always stiffening my pride, I think she would havemoved with me from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But shedid not get any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. Itmust have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew--forsurely 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 manshe 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 toher, because even on my wedding morning there had been, deep down inmy soul, voiceless though present, something weakly protesting, a faintperception of wrong-doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplyinggerms 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 pieceof statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected displayof vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movementtowards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals ratherstrengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructiveand reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. Iassailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a seriesof minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that theland was a great public service that needed to be controlled on broadand far-sighted lines. I had no objection to its nationalisation, but Idid object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressureof taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in anutterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all inthe direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate values from hisproperty, and such a course of action was bound to give us an irritatedand vindictive land-owning class, the class upon which we had hithertorelied--not unjustifiably--for certain broad, patriotic services andan influence upon our collective judgments that no other class seemedprepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buyit out, but do not drive it to a defensive fight, and leave it stillsufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in yourstate. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican untilthe outraged Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You nowpropose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class whichhas many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, andthere is nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows anysense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leadersyou are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at itnot only in the House, but in the press.... 

The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to mydefection. 

Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of theKINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was treated toan open letter, signed "Junius Secundus, " and I replied in provocativeterms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different endsof the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friendParvill, 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 ofindignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, J. P. , dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of theoccasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character andhis concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also inmourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the deathof her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of theseverest type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew ofSir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and acouple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stoppedhalfway 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 facecontracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken outand the features compressed. The rest of the deputation, which includedtwo other public-spirited ladies and several ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus going Strandward during theMay meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as spokesman, and manifesteda strong disposition to say "Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protestsprovided my eye wasn't upon them at the time. 

I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but quitedefinite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision. Behindthem I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for publicopinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed at the presenttime. The whole process of politics which bulks so solidly in historyseemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives aboveabysms 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 ifthere isn't a dissolution before next February, and if there is I shan'tstand 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 nowthat I don't think it will be necessary for me to resign, and the sooneryou find my successor the better for the party. The Lords are in acorner; they've got to fight now or never, and I think they will throwout the Budget. Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that willlast for years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguelyindignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever inthe matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the Britishconstitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it issufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords--and I don't see why heshouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to fall backupon. You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, isdestitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give it. I don't see whatyou will do.... For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between awindow and my writing-desk. "

I paused. "I think, gentlemen, " began Parvill, "that we hear all thiswith very great regret.... "

4

My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something thatplayed itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro betweenmy house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs andoffices in which we were preparing our new developments, in a stateof aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as achemist would say. I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. Ihad a tremendous sense of released energies. I had got back to the sortof thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself forso long in my imagination. Our purpose now was plain, bold, andextraordinarily congenial. We meant no less than to organise a newmovement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinionand prepare the ground for a revised and renovated ruling culture. 

For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted todo. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to create aweekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith tocollect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, LordGane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which should constitute a moreor less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunchon Tuesday to sustain our general co-operations. We marked our claimupon Toryism even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselvescollectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to allsorts of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character tocontrol me effectively in my editorial decisions. My only influentialcouncillor at first was old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It wascurious how we two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumedthe 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 necessaryinstincts for the business. We meant to make the paper right andgood down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this withextraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our politicalmotives too markedly at first, and through all the dust storm andtumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we made a littleintellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing. It was thefirm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were destined to bebeaten badly in 1910, and our game was the longer game of reconstructionthat would begin when the shouting and tumult of that immediate conflictwere over. Meanwhile we had to get into touch with just as many goodminds as possible. 

As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadlyconceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Ganegreat searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reformscheme into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues, and we did muchto humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up ofthe Poor Law agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatriceand Sidney Webb. In addition, without any very definite explanation toany one but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a smallmatter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical quality in ourcolumns. 

That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUEWEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the confusionand futility of contemporary thought was due to the general need ofmetaphysical training.... The great mass of people--and not simplycommon people, but people active and influential in intellectualthings--are still quite untrained in the methods of thought andabsolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely acaricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous andchaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do notsuspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage abovethis general condition stands that minority of people who have atsome time or other discovered general terms and a certain usefor generalisations. They are--to fall back on the ancienttechnicality--Realists of a crude sort. When I say Realist of courseI mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not Realist in the almostdiametrically different sense of opposition to Idealist. Such are theBaileys; such, to take their great prototype, was Herbert Spencer (whocouldn't read Kant); such are whole regiments of prominent and entirelyself-satisfied contemporaries. They go through queer little processes ofdefinition and generalisation and deduction with the completest beliefin the validity of the intellectual instrument they are using. They areRealists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour. The Baileys having got to this glorious stage in mental development--itis glorious because it has no doubts--were always talking about training"Experts" to apply the same simple process to all the affairsof mankind. Well, Realism isn't the last word of human wisdom. Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, and the like--thekind of people William James writes of as "tough-minded, " go on beyondthis methodical happiness, and are forever after critical of premisesand terms. They are truer--and less confident. They have reachedscepticism and the artistic method. They have emerged into the newNominalism. 

Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of intellectualmethod matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind, that the collectivemind of this intricate complex modern state can only function properlyupon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always been her side of our mentalco-operation rather than mine. Her mind has the light movement thatgoes so often with natural mental power; she has a wonderful art inillustration, and, as the reader probably knows already, she writes ofmetaphysical matters with a rare charm and vividness. So far there hasbeen no collection of her papers published, but they are to be found notonly in the BLUE WEEKLY columns but scattered about the monthlies; manypeople must be familiar with her style. It was an intention we didmuch to realise before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUEWEEKLY to maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, andat last scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, somelarge imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen ormine.... 

I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and socialmatter the best literary and critical backing we could get in London. Ihunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good criticism; Iwas indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if not to acceptadvice; I watched every corner of the paper, and had a dozen men alertto get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattachedreader. The chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that itshould fall into the hands of some particular school, and this I watchedfor closely. It seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension andbreadth of view together in the same critic. So it falls to the wiseeditor to secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detectedthe shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poorthing because it was "in the right direction, " or damn a vigorous pieceof 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 persistentappeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY wasprinting twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went intoall the clubs in London and three-quarters of the country houses whereweek-end parties gather together. Its sale by newsagents and bookstallsgrew steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of beingdiscussed, and influencing discussion. 

5

Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of AdelphiTerrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided window ofplate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the HotelCecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of southbank with its shot towers and chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seenpiers of the great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's justfloated into view on the left against the hotel facade. By night andday, in every light and atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed andsplashed the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes ofthings became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirrorof steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground theEmbankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisementsflashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of smokereflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a marvel ofshining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of driftingfog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details, minutely fine. 

As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am backthere, 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 greenshaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, twoor three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the shadows are chairsand another table bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimlyseen, a long window seat black in the darkness, and then the coolunbroken 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 wereblack animalculae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurelybetween 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. Oncesome piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of timeuntil I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see theeastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower Bridge, flushed andbanded 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 amore tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary manin relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism inrelation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I havegiven now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passedfrom my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructivearistocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a mandiscovering himself. Incidentally that self-development led to aprofound breach with my wife. One has read stories before of husbandand wife speaking severally two different languages and coming to anunderstanding. But Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I camemore and more to use my own, diverged. 

I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended forme. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to mymarried life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show thequeer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interestsbreak upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions. Ido not think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance ofsisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventurein an age of small families; I never came to know any woman at allintimately until I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs wereencounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure thatmade them things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From aboyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women Ihad passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were thingsinferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time Margarethad 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 windowthrough which one has been surveying a crowd. She didn't becomewomankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world.... Andthen came this secret separation.... 

Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development ofmy relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to havesolved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought thesethings were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, herbrow slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; andif we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribedand isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of ourlives in the slightest degree if we had. 

And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and herproblems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned. Thething stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and howit was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot ofthe modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his daywomen 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 oursthe case has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand besidethe tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of theshadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogetherunprecedented attention. I feel that in these matters my life has beenalmost typical of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She isno longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimentalbackground; 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? Isshe a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she cameto me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, anunavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded andcontrolled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once trustmore and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, mostnecessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness ofunderstanding.... 

2

In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed eitherthat the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow theydidn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they" were, hadto settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then. But even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the damsholding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We politicalschemers were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in thefield of social reconstruction. We had also, we realised, to ploughdeeper. We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements ofsexual relationship and examine and decide upon them. 

The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropoliswere scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspectof the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, newsense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence thatthe Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemicmadness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one whosought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women andsympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider thingsthan an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventionsof relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory adisorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and thatalso was coming to bear upon statecraft. 

My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don'tpropose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurditiesand follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of thatunquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that wereabsolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for itsone central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazinglyeffective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to theforces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple argument based on asimple assumption; it was the first crude expression of a great mass andmingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasionamong modern educated women that the conditions of their relations withmen were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. Theyhad not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairlymanifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use itperhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many thingsthey had every reason to hate.... 

I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in thesession of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went toprison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I camedown from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusionoutside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with an immensemultitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-facedand intent. I still remember the effect of their faces upon me. It wasquite different from the general effect of staring about and dividedattention one gets in a political procession of men. There was anexpression of heroic tension. 

There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women'sorganisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout thatwinter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shownin the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic. Whenat last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seatof excited people, and the array of police on horse and on foot mighthave been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak. There were densemasses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. Thescuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to followsuch stupendous preparations.... 

3

Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, andall through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piersof the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood womenpickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to andfro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course, the independentworker-class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standingthere, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness of battered women showing intheir eyes; north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women;trim, comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduatesand undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one'simagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of thosewomen looked defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir ofadventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. Ifound that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarilyimpressive--infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible"ragging" of the more militant section. I thought of the appeal thatmust be going through the country, summoning the women from countlessscattered homes, rooms, colleges, to Westminster. 

I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I shouldignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past withaverted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards the end theHouse evoked an etiquette of salutation. 

4

There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat thewhole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, irrelevantto all other broad developments of social and political life. Westruggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust outbefore us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness, " it insisted toour reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to the essentialthings.... "

We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient childrenwill starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That conservatism whichworks in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual dailylife is all against a profounder treatment of political issues. Thepolitician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, inspite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himselfout of the reality he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back tolittleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, butwithout, he adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morningcup of tea.... 

The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. Itreacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And atany particular time only a small minority have a personal interest inchanging the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in aconstantly recruited majority against conscious change and adjustmentin these matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and anoverwhelming proportion of influential people, are people who havebanished their dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and beautifulpossibilities are no longer to be thought about. They have given upany aspirations for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keendelights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical senseof righteousness as their compensation. It's a settled affair withthem, a settled, dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, theslightest reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said tothe Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universalmarriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving allthese things alone. " And then, with a groan in his voice, "Leave themalone! Leave them all alone!"

That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressedpassion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and wentout. 

For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. Ideveloped a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for thehuman figure in art--turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneerat lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I foundthe effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my mostuncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more forever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were notof my opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral andobjectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them asat that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normaldecent man. 

And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds ithard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreamsbeyond these commonplace acquiescences, --the appeal of beauty suddenlyshining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, thesweetness of distant music.... 

It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the presenttime, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered peopleand sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to followambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall inlove, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel intheir blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selectivebirths above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessityaverse from this most fundamental aspect of existence.... 

5

It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of theposition of women in general, or the change in my ideas about all theseintimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, thatled me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged fromthe region of academic and timid discussion into the field of practicalpolitics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was abroader and colder view of things that first determined me in my attemptto graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon BritishImperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it ispossible to estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done. 

I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universaleducation grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is buta short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality ofbirths in the community, and from that again to these forbidden andfear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, aEugenic society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and theRapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless peoplein general--one never addressed them in particular--nothing was donetowards arresting those adverse processes. Almost against my naturalinclination, I found myself forced to go into these things. I came tothe conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family, based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. Itwasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and welltrained enough for the demands of the developing civilised state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its intimatesubstance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensiveand courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard systemof pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longersecures a young population numerous enough or good enough for thegrowing needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weavingsplendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny, ugly, insufficient baby inthe cradle. 

No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present questionfor statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and sits atevery legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except theimprovement of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me ifwe were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageouspeople must come together and have children, women with their finesenses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compelsthem to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or tobear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherouspressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, inseeking to save the family, to threaten its existence. It is as ifa party of pigmies in a not too capacious room had been joined by acarnivorous giant--and decided to go on living happily by cutting himdead.... 

The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it canget the best possible increase under the best possible conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent family unitof to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and owner of thechildren, in which all are dependent upon him, subordinated to hisenterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up or down, does notsupply anything like the best conceivable conditions. We want tomodernise the family footing altogether. An enormous premium both inpleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out to women to subordinateinstinctive and selective preferences to social and materialconsiderations. 

The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition ofthe family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything ischanged. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most amongjust the most efficient and active and best adapted classes in thecommunity. The species is recruited from among its failures and fromamong less civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effectburning the best of their possible babies in the furnaces that run themachinery. In the United States the native Anglo-American strain hasscarcely increased at all since 1830, and in most Western Europeancountries the same is probably true of the ablest and most energeticelements in the community. The women of these classes still remainlegally and practically dependent and protected, with the only naturalexcuse for their dependence gone.... 

The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactorygroupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effortto sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary childgrows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no morethan continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, herenumbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlesslybegotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation of Bromstead overagain, 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 thefacilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimlessdecadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?... 

It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion untilI faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had it clearin my mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all thesurrenders of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of "Leaveit alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage and the begetting and care ofchildren, is the very ground substance in the life of the community. In a world in which everything changes, in which fresh methods, freshadjustments 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 abarbaric age. 

Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also thesolution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together, areright and left of one question. The only conceivable way out from ourIMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to say of adequatemothering, as no longer a chance product of individual passions buta service rendered to the State. Women must become less and lesssubordinated to individual men, since this works out in a more or lesscomplete limitation, waste, and sterilisation of their essentiallysocial function; they must become more and more subordinated asindividually independent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, toexpress the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly organised, scientificstate we desire must, if it is to exist at all, base itself not uponthe irresponsible man-ruled family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and freedom of women and the public endowment ofmotherhood. 

After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clearto modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering istheir special function in the State, and that a personal subordinationto an individual man with an unlimited power of control over thisintimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No contemporary woman ofeducation put to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man canmake upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. Shewants the reality of her choice and she means "family" while a mantoo often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the familyrelationships fundamentally. Their form remains just what it waswhen woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally achild-producing, chattel. Against these time-honoured ideas the newspirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, andtears.... 

I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I want tosee women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in thecollective purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fineas men; they can be as wise as men; they are capable of far greaterdevotion than men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage lawframed primarily for them and for their protection and the good of therace, and not for men's satisfactions. I want to see them bearing andrearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public dutyand service, choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in noway enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The socialconsciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mineof wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to changethe respective values of the family group altogether, and make the homeindeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner and responsibleguardian 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--asuntried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. Of course, it maywork out to modify men's ideas of marriage profoundly. To me that isa secondary consideration. I do not believe that particular assertionmyself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is apsychological necessity to the mass of civilised people. But even if Idid believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is theonly line that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from endingin biological decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the onlypossible way which will ensure the permanently developing civilisedstate at which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached inthe life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstructionmust be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population proveinsufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is not somuch moral decadence that will destroy us as moral inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only alternative to thisprofound reconstruction is a decay in human quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by ourcivilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase of disorder andcrumble and perish, as Rome perished, as France declines, as the strainof the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there maybe in the attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt. 

6

I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the priceof constructive realities. These questions were no doubt monstrouslydangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive whodidn't look scared at the mention of "The Family, " but if raising theseissues were essential to the social reconstructions on which my lifewas set, that did not matter. It only implied that I should take themup with deliberate caution. There was no release because of risk ordifficulty. 

The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project inthis direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my speculationsabout a change of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece ofmusic. The two drew to a conclusion together. I would not only go overto 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 strongpersuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislativeproposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things weremuch riper for development in this direction than old-experienced peopleout of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to phrasethe thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be done in theconstituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood forthwith, providedonly that it was made perfectly clear that anything a sane person couldpossibly intend by "morality" was left untouched by these proposals. 

I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE andBurkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of State Helpfor Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fallin the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE WEEKLY, leading upto a tentative and generalised advocacy of the public endowment of thenation's children. I was more and more struck by the acceptance won by asober and restrained presentation of this suggestion. 

And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came theHanditch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist, and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returnedtriumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of Motherhoodas part of my open profession and with the full approval of the partypress. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to thetable between the whips. 

That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of newmembers, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and newpurposes in the national life. 

Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my bookends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of thisgreat world of political possibilities. I close this Third Book as Iopened it, with an admission of difficulties and complexities, but nowwith a pile of manuscript before me I have to confess them unsurmountedand still entangled. 

Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growingrealisation that the essential quality of all political and socialeffort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay ofindividual lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis ofmorality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, fromthat will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement ofindividual lives.... 

I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this bookthe part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called itthe hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth andrightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more intoa disciplined and understanding relation to a plan. And I have triedto indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of ourconfusions.... 

Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, andhow it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of mine, amere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleasesthem. 

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 totell 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 avein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and atthis point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see ourdestruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if wehad been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected andconclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two friendsand crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to our situationor ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The thing was in us andnot from without, it was akin to our way of thinking and our habitualattitudes; it had, for all its impulsive effect, a certain necessity. Wemight have escaped no doubt, as two men at a hundred yards may shoot ateach other with pistols for a considerable time and escape. But it isn'tparticularly reasonable to talk of the contrariety of fate if they bothget hit. 

Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years offriendship, and not quite unwittingly so. 

In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in steeringmy way between two equally undesirable tones in the telling. In thefirst place I do not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence Iam very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got Isabel we can no doubtcount the cost of it and feel unquenchable regrets, but I am not surewhether, if we could be put back now into such circumstances as wewere in a year ago, or two years ago, whether with my eyes fully open Ishould not do over again very much as I did. And on the other hand I donot want to justify the things we have done. We are two bad people--ifthere is to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have actedbadly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largelywasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queerhumour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again andagain into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as unpremeditatedas it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a morning's writingI find the faint suggestion getting into every other sentence that ourblunders and misdeeds embodied, after the fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel so little confidence in my abilityto keep this altogether out of my book that I warn the reader here thatin spite of anything he may read elsewhere in the story, intimatinghowever shyly an esoteric and exalted virtue in our proceedings, theplain truth of this business is that Isabel and I wanted each other witha want entirely formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though Icould tell you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want oraccount for its extreme intensity. 

I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of wildrightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that eludesme and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the realveracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks andmenageries of human reason.... 

We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find myselfprone 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 behindus may have had such purposes with us, but it is not for us to annexher intentions by a moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, anydecent justification for us whatever--at that the story must stand. 

But if there is no justification there is at least a very effectiveexcuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of thatpassionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds ofmorality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious compromises ofthe late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of anything but the mosttimid discussion of sexual morality in our literature and drama, thepervading cultivated and protected muddle-headedness, leaves mentallyvigorous people with relatively enormous possibilities of destructionand little effective help. They find themselves confronted by thehabits and prejudices of manifestly commonplace people, and by thatextraordinary patched-up Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised"deity, diffused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from examinationand any possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god aboutwhom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are FORCED tobe laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is inevitable thata considerable fraction of just that bolder, more initiatory section ofthe intellectual community, the section that can least be spared fromthe collective life in a period of trial and change, will drift intosuch emotional crises and such disaster as overtook us. Most perhapswill 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 trueof America, that an honest open scandal ends a career. England in thelast quarter of a century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on thisscore; she would, I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serveher. Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seemthe cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessarysocial element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. Itnot only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets anenormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I amtelling this side of my story with so much explicitness. 

2

Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed adesultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel keptit up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with itsthree or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilledour election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would turn up ina state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she wasreading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of the day. Inher shameless liking for me she was as natural as a savage. She wouldexercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested herback in the afternoon, or guide me for some long ramble that dodged thesuburban and congested patches of the constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that unabashed, straight-minded way a girlwill sometimes adopt with a man, chose my path or criticised mygame with a motherly solicitude for my welfare that was absurd anddelightful. And we talked. We discussed and criticised the stories ofnovels, scraps of history, pictures, social questions, socialism, thepolicy of the Government. She was young and most unevenly informed, butshe was amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life hadI known a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamtthere was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightlessplace when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not haveprecipitated my abandonment of the seat!

She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed withme when presently after my breach with the Liberals various littleundergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions. Ifavoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At that timeI think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that laylike a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that wehad the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she wasmy pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and friend. People smiledindulgently--even Margaret smiled indulgently--at our attraction for oneanother. 

Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going, liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm, aspeople say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed tothink of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, orif they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought aspermanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments comeinto our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn't there. 

Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, andtremendously insistent upon each other's preference. 

I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should haveset me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself. It wasone Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees andshrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the newsharp greens of spring. I had walked talking with Isabel and a couple ofother girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticisedthe new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and thatin the hammocks under the trees, and picked a way among the scatteredtea-parties on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberiancrab near the great bay window. There I sat and ate great quantitiesof cake, and discussed the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made somecomments upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the men inPembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group of girls and women donswere now having it out with me. 

I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabelinterrupt me. She did interrupt me. She had been lying prone on theground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, andI was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I turned toIsabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and noseand forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows ofthe twigs of the trees behind me. And something--an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever feltbefore. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrowand concentrated life another human being had really thrust into mybeing and gripped my very heart. 

Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turnedback and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of herintervention. 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 thatthis was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told howdefinitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at mymarriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where thereis neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-making. Isuppose there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a womanwithout thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide:"Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO, " and set invisible barsbetween themselves and all the wives in the world. Perhaps that isthe way to live. Perhaps there is no other method than this effectualannihilation of half--and the most sympathetic and attractive half--ofthe human beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse isconcerned. I am quite convinced anyhow that such a qualified intimacyas ours, such a drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeledconversation with an invisible, implacable limit set just where theintimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and womenare to go so far together, they must be free to go as far as they maywant to go, without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and theliberal-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 wemust prepare for an unprecedented toleration of lovers. 

Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into thelife of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more urgentthan the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to ayoung man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding. She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and watched them, and testedthem, and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughtsabout them in the way that seems instinctive in a natural-minded girl. There was even an engagement--amidst the protests and disapproval ofthe college authorities. I never saw the man, though she gave me a longhistory of the affair, to which I listened with a forced and insinceresympathy. She struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thingin itself, and regardless of its consequences. After a time she becamesilent 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 andme than I was to know for several years to come. 

We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but wekept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she wantedto talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, andI went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I combined itwith one or two other engagements--somewhere in February. Insensibly shehad become important enough for me to make journeys for her. 

But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There wassomething in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment; themere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up. 

A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulouslyto talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute ofchaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or othernear 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 astate of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a game ofconversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was impressingthe Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in arising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of Merton to the BotanicGardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she got almosther 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 quickflush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to work withyou. 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 ahandful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on mylap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all thatit might mean to me. 

It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusiveas 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 withpride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no doubt that her valuein my life was tremendous. It made it none the less, that in those daysI was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go outof my life again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon thiscomplex business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery inevery love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneaththe fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future. I've neverproperly weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clearpreference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much deliberateintention 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 sostupid as not to have had that in my mind.... 

If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I couldhave managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage and beforeIsabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidentswith other people, flashes of temptation--no telling is possible ofthe thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and passion would nothave taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurablycomplicated by the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march ofour minds together. That has always mattered enormously. I should havewanted her company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled oldlady; we would have hunted shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only twomen would never have had the patience and readiness for one anotherwe two had. I had never for years met any one with whom I could be socarelessly sure of understanding or to whom I could listen so easilyand fully. She gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it sothat it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and cornersof my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible toexplain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voiceheard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased myears. 

She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent thesummer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of all shenow meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London forthe autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady Colbeck, but shefell out with her hostess when it became clear she wanted to write, notnovels, but journalism, and then she set every one talking by takinga flat near Victoria and installing as her sole protector an elderlyGerman governess she had engaged through a scholastic agency. She beganwriting, not in that copious flood the undisciplined young woman ofgifts is apt to produce, but in exactly the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms, developing the phrasing of opinions, takinga definite line. She was, of course, tremendously discussed. She wasdisapproved of, but she was invited out to dinner. She got rather areputation for the management of elderly distinguished men. It was anodd experience to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into somebig drawing-room and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sacktransformed into a shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls andivory-white and lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair. 

For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she professedan unblushing preference for my company, and talked my views and soughtme out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY began to link uscloselier. 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 myintentions with a keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me inmind of a steel blade. Her writing became rapidly very good; she hada wit and a turn of the phrase that was all her own. We seemed to haveforgotten the little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over ourlast meeting at Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us inthose 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 notkeenly personal between us, but they had an air of being innocentlymental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a monstrous andengaging 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 longtime--until within a year of the Handitch election. 

After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" forcomfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less formaland compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their cousinLeonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with them inHerefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men who came alittle timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner andthe Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals withmanifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendshipthat oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsyand shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest ofhelping 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 thoughtthat might interfere with her work. If their friendship stole some hoursfrom Isabel's writing, it did not for a long while interfere with ourwalks 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 itimpossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebblestarted the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that thebarriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing downunperceived. 

And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycleof nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began tohappen, 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 inLondon, had kissed her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was thesort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, thatone never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprisingeffect of a judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off hiswig in court. No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite thesame quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with aremarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things itseemed to open to her. 

"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing, " she avowed. "Isuppose 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 thesethings. "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 tostop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry togive them up. "

"It's part of the requirements of the situation, " I said, "that heshould be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of newtopics, 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'vebegun to doubt about it. "

I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw andunderstood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each otherthen, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after thisthat we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with thecurtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plainbefore our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We justassumed the new footing.... 

It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there wasthin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other peoplehad been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenishcolour, 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 Ialso remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-likeflowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curiousthing that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate lovefor one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love foreach other had always been patent between us. There was so long andfrank an intimacy between us that we talked far more like brother andsister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of thesexes. We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever wedid we meant to do in the most perfect concert. We both felt anextraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, whatagain is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in spite ofthe perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. Itwas as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of eachother, 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 ordinaryobserver. I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with allthat really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as awicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personalinequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so manythings she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwentmine. The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like theresponse of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watchingsunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was sobright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the backof our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is fullof joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had todiscuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers. 

Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all thescreaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances of myupbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not ashadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate love betweenus was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with the fullestparticularity just all that I was taught or found out for myselfin these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and the fiercesilences of her governesses and the breathless warnings of teachers, andall the social and religious influences that had been brought to bearupon her, had worked out to the same void of conviction. The code hadfailed with us altogether. We didn't for a moment consider anything butthe 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, andparticularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality hasn'tgripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They may renderit lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There are scarcely anytolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its prohibitions do, infact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly suppressions. You may, ifyou choose, silence the admission of this in literature and currentdiscussion; you will not prevent it working out in lives. People come upto the great moments of passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unpreparedas no really civilised and intelligently planned community would let anyone be unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customsthat have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generousspirits are disposed to despise. 

Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are tryingto run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush" withoutexplaining to our children or discussing with them anything aboutlove and marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in enforceddarknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient tradition whicheverybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We affect a tremendousand cultivated shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the mostarbitrary appearance. What ensues? What did ensue with us, for example?On the one hand was a great desire, robbed of any appearance of shameand grossness by the power of love, and on the other hand, the possiblejealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so and so, material risks anddangers. It is only in the retrospect that we have been able to graspsomething of the effectual case against us. The social prohibition litby the intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous, irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. Wemight be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sortof heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to theprospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people mayhesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensityof the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timidpeople. 

We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores ofthousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it werepossible 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 waseasy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything toourselves. That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle thatmattered to us--the haunting presence of Margaret. 

And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scatteredabout us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves. Love willout. All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that. Love withsustained secrecy cannot be love. It is just exactly the point people donot understand. 

5

But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and asudden journey to America intervened. 

"This thing spells disaster, " I said. "You are too big and I am too bigto attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility of beingfound 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'mafraid--I'd be proud. "

"Wait till it happens. "

There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is hardto tell who urged and who resisted. 

She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, andargued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms; she toldme that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessedher, so that she could not work, could not think, could not endure otherpeople for the love of me.... 

I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to Americathat puzzled all my friends. 

I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all mystrength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit thepaper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among otherthings, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the world. 

Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical myexplanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to preventthe remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in theTUSCAN, 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 thetrain from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself--no novelist would dare toinvent 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 backheadlong to London. 

Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust andconfidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength torefrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation mightsucceed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters setthat idea going in my mind--the haunting perception that I might returnto 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. Icouldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, inshort, stand it. 

I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have keptupon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, andI wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world wasphantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you have neverwanted anything like that. I went straight to her. 

But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the realityof love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings arenothing, 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 senseof defiance, the joy of having dared, I can't tell--I can but hint ofjust one aspect, of what an amazing LARK--it's the only word--it seemedto us. The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it so faras it will bear justification, eludes statement. 

What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficultiesevaded and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say thatone looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throband beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand? Robbed ofencompassing love, these things are of no more value than the taste ofgood wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing of music, --justsensuality and no more. No one can tell love--we can only tell the grossfacts of love and its consequences. Given love--given mutuality, and onehas effected a supreme synthesis and come to a new level of life--butonly those who know can know. This business has brought me morebitterness and sorrow than I had ever expected to bear, but even nowI will not say that I regret that wilful home-coming altogether. Weloved--to the uttermost. Neither of us could have loved any one elseas we did and do love one another. It was ours, that beauty; it existedonly between us when we were close together, for no one in the worldever to know save ourselves. 

My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extremevividness, 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 yetexcept Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in upon Brittenand 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. SilentlyI 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 liesto Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her from Chicagoand again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on the spotin England for the new session, and that I was coming back--presently. I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made a calculatedprevarication when I announced my presence in London. I telephonedbefore I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She was, I knew, withthe Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came back to Radnor SquareI 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 mymind 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. Icame out of my study upon the landing when I heard the turmoil of herarrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened gladness. It was acold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar dark furs that suited herextremely and reinforced the delicate flush of her sweet face. She heldout both her hands to me, and drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissedme. 

"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, tooundifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness. Ithink 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. Sheput 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 luggagecab. 

"Tell me all about America, " said Margaret. "I feel as though you'd beenaway six year's. "

We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off thefur'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 hadexpected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this suddenabolition of our distances. 

"I want to know all about America, " she repeated, with her eyesscrutinising me. "Why did you come back?"

I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she satlistening. 

"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. Yousaid 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 withexpressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table trembleslightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness possessed me. Whatmight 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'tknow. I think perhaps I was rather stupid. " Her eyes were suddenlyshining 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 wantto 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 kissedit. 

"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with herarm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my face. I felt themost damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thoughtof Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence betweenus.... 

"Tell me, " I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell meplainly what you mean by this. "

I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with anodd effect of defending myself. "Have you been reading that old book ofmine?" I asked. 

"That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning downto Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn'tunderstand--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 themiddle 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, andshe sat close to me on the sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on mywords, a deliberate and invincible convert. 

"Yes, " she said, "yes. "... 

I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted themprofoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the lives ofall politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is attheir feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business toadmit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on talking. And I wasnow so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications, restatements, and confirmations.... 

Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my politicalprojects 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. Ithink it was some book I had to take her, some American book I hadbrought 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 wascompelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly about myneck 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 shampreoccupation to the door. 

I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me. If Ihad 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 andmyself, had reached out to stab another human being. 

7

The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretendthat nothing had changed except a small matter between us. We believedquite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thingthat had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through somemagically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world about us! Seen inretrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a weekI realised it; but that does not alter the fact that we did believe asmuch, and that people who are deeply in love and unable to marry willcontinue to believe so to the very end of time. They will continue tobelieve out of existence every consideration that separates them untilthey have come together. Then they will count the cost, as we two had todo. 

I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; andchiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions thathave happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world. Themoralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure andsay, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to havedone"--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that itdidn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doingit came. It amazes me now to think how little either of us troubledabout the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't anatom of respect for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of publicmorals will say we were very bad people; I submit in defence that theyare very bad guardians--provocative guardians.... And when at last therecame a claim against us that had an effective validity for us, we werein 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 dramaticallyrecalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazedhow much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised andconventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me there was sucha reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was my honour, that I had hadno right even to imperil. 

I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel andputting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did. PerhapsI may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had sofreshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day atthe sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylightbrought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, wedeclared, "pull the thing off. " Margaret must not know. Margaret shouldnot 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, magicallycut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we beganto realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was allabout us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resumingpossession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of herunreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hiddenlove made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husbandand wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her see that aspectof our case. How could I? The time for that had gone.... 

Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elementscrept 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 essentialfrankness of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that manywomen would have enjoyed. Together in our secrecy we relaxed, then inthe presence of other people again it was tiresome to have to watchfor the careless, too easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from thelimitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch. 

Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if itdevelops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had to snatch atremorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to thisor that. That is all very well for the intrigues of idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship. It is like lighting acandle for the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each timeblowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing to children playingwith the matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it inorder to do fine and honourable things together. We had achieved--Igive the ugly phrase that expresses the increasing discolouration in mymind--"illicit intercourse. " To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't inour style. But where were we to end?... 

Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we couldhave seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the glow of ourcell blinded us.... I wonder what might have happened if at that time wehad given it up.... We propounded it, we met again in secret to discussit, and our overpowering passion for one another reduced that meeting toabsurdity.... 

Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all ourconceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in the qualityof our minds that physical love without children is a little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful. With imaginative people therevery speedily comes a time when that realisation is inevitable. Wehadn'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 suchthings. 

There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in theirorder, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first brightperfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases wereno more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadowsspreading 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 troublethe reader with a detailed history of events that must be quitesufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks ofjournalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the readervery probably, as for most people outside a comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name inthe BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. BeforeHanditch I was a journalist and writer of no great public standing;after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group ofpersons who stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to avery large extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, howmuch one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second electionI was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply ayoung candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told todo this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialistflood, like a starfish rolling up a beach. 

My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do notthink I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance atall of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat withits long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 atthe last election, offered a hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensionsand the belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate wereprovidential interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me, did counttremendously in my favour. "We aren't going to win, perhaps, " saidCrupp, "but we are going to talk. " And until the very eve of victory, wetreated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And so itwas the Endowment of Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got intoEnglish 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, " hesaid. 

"I think the Family exists for the good of the children, " I said; "isthat queer?"

"Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it. And aboutmarriage--?"

"I'm all right about marriage--trust me. "

"Of course, if YOU had children, " said Plutus, ratherinconsiderately.... 

They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag callthe HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations andmisrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I spokefor an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy of theSENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest expositionof the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever been made upto that time in England. Its effect on the press was extraordinary. TheLiberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space under the impressionthat I had only to be given rope to hang myself; the Conservatives cutme down or tried to justify me; the whole country was talking. I had hada pamphlet in type upon the subject, and I revised this carefully andput it on the book-stalls within three days. It sold enormously andbrought me bushels of letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitchalone. At meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Longbefore polling day Plutus was converted. 

"It's catching on like old age pensions, " he said. "We've dished theLiberals! 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 fifteenhundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apologetics variedby repudiation to triumphant praise. "A renascent England, breedingmen, " said the leader in his chief daily on the morning after thepolling, and claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the pioneersin sanely bold constructive projects. 

I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the nighttrain. 

CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION

1

To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel andmyself, I might well have appeared at that time the most successful andenviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an uncongenial startin political life; I had become a considerable force through the BLUEWEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly influential body of opinion; Ihad re-entered Parliament with quite dramatic distinction, and in spiteof a certain faltering on the part of the orthodox Conservativestowards the bolder elements in our propaganda, I had loyal and unenviousassociates who were making me a power in the party. People were comingto our group, understandings were developing. It was clear we shouldplay a prominent part in the next general election, and that, given aConservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world openedout to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years ahead seemedfalling into order, shining with the credible promise of immenseachievement. 

And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret of myrelations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and thrusts, thrustsrelentlessly. 

From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her hadbeen more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation. It hadinnumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we wanted to betogether as much as possible--we were beginning to long very much foractual living together in the same house, so that one could come asit were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy perhaps about sometrivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively sterile passion, you must remember, outsideit, altogether greater than it so far as our individual lives wereconcerned, there had grown and still grew an enormous affection andintellectual sympathy between us. We brought all our impressions and allour ideas to each other, to see them in each other's light. It is hardto convey that quality of intellectual unison to any one who has notexperienced it. I thought more and more in terms of conversation withIsabel; 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 goingabout Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of herapproach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The morning ofthe polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw her for an instantin 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 therelike a queen by your side--! She did--last time. I remember. " She caughtat a sob and dashed her hand across her face impatiently. "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool!... Good luck, old man, to you! You'regoing 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 thepassage.... 

I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse withvictory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's flat andfound her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping about hereyes. 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 morningpapers--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 sobbingin my arms. "The bigger you are--the more you show, " she said--"the morewe 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 andsat 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 myhand and kissed it. 

"You've done a great thing this time, " she said. "Handitch will makeyou. "

"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 asif 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 wasnothing--it was just a step across the threshold. My dear, every momentyou are away I ache for you--ache! I want to be about when it isn'tlove-making or talk. I want to be doing things for you, and watchingyou when you're not thinking of me. All those safe, careless, intimatethings. And something else--" She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to botheryou. 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, mycolleague, 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 womanin love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is necessary tome--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 oneanother--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 Ibegan, 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 thetrouble.... 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 sodiscontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come betweenus if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything--with all mybrains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master, never youfear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This election--You'regoing 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 hadthe idea I was going to have you somehow presently for myself--I mean tohave 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 mythought of you. And it's nonsense--utter nonsense!" She stopped. She wascrying and choking. "And the child, you know--the child!"

I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations wereclear 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 muchaltogether.... Children get into a woman's brain--when she mustn't havethem, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the childwe might have now!--the little creature with soft, tender skin, andlittle 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 isfull of such little ghosts, dear lover--little things that asked forlife and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little fistbeating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little coldhands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holdingmy arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drewherself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall neversit with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a womanand your lover!... "

2

But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more andmore apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clingingpassionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible andfated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, butalso we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with thesedesires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political andintellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights keptaltering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing orthat. 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'taltogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most parta value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our otherinterests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to uslike killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of eachother engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other bestas activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't wanteach other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wantedto do big things together, and for us to take each other openly anddesperately would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wantedchildren indeed passionately, but children with every helpful chance inthe world, and children born in scandal would be handicapped at everyturn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude. 

And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimationsthat 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 thepreposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabelalmost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it herbusiness to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us both withconsternation. 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 andan atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased toinvade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we knew not how--aprivate scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed fromabsolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledgeof our relations. 

It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The longsmouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flaredup into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogetherdisastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of myposition 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 pouringin.... It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweepingthrough London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of theconsciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. Acertain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruptionwith extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England peopleto a kind of competition in denunciation. The old methods of theAnti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too widea scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to berestricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimationsof an extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters.... 

I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnervingrealisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptlyone's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. Onewalks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudibleaccusations. 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 anintrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. Ibecame doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentaclesof easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still growwarm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meetingme 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 whatof all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I andempty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I hadan open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one countsupon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they weredisconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving waybeneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidenceof life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similarthings were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces againstus. 

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. TheBaileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal groupthey had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table hadlong been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all itsallies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing, "and found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted ChambersStreet a dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished tofind them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think Handitchhad filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not onlyabandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power ofmisrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired theirwork and devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt fora certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerilityof their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more thaninjuries, and anyhow they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers of girls against me as a "reckless libertine, " andAltiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fendercurb after dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at atime with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell wasopen to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in. 

I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports thatcame to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles inthe POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEWwhich had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up tothe present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora hadhad not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to herpraises in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so manypeople who rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writesa poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has herUniversity training behind her and wrote from the first with the starkpower of a clear-headed man. "Now we know, " said Altiora, with just agleam of malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helpswith 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 bethoughtme of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist andsecretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days ofour breach. "Of course!" said I, "Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a longthin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letterdrawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guiltyand ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly ina state of hot indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in theair between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the sametime I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed himoff without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheapanyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem him ifanything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man'skissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were lookedafter with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And Altiora, I'veno doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening to get to thebottom of the matter. She got quite to the bottom of it, --it must havebeen a queer duologue. She read Isabel's careless, intimate lettersto me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use thisinformation in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in hersince our political breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; ithelped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall inany public sense was sheer waste, --the loss of a man. She knew she wasbehaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her informationwas irresistible. And she set to work at it marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levelsof 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'tthink, she denied and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of sixyears old which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, Ithink, that she couldn't bear our political and social influence; shealso--I realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemedto her the sickliest thing, --a thing quite unendurable. While suchthings were, the virtue had gone out of her world. 

I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in andtaken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and ina business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her andwas muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffedpenetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interruptedeverything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions ofher sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed withgrief 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 circulatingstories, " she denied. "No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmainis an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. Youmisjudged him altogether. "... 

I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch inthe League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where he hadgot his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave himthe 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 hishorrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had justleft England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck meas mean, even for Bailey. I've still the odd vivid impression of hisfluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evadingme, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and thewould-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormousugly hands. 

"I can assure you, my dear fellow, " he said; "I can assure you we'vedone everything to shield you--everything. "... 

3

Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She madea white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. Isat 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 thatevery 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 thingsto 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 haveovertaken 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'vebeen 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, " shesaid. 

"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--youtold him?"

She nodded. "He's rather badly hurt, " she said. "He's been a goodfriend to me. He's curiously loyal. But something, something he said oneday--forced me to let him know.... That's been the beastliness of allthis secrecy. That's the beastliness of all secrecy. You have to springsurprises on people. But he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd alreadysuspected. 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 theworld at large?--against your will and desire?... I don't understandhim. "

"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 refusedto 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 tome. "

"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 quiteready 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 fightingthese 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'tsmash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die thanthat should happen. Look what you are becoming in the country! Look atall 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... Closesthe 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 handsupon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine. 

"My dear, " she said very earnestly, "don't misunderstand me! Don't thinkI'm retreating from the things we've done! Our love is the best thing Icould ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; nothing couldever 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 couldever love me as you have loved me, my king. And it's just because it'sbeen so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than have atithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for it's made me, it's allI am--dear, it's years since I began loving you--it's just because ofits goodness that I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end inthe smashing up of all the big things I understand in you and love inyou.... 

"What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" she went on. "Allthe big interests in our lives will vanish--everything. We shall becomespecialised people--people overshadowed by a situation. We shall bean elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone! People willalways think of it first when they think of us; all our work and aimswill 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 passionatecase, the best of cases, but do we want to spend all our lives defendingit and justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you carefor Margaret--you care more than you think you do. You have said finethings of her. I've watched you about her. Little things have droppedfrom 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 thesethings. Oh, I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love youin relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, anotherthing worth saving. "

Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up intomy 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 intolerabledread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid andclumsy 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 thatlarge 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 wasfor me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the dooropen so that she would come in to me. 

I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in thedoorway. "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 alltalking. I don't think everybody knew who I was. Just Mrs. Mumble I'dbeen 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 ParkLane 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 cameon 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 ofher golden-robed body. What gulfs there were between us! "You've beenamused, " 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 thatfulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd never hear. But all that dayand 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 amoment 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 unusualgravity. She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat down slowly inmy armchair. 

"What is it?" she said. 

I went on awkwardly. "I've got to tell you--something extraordinarilydistressing, " I said. 

She was manifestly altogether unaware. 

"There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recentlyheard 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?" Shepaused and looked at me. "It's so incredible. How can any one believeit? I couldn't. "

She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expressionchanged 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 ofpaper 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 verywhite, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as shespoke. "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 lookedabout the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with achildish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress uponher face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth ofgold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of herchair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunchher tears. "I am sorry, Margaret, " I said. "I was in love.... I did notunderstand.... "

Presently she asked: "What are you going to do?"

"You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know whatyou--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 finemovement of yours?"

"No. " I spoke sullenly. "I don't want to leave anything. I want to stayon. I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--have got todrive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far things maygo, 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 athing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn'tunfold--consequences.... People have got hold of these vague rumours.... Directly it reached any one else but--but us two--I saw it had to cometo you. "

I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had withMargaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtfulif she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her andshattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get ather, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my movement shemoved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort towipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes. "Oh, my Husband!" shesobbed. 

"What do you mean to do?" she said, with her voice muffled by herhandkerchief. 

"We're going to end it, " I said. 

Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair besideher 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 itwithout 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 itshattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you tohave--all that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've madean immense and tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, howdifferent they seemed! My character and accident have conspired--We'llpay--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 definitelyat an end. We--we talked--yesterday. We mean to end it altogether. " Iclenched 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 hermovement as she turned on me. 

"It's all right, " I said, clinging to my explanation. "We're doingnothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right--as things canbe now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing thingsstraight--now. Of course, you know.... We shall--we shall have to makesacrifices. Give things up pretty completely. Very completely.... Weshall have not to see each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not along time. Two or three years. Or write--or just any of that sort ofthing ever--"

Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself cryinguncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child. I wasamazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was on herknees 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? Iwould do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you. I love you overand away and above all these jealous little things!"

She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head ofa son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. "Oh! my dear, " shesobbed, "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 insilence. 

"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two, Imean. 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 shouldmeet 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 ofgrief that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable. We hadseen so much of one another, had become so intimate, that we talked ofparting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness. We wenttogether up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards thesea, past the white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland. There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was aspacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotelybelow a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, andengaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chatteringjackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and askerry 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 inthe life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touchupon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol ofall this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate lovethe world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrongin it either way.. .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us outof ourselves until we were something representative and general. She waswomanhood 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 turnedback 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 herlife 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 forMargaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous andugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of marriage. We criticisedthe current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, howmodified by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and theincreasing freedom of women. "It's all like Bromstead when the buildingcame, " I said; for I had often talked to her of that early impression ofpurpose dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear rightin the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-daymust practise a tainted goodness. "

These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness ofdiscussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective holdupon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already, will neverhold 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, partlyat least because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad. Oh! I knowthere'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 coveredwith slime. That's where the real mischief comes in. Passion can alwayscontrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. Thatcarried 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 allwe have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who could believe wethought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step fromthe 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 wayof Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were possible totell the very heart of our story.... 

"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked--"shieldyou--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 airto 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 mightbe with him. 

"He's good, " she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic. He's thevery image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You can't say a thingagainst him or I--except that something--something in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice--fails for me. Why don't I lovehim?--he's a better man than you! Why don't you? IS he a better man thanyou? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's the breed andthe tradition, --a gentleman. You're your erring, incalculable self. Isuppose we women will trust this sort and love your sort to the very endof time.... "

We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It seemedenormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to the pitchof easy and confident affection and happiness that held between usshould be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half thesubstance of their lives. We felt ourselves crushed and beaten by anindiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in the service ofjealousy. "The mass of people don't feel these things in quite the samemanner as we feel them, " she said. "Is it because they're different ingrain, or educated out of some primitive instinct?"

"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no morethan the gateway, " I said. "Lust and then jealousy; their simpleconception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand inhand.... "

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. Andthen 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 soserene. 

"And in this State of ours, " I resumed. 

"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking outat the horizon. "Let's talk no more of things we can never see. Talk tome 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 thethings we'll go on doing--just as though we were still together. We'llstill be together in a sense--through all these things we have incommon. "

And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to thepitch of self-forgetfulness. We weighed persons and forces, discussedthe probabilities of the next general election, the steady drift ofpublic opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism towards us. It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the EXPURGATOR, weshould come into the new Government strongly. The party had no one else, all the young men were formally or informally with us; Esmeer would haveoffice, Lord Tarvrille, I... And very probably there would be somethingfor Shoesmith. "And for my own part, " I said, "I count on backing on theLiberal side. For the last two years we've been forcing competition inconstructive legislation between the parties. The Liberals have not beenlong in following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have togive 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, " Isaid, "ever so many years ago. It was some place near Locarno, and welooked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we look over thesea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless way of all that youand 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 personalthings that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and wonderfulagain with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems. Ibegan to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, as I could nevertalk of them to any one but Isabel; began to recover again thepurpose that lay under all my political ambitions and adjustments andanticipations. I saw the State, splendid and wide as I had seen it inthat first travel of mine, but now it was no mere distant prospect ofspires and pinnacles, but populous with fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people. It was as if I had forgotten for a long time and nowremembered with amazement. 

At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could doanything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I hadwanted a clue--until she had come into my life questioning, suggesting, unconsciously illuminating. "But I have done nothing, " she protested. Ideclared she had done everything in growing to education under my eyes, in reflecting again upon all the processes that had made myself, sothat instead of abstractions and blue-books and bills and devices, I hadrealised the world of mankind as a crowd needing before all things finewomen and men. We'd spoilt ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we hadour lesson. Before her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealingwith the nation as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of womenand children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, whichmust be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the Stateis to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose factors of agreat 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 couldpresently begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a centre of force. Already we hadgiven Imperialism a criticism, and leavened half the press from ourcolumns. Our movement consolidated and spread. We should presently comeinto power. Everything moved towards our hands. We should be able to getat the schools, the services, the universities, the church; enormouslyincrease the endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted, a criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press andcreative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify, strengthen thepublic consciousness, develop social organisation and a sense of theState. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant young peers like LordDentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell. It filled me with prideto 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 myheart 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 iscurious and I think a very significant thing that since we had becomelovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that had once sostrongly gripped our imaginations. 

"It's good, " I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth andgreat ambitions with you. There have been times lately when politics hasseemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for mean ends--and nonethe less so that the happiness of three hundred million people might betouched by our follies. I talk to no one else like this.... And now Ithink of parting, I think but of how much more I might have talked toyou. "... 

Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousandthings. 

"We've talked away our last half day, " I said, staring over my shoulderat the blazing sunset sky behind us. "Dear, it's been the last day ofour lives for us.... It doesn't seem like the last day of our lives. Orany 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 intomy 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 weremain. "

"Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who didn'tlive in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't part, andhere we lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who did meet, poorlittle Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met and loved too muchand had to part, they part and go their ways, and we lie here and watchthem, 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--fortuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a littlewhile ago. I suppose all love is hysterical--and a little foolish. Poormites! Silly little pitiful creatures! How we have blundered! Think howwe must look to God! Well, we'll pity them, and then we'll inspire himto stiffen up again--and do as we've determined he shall do. We'll seeit through, --we who lie here on the cliff. They'll be mean at times, andhorrid at times; we know them! Do you see her, a poor little fine ladyin 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 hercopy in his hand. "

"Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she wroteit? Is it?"

"Better, I think. Let's play it's better--anyhow. It may be that talkingover was rather mixed with love-making. After all, love-making is joyrather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that even.... Let's go onwatching him. (I don't see why her writing shouldn't be better. Indeed Idon't. ) See! There he goes down along the Embankment to Westminster justlike a real man, for all that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What isrunning round inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going pastthe Policemen, specks too--selected large ones from the country. I thinkhe's going to dinner with the Speaker--some old thing like that. Is hisface harder or commoner or stronger?--I can't quite see.... And now he'sup and speaking in the House. Hope he'll hold on to the thread. He'llhave to plan his speeches to the very end of his days--and learn theheadings. "

"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 anymore 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 sovery hard for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, alwaysfaithfully here on this warm cliff of love accomplished, watching andhelping them under high heaven. It isn't so VERY hard. Rather good insome ways. Some people HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altioradown 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 toDover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt, returnto London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station ofMartin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for themost part of unimportant things. 

"None of this, " she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree realto 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'tfeel as though you and I were really never to see each other again foryears. 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 jogglingelbows. "... 

"Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall begin towhen 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 somany trains. "

"I shall go on thinking of things to say to you--things to put in yourletters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in that waynow? We've got into each other's brains. "

"It isn't real, " I said; "nothing is real. The world's no more than afantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?"

"I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to. Can'twe 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 walkedlong 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 thecompartment. "Good-bye, " I said a little stiffly, conscious of thepeople upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky, looking atme 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 uponme, 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 andShoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went awaytogether. 

It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin tosee 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 daysbefore I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every duty. It astoundsme to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everythingbut that we two were parted. I still believe that with better chanceswe might have escaped the consequences of the emotional storm thatpresently seized us both. But we had no foresight of that, and nopreparation for it, and our circumstances betrayed us. It was partlyShoesmith's unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after the end of thesession--partly my own amazing folly in returning within four days toWestminster. But we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandaland the complete restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary thatShoesmith's marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessarythat I should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaretin London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we visitedthe theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence atthe wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last moment which would justifymy absence.... 

I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion ofmy separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years allmy thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think ofnothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate Ihad found in the world. I came back to the House and the office and myhome, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did notsave me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never feltbefore in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did ahundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by myown low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going aboutin my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies deadupstairs. 

I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something inthat stripped my soul bare. 

It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that thehouse caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men'sdinner--"A dinner of all sorts, " said Tarvrille, when he invited me;"everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heavenknows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards Tarvrille wasaccused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and amemory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had notbeen altogether drenched in misery, I should have found the same wildamusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or twouniversity dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, theartist, two or three big City men, Weston Massinghay and anotherprominent Liberal whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrillehad promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member forMonckton, Neal and several others. We began a little coldly, withduologues, but the conversation was already becoming general--so far assuch a long table permitted--when the fire asserted itself. 

It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burningrubber, --it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reekforced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that hadsprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of thetable. "Something burning, " said the man next to me. 

"Something must be burning, " said Panmure. 

Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularlyimperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigiddisapproval. 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 thesiege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followedupon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history thatrefuse to join on to that general scheme of protestation by whichcivilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general flow ofexperience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife andthe 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. Ihad never given the business a thought for years; now this talk broughtback a string of pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and theplundering began, how section after section of the International Armywas drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection spread upwarduntil the wives of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinelsstripped 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 themselveswith arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now itwas all recalled. 

"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as bad asany one, " said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one--flushed like a womanat a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to her that the silkshe'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother!' and threw itaside and went back.... "

We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not toseem 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'snot 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 LadyPaskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager Empress had shownher some little things of hers. Pet things--hidden away. Susan wentstraight for them--used to take an umbrella for the silks. Bornshoplifter. "

It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played uployally. 

"This is recorded history, " said Wilkins, --"practically. It makes onewonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example. "

But nobody touched that. 

"Thompson, " said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicatingthe 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'squeer, " he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his storyof an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement ofplundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a boy until itbroke, 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, theymurdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, frommercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certaincases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from German high schoolsand English homes!"

"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot. 

"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases.... Some of the Indiantroops were pretty bad. "

Gane picked up the tale with confirmations. 

It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, sothat were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns and warmgreys beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white ofevening dress, the alert menservants with their heavier, clean-shavedfaces indistinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was colouredemotionally for me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and bythe chance trend of our talk to the breaches and unrealities of thecivilised scheme. We seemed a little transitory circle of light in auniverse of darkness and violence; an effect to which the diminishingsmell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swishof water, added enormously. Everybody--unless, perhaps, it wasEvesham--drank rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement ofour situation, and talked the louder and more freely. 

"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a merethin 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?" Wilkinsspeculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers, Pekin-stained J. P. 's--trying petty pilferers in the severestmanner. "... 

Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden cascadeof water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling began to rainupon us, first at this point and then that. "My new suit!" cried someone. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of blackened water wouldestablish itself and form a spreading pool upon the gleaming cloth. Themen 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, " hesaid; and presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexibledignity--"Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks ofblackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet yearwhen he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated disputesprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency of the newFrench and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a little drunkenshrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-splashed shirt front whopresently silenced them all by the immensity and particularity of hisknowledge of field artillery. Then the talk drifted to Sedan and theeffect of dead horses upon drinking-water, which brought Wrassletonand Weston Massinghay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "Thetrouble in South Africa, " said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn'tboil our water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank thesame stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery. "

That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the table bya man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, butin the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghayat intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY didn't getdysentery. "

I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and moreclosely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to atinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths. Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say startlingand aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to alistener in the next room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting me. "Ours isn't the Tory party any more, " said Burshort. "Remington has madeit the Obstetric Party. "

"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; "Ishall use that against you in the House!"

"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do, " saidTarvrille. 

"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babiesinstead, " Burshort urged. "For the price of one Dreadnought--"

The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined inthe baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature. Something inhis eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. "Love and finethinking, " he began, a little thickly, and knocking over a wine-glasswith a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking. Two things don't gotogether. 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'npretty phrase--attractive. Suitable for p'litical dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wisevalu'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 theschool 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 goingson. What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners. What'sRadicalism?--hate of lords. What's Toryism?--hate of disturbance. It'sall hate--hate from top to bottom. Hate of a mess. Remington owned itthe other day, said he hated a mu'll. There you are! If you couldn'tget hate into an election, damn it (hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll forlove!--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 atagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a mad dog withShasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking--what we want is the thickes'thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone. Taf Reform meanswork for all, thassort of thing. "

The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd as soongo 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 ofthe whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary revelation to me. Every one was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amazing howmanifestly they echoed the feeling of this old Tory spokesman. They werequite friendly to me, they regarded me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuableparty assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached no moreimportance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkabletherapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhapsthey went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they leftthe impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynicalviews of political life. For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim wasjust every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living towhich their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, howexhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent attackon 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 quickeye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then for a time I satsilent and drank port wine while the others talked. The disorder ofthe room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties andcrumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my tormented nerves.... 

It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille comingwith me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go upstairs to seethe damage. A manservant carried up two flickering candles for us. One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, several chairs andtables were completely burnt, the panelling was scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare and gutter, and some scrapsof 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 eyesbeneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at hersurprise. 

2

I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my wayalone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for a longway, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miserable to go tomy house. 

I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Godsare dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that wildconfusion 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 haveconvinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength invain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party hadhigher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newlydiscovered that the men I had to work with had for the most part no suchdreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held. They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limitedby habits of thought, as the men in any other group or party. Perhaps Ihad slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party man--but Ido not think so. 

No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon theabrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that gave thisfact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastatingrevelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspectedthe stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, the routine, theconventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, andthat clearly conscious development and service of a collective thoughtand purpose at which my efforts aimed. I had thought them but a littleway apart, and now I saw they were separated by all the distancebetween earth and heaven. I saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon interests close at hand, an inability to detachoneself from the provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumblusts and shy timidities that touched one at every point; and, savefor rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoterpossibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem asunearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer willtell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets andanswering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. Itseemed to me I had aspired too high and thought too far, had mocked myown littleness by presumption, had given the uttermost dear reality oflife for a theoriser's dream. 

All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads ofthought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God againsta task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned andpointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of hissoul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to findblank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose webtore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I hadcome to depend upon the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmedme and sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with ourpurposes now that she had vanished from my life. She had been theincarnation of those great abstractions, the saving reality, the voicethat answered back. There was no support that night in the things thathad been. We were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that wasvery pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could helpme now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, nosentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive, --to talk to me, to touchme, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness ofher presence, the consolation of her voice. 

We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman intointerest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and characteristicsentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! Thatwas just where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinctionfrom that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go out to otherinterests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabricof ambitious understandings we had built up together in our intimacywould be the first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would bea few gross memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidentalexcitements.... 

I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life fora long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That infernallittle 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 resistan infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation fromIsabel, could find no resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemedto me that what he had said was overpoweringly true, not only ofcontemporary life, but of all possible human life. Love is the rarething, the treasured thing; you lock it away jealously and watch, andwell you may; hate and aggression and force keep the streets and rulethe world. And fine thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weakthinking, is a balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyalimpartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honestmen, " as Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinkingout decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfastpleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists "blaggardsand scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords were"scoundrels, " all people richer than he were "scoundrels, " allSocialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails andjustice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the sombrejoys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment forall recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That hadsurvival value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in politics tobe a consistent and happy politician.... 

Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat medown 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 workedit all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all partiesstood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achievesitself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the warof individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that science andphilosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion andnarrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of theirservants, 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 whichwe are but moments and transitorily lit cells?" Hadn't I known that thespirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud andslime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster?Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak withoutdiscretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Beforemankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphsof order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, amultitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headedenergies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had setourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personalrewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and shining in ourlives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out ofthe BLUE WEEKLY and our young Tory movement preposterously enormousthings-as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeedthe germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives suchas ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning. That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelledto nothing in the black loneliness of that night. 

I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my realservices to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognisedand unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Ourseparation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to menow for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing andhampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live bythe imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; theone good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me forever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand;I should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absoluteevil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed ormisinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidstthe slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyondmeasure of my derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in loveand fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily eitherlove steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking toGod--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 jollythoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, andleave me bare!"

I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought Ihad a gleam of you in Isabel, --and then you take her away. Do you reallythink I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness andsilence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?"

Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelismbetween my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine thinking" and the"Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christianpropaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I hadbeen feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? HadI spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanityto think how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recallinglong-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that greatcentral figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in thedisciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour forBarabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate.... 

It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinnershould lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He DID meanthat!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd madeof His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sittinginaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a longprocession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He wasn't human, " I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My God! My God! why hast Thouforsaken 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 rageagainst the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity Iwanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about thatstrenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOWinto the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperousrascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel thattransition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisiveanger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant ofexhaustion. 

"I will have her, " I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks meand cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't Isave what I can? I can't save myself without her.... "

I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather tediouslyasking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of HollandPark.... 

It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now withoutany risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning toMargaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliestfacts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I feltfor Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, andthe enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that. I hope now that in this book I am able to give something of her silverysplendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of that. There wasa triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant tobe so kind to me, to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, tosupply just all she imagined Isabel had given me. 

When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she wouldmeet 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 aneffort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it should make no differenceto her. She would want to know who had been present, what we had talkedabout, show the alertest interest in whatever it was--it didn't matterwhat.... 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 silvercandlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--thefoolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaretheaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electriclights, 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 oughtnot to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was with theBalfes--she was to have been married from the Balfes--and I sent myletter there. And I went out into the silent square and posted the noteforthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morningI should never post it at all. 

3

I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting. (Ofall places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the bridgeopposite Buckingham Palace. ) Overnight I had been full of self pity, andeager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the ill-written scrawlin which she had replied had been full of the suggestion of her ownweakness and misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows werealtogether swept away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something hadhappened to her that I did not understand. She was manifestly ill. Shecame towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so bravely;her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face whiteand 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 intimateappeal to me, and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in mylife!--I felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that herewas something that I could die to shelter, something that meant morethan joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, anew kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed fountainwas opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, Isabelbeaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could love any sweetor delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't care any more foranything in the world but Isabel, and that I should protect her. Itrembled as I came near her, and could scarcely speak to her for theemotion 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, andI rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree. Thesquare grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs, I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from the pathwayand 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 doyou 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 achild tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep.... 

"Oh! I don't care, " I cried, "now. I don't care. Damn the whole systemof things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I want to takecare 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 thoughtindeed 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 ofthat; I've got to shelter you. "

"And I want you, " I went on. "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand lifewithout you. "

She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, andlooked at me steadfastly for a moment. "I was going to kill myself, " shewhispered. "I was going to kill myself quietly--somehow. I meant to waita bit and have an accident. I thought--you didn't understand. You were aman, and couldn't understand.... "

"People can't do as we thought we could do, " I said. "We've gone too fartogether. "

"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 triesto be kind to me.... I didn't know. I felt adventurous before.... Itmakes me feel like all the women in the world who have ever been ownedand subdued.... It's not that he isn't the best of men, it's because I'ma part of you.... I can't go through with it. If I go through with it, Ishall 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 lateto save those other things! They have to go. You can't make terms withdefeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most. But it's you. And Ineed you. I didn't think of that either. I haven't a doubt left in theworld 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 toearth and begin again.... Dear, I WANT disgrace with you.... "

So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded cushionsof the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been so valiantand 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 asmuch as possible of its affairs in working order before I left Londonwith Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office. Upstairs Ifound Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, methodically readingthe title of each and sometimes the first half-dozen lines, and eitherdropping them in a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, orputting them aside for consideration. I interrupted him, squatted onthe window-sill of the open window, and sketched out my ideas for thesession. 

"You're far-sighted, " he remarked at something of mine which reached outahead. 

"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 himout and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of course--it'snothing to you. Honour--"

"I know. "

"Common decency. "

I nodded. 

"All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most.... It's come tobe a big thing, Remington. "

"That will go on. "

"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it. No one.... I'm notsure 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 alightwith it. " Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment. "But I thoughtyou 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 withthis--and everything. And besides, there's things you can't understand. There's feelings you've never felt.... You don't understand how muchwe'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 thingone doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you. I'm the sort of man wholeads 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 knowthings about you, --qualities--no mere act can destroy them.. .. Well, Ican tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now like a man who ishypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It waswrong 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 theconsequences and thought of other people. You could have ended it at thefirst pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered again. You kepton. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You didn't keep it. You were careless. You made things worse. This engagement and thispublicity!--Damn it, Remington!"

"I know, " I said, with smarting eyes. "Damn it! with all my heart! Itcame of trying to patch.... You CAN'T patch. "

"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two oughtto stand these last consequences--and part. You ought to part. Otherpeople 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 toourselves or any one after this parting? I've been thinking alllast night of this business, trying it over and over again from thebeginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came back from America--Igrant 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 Iwas 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 ofowner.... 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 misshapencripples.... You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush andfeel of things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is withus. You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; youdon't know anything. "

Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered toa wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put back?" hegrunted, 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 forbalancing 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 werejust 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 standagainst 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 savesomething--"

Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you, " hesaid. 

His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man has aright to take his hand from the plough!"

He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "Youknow, Remington, " he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended offfor six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the waysomehow, --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 doesit matter if we could?"

I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had notbeen able to find for myself alone. 

"I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up thisscandal. "

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 everyone. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison whitewash. I amconvinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I meanit--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 Carmelstory and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that havepicked man after man out of English public life, the men with activeimaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this totteringold-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! Yousay 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 andwent through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us butwhat has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, Irecalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was toldand how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We allare. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautifulthings 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 childrenbetter than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given aview of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabbysubservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission tounreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to thedictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--wewere 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 apride 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 avalid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride inself restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see andthink and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the currentthing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in acage 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 callimmorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slimeif 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!... Iwill!"

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. "That'sall very well, Remington, " he said. "You mean to go. "

He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the wrongyou wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plainto you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wifewho trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won'tsee you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, mightcome to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwingyourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you. "

He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington, " he said, "have youforgotten 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 goon--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. Youknow, 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 theimplications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just now it'srather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas fromend to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jollymistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not goingout of this--for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snufflesand Keyhole imagine--that excites them! When I think of the thingsthese creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physicalpassion 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 sawher the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I'vebeen a cold man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with thatword!--I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold ofme at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sickthing--a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'mnot in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a manthat's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imaginethe 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'trhetorical, but it's this, Britten--there are distresses that mattermore than all the delights or achievements in the world.... I madeher what she is--as I never made Margaret. I've made her--I've brokenher.... 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'dsaid all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the deskbefore him, and I came back abruptly to the paper. 

I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. "Thisman goes on doing first-rate stuff, " I said. "I hope you will keep himgoing. "

He did not answer for a moment or so. "I'll keep him going, " he said atlast with a sigh. 

5

I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannotresist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no wordof mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts writtenin pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness isessential. 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 wantto 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--butI don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got ridof my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Thenperhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of ourpolitical work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of yourpresence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING forthe world--had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothingto DO. I am suddenly at loose ends.... 

"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life ofmy own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for youand your schemes.... 

"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I askagain, '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 atall, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I mightnot have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastropheimpossible.... 

"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, andtell 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 stoodaway from. You let my first repugnances repel you.... 

"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be askingmyself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATEyou. 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 Iexact that you should watch and understand my life, when clearly I haveunderstood so little of yours. But I am savage--savage at the wreckingof 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 notonly pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to greatpurposes. They ARE great purposes.... 

"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strengthyou had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and your youngmistress.... All that matters so little to me.... 

"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At timesI am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to giveyou.... 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 reallya CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretences--and not only pretences butdecent coverings.... 

"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slowpeople like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't I bold andreckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as toask why my hair is fair.... 

"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I findmyself alone.... 

"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I shallnever go back to that house we furnished together, that was to have beenthe laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which youwere to forge so much of the new order.... 

"But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of you, Imean.... It tears me when I think of you poor and discredited. You willlet me help you if I can--it will be the last wrong not to let me dothat.... 

"You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall comeafter you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as awife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a districtvisitor.... "

There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were writtenbefore or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of themhave little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetratinganalysis 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 likenakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes througheverything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendiddream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, butby a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watchedyou so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to followrules. I don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at oncemakers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people--criminalpeople, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You'reso much better than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no makingwithout destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothingbut an instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do youremember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walkedover the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know itdisappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heatbecause there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crustforms 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 anythingI know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it wassomething I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty isa quiet thing. You have always laughed at my feeling for old-fashionedchintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USEDthings. My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. Iknow nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one should godeliberately out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangersand be singed and tormented and destroyed. I don't understand.... "

6

I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, theplatform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead, thebustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboysand boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends seeingtravellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very quiet and still in thecompartment, and I stood upon the platform with the door open, witha curious reluctance to take the last step that should sever me fromLondon's ground. I showed our tickets, and bought a handful of red rosesfor her. At last came the guards crying: "Take your seats, " and I gotin and closed the door on me. We had, thank Heaven! a compartment toourselves. I let down the window and stared out. 

There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of "Standaway, please, stand away!" and the train was gliding slowly and smoothlyout of the station. 

I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly gatheringpace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the pedestriansin the footway, and the curve of the river and the glowing great hotels, and the lights and reflections and blacknesses of that old, familiarspectacle. Then with a common thought, we turned our eyes westward towhere the pinnacles of Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hardand clear against the still, luminous sky. 

"They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night, " I said, alittle stupidly. 

"And so, " I added, "good-bye to London!"

We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below--bright gleamsof lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes of housesand factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, NewCross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to me that for a timewe had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our knot, we had accepted the last penalty of that headlong return of mine fromChicago a year and a half ago. That was all settled. That harvest offeelings we had reaped. I thought now only of London, of London as thesymbol of all we were leaving and all we had lost in the world. I feltnothing 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. Thesprawling suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim tree-setcountry under a cloud-veiled, intermittently shining moon. We passedCardcaster Place. Perhaps old Wardingham, that pillar of the oldConservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle withour young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel andhow it would confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps somefaint intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of theyoung fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lightedcarriage 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 Ihad been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all myambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be goingout to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell fromus--and before us was no meaning any more. We were leaving London; myhand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had beenforced from it, my fingers left their hold. That was over. I shouldnever have a voice in public affairs again. The inexorable unwrittenlaw which forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going out to anew life, a life that appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelledremnant of me, a mere residuum of sheltering and feeding and seeingamidst alien scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were goingto live cheaply in a foreign place, so cut off that I meet now themerest stray tourist, the commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixtureof shyness and hunger.... And suddenly all the schemes I was leavingappeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtleremaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and nowsuddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidalabandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted andfavoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stoodfor far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear greatcity of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link, a reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seekvaguely for in vain? What is one life against the State? Ought I notto have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, andheld to my thing--stuck to my thing?

I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WASa good game. " No end of a game. And for the first time I imagined thefaces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt ofthis secret flight, this flight of which they were quite unwarned. AndShoesmith might be there in the house, --Shoesmith who was to have beenmarried in four days--the thing might hit him full in front of any kindof people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why the devil hadn't I writtenletters to warn them all? I could have posted them five minutes beforethe train started. I had never thought to that moment of the immensemess they would be in; how the whole edifice would clatter about theirears. 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 momentbrightened, became animated and prolific of ideas. I thought of abrilliant line we might have taken on that confounded ReformatoryBill.... 

That sort of thing was over.... 

What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinousperception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiorabegan her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thoughtof people I had been merry with, people I had worked with and playedwith, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of houses thathad once glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose themall. I saw life like a tree in late autumn that had once been rich andsplendid with friends--and now the last brave dears would be hanging ondoubtfully against the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured inthe universal gale of indignation, trying to evade the cold blast of thetruth. I had betrayed my party, my intimate friend, my wife, thewife whose devotion had made me what I was. For awhile the figure ofMargaret, remote, wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought ofmy immense ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I hada feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by thethroat, some one talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for notkeeping me, for letting things go so far.... I wanted the whole worldto know how fine she was. I saw in imagination the busy, exciteddinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly excited, brightlyindignant, merciless. 

Well, it's the stuff we are!... 

Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret'stears and the sound of her voice saying, "Husband mine! Oh! husbandmine! 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 onthe rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my wilting redroses tightly in her bare and ringless hand. 

For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I perceivedshe was sitting bent together with her head averted from the light tohide the tears that were streaming down her face. She had not got herhandkerchief 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 andweary amazement. Why had we done this injury to one another? WHY? Thensomething stirred within me. 

"ISABEL!" I whispered. 

She made no sign. 

"Isabel!" I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely toher, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.